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Just another Día
April 27, 2008
The party is not over yet. The real Children's Day, in Mexico anyway, is April 30. Many Día de los Niños/Día de los Libros celebrations in the US will wait till Wednesday, but a whole lot of them happened over the weekend.
We were lucky to be at the Rio Grande Valley Book & Cultural Festival on Saturday, surely the biggest Día event in deep South Texas. You would've had to go way upriver to Pat Mora's hometown of El Paso for a bigger one. (How do I know this? The Día database of the Association for Library Service to Children, of course.)
The festival here had something for everybody: storytelling, readings by authors who write for kids 
and for adults--in English and in Spanish--great live music, visual art, books for sale, and food.
It all started with a short set by an ace mariachi ensemble of schoolkids from the town of Mercedes. Then the inaugural Tejas Star Children's Book award was presented to Xavier Garza for Juan and the Chupacabras/Juan y el Chupacabras, which he created with illustrator April Ward.
"The demographics of Region One [the area of Texas served by the educational service center that hosted the event] are ninety percent Hispanic," Maria Elena Ovalle reminded the crowd at the award ceremony. "Research shows that if students see their culture reflected in books, they read more." Books considered for the award are bilingual or in Spanish, and the voters are thousands of Region One schoolchildren themselves. To see the books nominated for the first award as well as a list--with ISBNs and publishers--of those up for next year's Tejas Star, go to the blog of one of their authors.
Maybe you're hatching ideas for your 2009 observance of Día. Good for you. It's gonna be amazing how many people will be pleased by whatever it is you'll be doing. If you haven't started, check out the ALSC database and get some ideas. If you're lucky you might have a mariachi as accomplished as this.
Better move fast if you want to hire these guys. It's probably best to get in touch with one of their teachers.
Posted by Bruce Jensen on April 27, 2008 | Comments (0)
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