Against Insular and
Insulated Thinking
Roseanne Greenfield Thong (author). John Parra
(illustrator). Green Is a Chile Pepper: A
Book of Colors. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2014.
“I can hardly describe to you the effect of these books.
They produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings.”
-- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
(1816)
The argument behind groundswells such as #We
NeedDiverseBooks is that children of different ethnic backgrounds are provided
little to no opportunity to see themselves or their cultures reflected in the books
they encounter. The result of a paucity of diversity in children’s literature is
not only the lack of validation, for some children, of their own identities,
cultures, and bodies, but also an experience of invisibility. Ultimately, an
inability to see oneself in literature amounts to a sense that one’s identity
is not worthy of representation, which leads to a concession (or capitulation) to
the naturalness or preferability of the Anglo-American bodies, identities, and
stories which predominate the sphere of representation.
Of course there is something to be said for children of all
backgrounds reading books featuring more than just themselves. Exposure to diversity
in all sorts of forms—ethnic, class, sexual, gender, body type, geography, etc.—broadens
audiences’ horizons and so explodes insular and insulated perspectives. These
days it seems there is nothing more dangerous than such a perspective. As one
sees all too much in twitter and Facebook posts and, especially, in the
comments sections beneath online news stories, an insular and insulated perspective
is the antithesis of compassion and goodwill.
As the subtitle suggests, Green Is a Chile Pepper: A Book of Colors ostensibly helps children
learn their colors. As one typically finds in these sorts of books for very
young learners, the primary colors are introduced and reinforced through
association with physical objects.
The objects that the author chooses separate this book from
other books. Whereas one might be accustomed to red is for apple, green is for
grass, and orange is for, well, orange, colors in this book are associated with
an assortment of culturally specific items. For example, Thong writes that “Red
is a ribbon./Red is a bow/and skirts for/baile
folklórico.” Elsewhere, “Brown is a churro,” “White are…sugar skulls,” and “Yellow
is masa/we use to make/tortillas, tamales, and/sweet corn cake!”
Granted, in a book self-consciously situating itself in the
children’s literature marketplace, in the classroom, and in children’s hands as
a “multicultural” text, such associations are to be expected. In any case,
Thong does a worthwhile job of stretching the parameters for the associations and
lessons presented to children. We might not usually think that there is a
politics to teaching children to associate the color red with apples and the
color yellow with bananas, but there is. Most obviously, these associations
function as interpellative devices, inconspicuously suturing children into
healthy eating habits. Certainly, imparting lessons on healthy eating is great.
But these examples also implicitly provide touchstones for concepts of
normativity, and they function as coordinates for understanding the world. (In
this vein, Tony Watkins proposes, “The stories we tell our children, the
narratives we give them to make sense of cultural experience, constitute a kind
of mapping, maps of meaning that enable our children to make sense of the
world” [183]). As certain other kinds of associations remain overlooked or
ignored, certain identities and experiences remain banished to marginalization
if not ghettoization. In effect, the worldview of the child gets narrowed. With
Green Is a Chile Pepper, Thong
recovers (and so validates) culturally meaningful objects for children for whom
such objects are familiar. And for readers for whom these objects are not
familiar, she offers to make them familiar, by which she contributes to the
broadening of their worldview.
A concern (or question) that does arise with this book (and
which arises with many other books marketed as “Latino/a”) is its homogenization
of Latino/a cultural groups. Such an issue emerges right away, in fact, on the
inside flap of the dust jacket, which reads, “In this lively concept book
children discover a rainbow of colors in the world around them…. Many of the
featured objects are Hispanic in origin, but all are universal in appeal.” The
use of “Hispanic” is a fraught move for many reasons, including but not limited
to its erasure of Latin American origins and the obliteration of geographical
and cultural particularities. Thus, inasmuch as the multicultural objectives of
the text are laudable, at bottom the glossing over of cultural variations
results in the text participating in the construction of a seemingly singular Latino/a
culture. Owing to the dangers of such a construction, for years scholars have
argued strenuously for the need for its explosion.
Compounding matters is the absence of any geographical orientation.
Different culturally specific practices are narrated and illustrated, but there
is no sense of geography provided in either the written text or the
illustration. This begs the same sort of questions that arise with a program
such as Dora the Explorer, namely, are
all Latinos/as everywhere the same (in terms of culture, language, physiognomy,
class, etc.)?
Regarding the illustrations, while they are lushly
beautiful, they verge (more in some spots than in others) on reinscribing Latino/a
peoples as peasants (akin to what happens in a text like Leo Politi’s Pedro: Angel of Olvera Street [1946]).
To be sure, individuals throughout Latin(o/a) America live in diverse
material conditions. But the illustrations here seem to fall into a familiar, essentializing
tendency to render Latino/a peoples in terms of a peasant aesthetic. In the
process, Latino/a peoples remain aligned—or are realigned—with economic,
social, and even cultural “backwardness” in the sense that they are outside of,
alien to, at odds with, and fundamentally inferior to modernity, progress, and
bourgeois Anglo America.
In sum, in some ways for better and in some ways for worse Green Is a Chile follows rather
conventional formulas for enacting a politics of multiculturalism. It doesn’t
hurt to incorporate this book into reading lists and experiences for very young
children. But one must be aware of the book’s shortcomings for the sake of thinking
carefully about the kinds of books children read and experience as they get
older. It also would be a good idea to think about the kinds of books we wish
were available for readers when they are very young, too.
--phillip serrato, san diego state university
Work Cited
Watkins, Tony. “Cultural Studies, New Historicism and Children’s
Literature.” Literature for Children:
Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Peter Hunt. New York: Routledge, 1992. 173-195.
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