Johnny, the eldest daughter of Mexican farm workers, is expelled from high school, but with the help of a Latina psychologist and a civil rights attorney, she fights the discriminatory treatment and returns determined to finish school.

This revised edition of an award-winning resource celebrates the lives and works of 35 Latina and Latino authors who write for today's young readers. Expanded to include 12 additional authors, updated information on the original 23 authors profiled, and 135 new titles, this comprehensive reference tool helps teachers, librarians, and parents stay current on one of the most dynamic areas of contemporary literature. Both established and emerging voices are profiled. Personal quotes and photographs introduce each biographical essay, presenting information gathered through interviews, personal communications, and research. A complete list of all books and works written by the author is included along with publication information. Annotations are provided for most of the titles, along with information on major themes, awards won, and recommended age levels. Evaluating Books for Bias provides helpful guidelines for examining and selecting books from a pluralistic perspective. Appendices offer further helpful information about the field, including special awards honoring books by Latinas and Latinos, a calendar of holidays and special days celebrated by the Latino community, and listings of related resources and organizations. The author has also compiled ideas for classroom activities and ways for librarians to extend the literary experience. A title index and extensive topic index—including themes, curricular areas, and genres—help in planning story sessions and study units. This is a multipurpose resource for anyone who wants to help young readers connect with contemporary literature in a meaningful way.

Unlike any other book of its kind, this volume celebrates published works from a broad range of American ethnic groups not often featured in the typical canon of literature. This culturally rich encyclopedia contains 160 alphabetically arranged entries on African American, Asian American, Latino/a, and Native American literary traditions, among others. The book introduces the uniquely American mosaic of multicultural literature by chronicling the achievements of American writers of non-European descent and highlighting the ethnic diversity of works from the colonial era to the present. The work features engaging topics like the civil rights movement, bilingualism, assimilation, and border narratives. Entries provide historical overviews of literary periods along with profiles of major authors and great works, including Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Maya Angelou, Sherman Alexie, A Raisin in the Sun, American Born Chinese, and The House on Mango Street. The book also provides concise overviews of genres not often featured in textbooks, like the Chinese American novel, African American young adult literature, Mexican American autobiography, and Cuban American poetry.

Celebrating the wealth of quality multicultural literature recently published for children and young adults, this valuable resource examines the fiction, oral tradition, and poetry from four major ethnic groups in the United States. Each of these genres is considered in turn for the literature dealing with African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native-American Indians. Taking up where their earlier volume This Land is Our Land left off, Helbig and Perkins have teamed up once again to identify and expertly evaluate more than 500 multicultural books published from 1994 through 1999. Both considered authorities in the field of children's literature, the two of them personally selected, read, and evaluated all the books included here. Their insightful annotations help readers carefully consider both literary standards such as plot development, characterization, and style, as well as cultural values as they are represented in these cited works. Each entry also indicates the suggested age and grade level appropriateness of the work. With the proliferation and ever increasing popularity of multicultural literature for children and young adults, this sensitively written volume will serve as an invaluable collection development tool. Teachers, as well as librarians, will find the comprehensiveness and organization of this bibliography helpful as a guide in selecting appropriate materials for classroom use. Even students will find this book easy to use, with its five indexes identifying works by title, writer, illustrator, grade level, and subject. Public libraries and school media centers will find much use for Many Peoples, One Land.

Zakiya, a sophomore at Roosevelt High School, has settled into the new school year. She loves her friends, the volleyball team and her dance class. There’s even a cute guy she has her eye on. But her world falls apart when her dad dies unexpectedly. Zakiya had a special relationship with her father and is completely devastated by his death. After the funeral, her friends and family try to console her, but Zakiya pushes them away. She just wants to be alone. She quits the volleyball team, shuts down the boy she once dreamed of dating and even skips school. When she experiences a frightening episode of anxiety, she discovers that cutting herself helps to relieve the pain. Will she ever learn how to deal with her grief and sense of loss? Zakiya’s Enduring Wounds is the eleventh novel in Gloria L. Velasquez’s popular Roosevelt High School Series, which features a multiracial group of teenage students who must individually confront social and cultural issues (such as violence, sexuality and prejudice).

A high school student and member of a Mexican American family struggles with his sexual identity and finally learns that he will not have to stand alone any more.

There has been a dramatic increase in the amount of narrative work published by Chicana and Latina authors in the past 5 to 10 years. Nonetheless, there has been little attempt to catalog this material. This reference provides convenient access to all forms of narrative written by Chicana and Latina authors from the early 1940s through 2002. In doing so, it helps users locate these works and surveys the growth of this vast body of literature. The volume cites more than 2,750 short stories, novels, novel excerpts, and autobiographies written by some 600 Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, Dominican American, and Nuyorican women authors. These citations are grouped in five indexes: an author/title index, title/author index, anthology index, novel index, and autobiography index. Short annotations are provided for the anthologies, novels, and autobiographies. Thus the user who knows the title of a work can discover the author, the other works the author has written, and the anthologies in which the author's shorter pieces have been reprinted, along with information about particular works.

ChicaNerds in Chicana Young Adult Literature analyzes novels by the acclaimed Chicana YA writers Jo Ann Yolanda Hernández, Isabel Quintero, Ashley Hope Pérez, Erika Sánchez, Guadalupe García McCall, and Patricia Santana. Combining the term "Chicana" with "nerd," Dr. Herrera coins the term "ChicaNerd" to argue how the young women protagonists in these novels voice astute observations of their identities as nonwhite teenagers, specifically through a lens of nerdiness—a reclamation of brown girl self-love for being a nerd. In analyzing these ChicaNerds, the volume examines the reclamation and powerful acceptance of one’s nerdy Chicana self. While popular culture and mainstream media have shaped the well-known figure of the nerd as synonymous with white maleness, Chicana YA literature subverts the nerd stereotype through its negation of this identity as always white and male. These ChicaNerds unite their burgeoning sociopolitical consciousness as young nonwhite girls with their "nerdy" traits of bookishness, math and literary intelligence, poetic talents, and love of learning. Combining the sociopolitical consciousness of Chicanisma with one aligned to the well-known image of the "nerd," ChicaNerds learn to navigate the many complicated layers of coming to an empowered declaration of themselves as smart Chicanas.

When she begins dating a wealthy white senior, Ankiza must face the reactions and prejudices of other students, parents, and school officials.