NewsTaco

By Eres Nerd

Mi ‘apa is a nerd. Specifically, a history nerd, por eso, the chances that I would turn out a nerd when I was born were very high. Our discussions frequently revolved around civilizations and their mythology; our favorite discussions focused on the Hellenic world. I knew the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts, the tasks of Heracles, and the fickleness of the Greek Gods. However, I knew the difference between the mythology and concrete historic event where people lost life and liberty despite prayers to their Gods.

I became a fantasy nerd because I was predisposed, as both a history and gaming nerd. I graduated from playing the “Oregon Trail” to playing the “Legend of Zelda” on Nintendo, featuring an elf-like hero seeking adventure against strange creatures. It appealed to my gaming nerd tendencies; the detailed back-story of that world appealed to my history nerd tendencies. It was my introduction into a created mythology and preparation for the next big thing in my young Latino nerd life.

One day at school I picked out a free book with a picture of a chubby boy with a dagger on its cover; the boy was glancing backwards at danger, which was a fierce looking creature with evil eyes. The book’s cover proclaimed that it was “The Enchanting Prelude to the Lord of the Rings.” I was dubious about the statement and judged it by association being among the other books, but I decided to give it a chance.

The book was “The Hobbit” by J.R.R. Tolkien. For those unfamiliar with the book, it involves 13 dwarves seeking to retake their Aztlán from a greedy Dragon. Since 13 dwarves were not enough for the job, Gandalf the Grey drafts Bilbo Baggins for comic relief. Along the path to Aztlán they battle trolls, orcs, and finally battle the Dragon. In addition, Bilbo meets Gollum and they play board games. A small man becomes a hero and a wizard becomes suspicious about a particular ring. I needed to learn what happened before and after “The Hobbit;” from that day forth, this Latino nerd was hooked reading about these strange creatures.

I finished the book quickly and re-read. My dad took me to the public library to check out the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. For the next couple of months the world of hobbits was an obsession. I read, cross-referenced, and learned the history of Middle Earth; the book’s appendix has a timeline of all the events and I made sure to know how everything fit in. I did the interlibrary loan to get mis manos on the rare Tolkien books, such as “The Silmarillion.” It was a world where magic filled the air. Great deeds were done and tragedy was lamented — my imagination expanded. No wonder many nerds are lost in that world and become basement dwellers, fantasy literature is very appealing and easier to interact that the real world.

However, in my case, the leaves fell all around and it was time for me to leave that that world. It was not because I tired of world of Tolkien, but because there was an entire world of books that needed reading. I would not again pre-judge a book. I read the icky Jude Blume books; the guilty and trashy pleasures of Jackie Collins; and insights of the great Arturo Islas. My reading of books became very eclectic and non-elitist.

“The Hobbit” taught me that a book was good was because it was good — not because of its category or where it was reviewed. A world filled with dragons and orcs was equally valid that a book set in the “real word” written by a “serious author.”  My sense was correct since the “Lord of the Rings” became part of popular culture through the films. The film version of “The Hobbit” will be released this December and I look forward to it, even though the book is always better than the film.

Eres Nerd lives a nerdy life in the borderlands of Estados Unidos and Mexico.

[Photo By Mac m 13]

It all started on Twitter. A conversation about being able to find literature by Latino writers morphed into a hashtag, then a Twitter account, and finally a website. David Cid, a teacher who is currently a graduate student of Chicana & Chicano Studies at California State University Los Angeles, has coordinated the efforts of many and the site, Aztlan Reads, went up in August.

“I’ve been wanting to contribute knowledge that I have gained at the university, and this shows that there is a literary heritage in our community that goes back hundreds of years,” he said.

Perusing the website yields a plethora of different types of information. There are biographies of Latino authors. There are poems. There are announcements about readings or art exhibits. Then, of course, there are book reviews. And Cid says this is just the beginning, in the long term he told NewsTaco, he hopes that the site will also offer film reviews.

The site itself notes:

The initial idea behind an #aztlanreads hashtag was to facilitate easy access to an expansive list of Xicana/o fiction and non-fiction literary work that could be used for our personal reading enjoyment or for academic research purposes.  The books could be on any topic be it history, women’s studies, cultural studies, literature, etc.  The next step, of course, was to create a separate and more accessible twitter feed to continue our endeavor.  So @aztlanreads was created.  One goal for this project is to promote literacy within the Twitter community and beyond. Another goal is to let the world know that Xicanas and Xicanos are reading and thereby asserting that we are not an uneducated group of people.  A third goal is to debunk the myth that there is small body of work by and for Xicana/os and to debunk the myth that these works are inaccessible.

“We are not only writing, but we are also reading,” he said by way of explaining the site’s mission. “We are all struggling to create a knowledge base that we hope incorporates other groups, since we are not a homogenous group.”

Cid said the site is looking to collaborate, for more information about Aztlan Reads check out the website, Twitter feed or email him at clshc@me.com.

[Photo By Twitter]

I knew the moment I laid my eyes on The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry, that I had to have it. The 728-page bilingual anthology not only brings together the giants of Latin American poetry we are all familiar with — Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, and Jorge Luis Borges — it integrates with equal weight the work of lesser-known giants, like Brazil’s Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Perú’s Cesar Vallejo, and Chile’s Vicente Huidobro.

All in all, there are 84 poets from 13 Latin American countries. There is even work from poets writing in Zapotec, Mapuche, Quechua, Nahuatl, Ladino, and even Spanglish — the bastard dialect of Spanish spoken by Latinos in the U.S. and reviled by the Real Academia Española.

The anthology is comprehensive, but not exhaustive, so it begs to be used as a work of reference, and prompts further interaction and investigation; all the poets in the anthology get two to three poems, which seems limiting at first but there are so many poets included that certain concessions surely had to be made. The editor, Ilan Stavans, one of the foremost scholars of Hispanic culture and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, makes an important distinction early on.

Many American scholars believe that Modernism came before Modernismo, but Stavans sets the record straight in the introduction: “Modernism, which, roughly speaking, came about in the English-speaking world a couple of decades later and includes Woolf, Stein, Pound, and Joyce.” Eliot’s Wasteland (1922), for example, comes more than thirty years after Dario’s Azul (1885), an intensely before-its-time collection of poetry.

This book represents a master work on Latin American Poetry constructed by a master verbal architect using highly representative pieces from a tribe of poets that have left their imprimatur on the world of literature. Because Stavans arranges the poets chronologically, reading the anthology from page 1 on creates a trajectory of voice, style, and inflection. So, for example, it becomes increasingly easy to see how the modern bent in José Martí’s “Love in the Big City,” gives rise to Rubén Darío’s “Love Your Rhythm.”

In fact, read enough of Stavans’ anthology and you get a ringside seat of how “the syntax of el español changes throughout the century.” More importantly, the more you read Stavans’ anthology the more you realize Latin American poetry is a different animal than American poetry. According to Stavans, Latin American poets exude “a cosmopolitanism that might verge on disdain for the urgent problems of society, contrasted with an ideological compromise that runs the risk of pamphleteering.”

Yago Cura is a writer based in Los Angeles. He edits the online journal Hinchas de Poesia and moderates the blog Spicaresque. Follow him on Twitter @theshusher.

My son is almost one year old. It will still be a couple of years before he’s reading, but as his father I’ve made sure he already has more books in his minuscule collection than most adults. Why do my wife and I care whether our infant son interacts with a book if he can’t read? And why, if he’s still decades away from reading large tracts of text independently, don’t we accommodate his future reading habits with an electronic reader (iPad, Kindle, tablet, etc.)?

Well, my wife and I are voracious readers, and we have always talked about our children inheriting our shared affinity. Now, while it is true that you shouldn’t force your interests on your child, reading is a behavior that positively augments his chances at success, creativity, and fulfillment. Reading too much can also lead him to be that kid that no one wants to hang out with because he smells like soup. Reading excessively might make him not throw a ball in a manly register.

My infant interacts with the world through his mouth, and the salivary informatics he garners. Truth be told, my son’s books are more like pulpy hors d’ouvres at this stage of his development than benign instruments. There is no practical, pragmatic reason we surround him with books, is there? You can’t lay the foundation for a child’s future literacy success by simply surrounding him or her with books, can you?

Well, in 2004, two economists, Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt, authored a study titled, “Understanding the black-white test score gap in the first two years of school.” The study focused on data gathered from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, and Fryer and Levitt concentrated on the differences between black and white children exiting kindergarden and entering first grade. Even on entering kindergarden, the difference between black and white children at the start of the year was .40, which meant that black children scored 40% of standard deviation below white children.

When Frye and Levitt manipulated for parent’s occupation and household income the gap dipped to .134, or a little over 13%. But, when they manipulated the date for parent’s occupation, household income, and the number of books in the home, the gap dropped to nearly zero, or -.006.

What this means is that there is a clear correlation between the number of books in the home and how alike minority children and white children score on an exam given at the start of kindergarden.

In other words, the more books in your home, the better prepared your child will be to receive education, and incorporate reading into their repertoire or behaviors. And, if your child is Latino or black, there is even more reason to surround them with books as, statistically, they do not fare as well as their white counterparts. At the best you are preparing your child to know how to decode the world around them, and at the worse you are getting them trained to drop the remote control or joystick every now and then and pick up one of the oldest, most amazing technologies every invented: the book.

Yago Cura is a writer based in Los Angeles. He edits the online journal Hinchas de Poesia and moderates the blog Spicaresque. Follow him on Twitter @theshusher

[Photo By Brandi Jordan]

According to a new survey, Latinos are increasingly making up the market for e-readers and tablets, just as the number of people who owned an e-reader doubled in six months. The survey, done by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project also found that tablet growth is lagging behind e-readers. More from MediaPost:

The number of U.S. adults owning an e-reader has doubled from 6% to 12% between November 2010 and May 2011, while tablet penetration during that period has increased only from 5% to 8%.

And despite the release of scores of new tablet models in 2011, tablet ownership since January has only inched up from 7% to 8%…

At the same time, Hispanics have among the highest rates of tablet ownership, at 15%. That’s roughly comparable to that of the 17% ownership rate among those with annual household incomes of at least $75,000.

I think it’s interesting that Latinos as a market seem to be more interested in reading books than using tablets as computers. I personally know more Latinos with tablets, none with e-readers, but I hear both offer neat perks. To read the rest of the MediaPost story, click here, to read Pew’s report, click here.

What do you think?

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD

[Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from the executive summary for a report released by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. You can read the entire report here.]

The NAEP 2009 Reading and Mathematics Assessments included grade 4 and grade 8 students nationally and for all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia and the Department of Defense Education Activity (hereinafter referred to as states).

This report provides detailed information on the size of the achievement gaps between Hispanic and White public school students at the national and state levels and describes how those achievement gaps have changed over time. Additional information about race/ethnicity in NAEP is given in appendix A of the report. Most of the data in this report is derived from the results of the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) main assessments in mathematics and reading; however the trend data provided is derived from results from as early as 1990.Achievement Gaps: How Hispanic and White Students in Public Schools Perform in Mathematics and Reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, follows our previous report that provided similar information on the achievement gap between Black and White students.

Mathematics

In 2009, NAEP mathematics scores for both Hispanic and White students in grades 4 and 8 nationwide were higher than in 1990, the first assessment year for both Hispanic and White public school students. Mathematics scores increased, but the achievement gap between Hispanic and White students did not change significantly at either grade 4 or 8 from 1990 to 2009.

• From 2007 to 2009, scores for Hispanic and White fourth-graders remained unchanged and the gap persisted at 21 points.
• For eighth-graders, scores increased for both Hispanic and White students from 2007 to 2009, but the gap remained at 26 points, which was not significantly different from the gap in 1990 or 2007.
• At grade 8, the 2009 mathematics achievement gap for Hispanic and White students eligible for the National School Lunch Program was narrower than in 2003.
• In 2009 at grade 4, eleven states had a smaller Hispanic-White gap than the nation, and six states had a gap that was larger.
• At grade 4, in all 21 states for which 1992 data were available, both Hispanic and White students achieved higher average scores in mathematics in 2009 than in 1992.

In six of those states (Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island) the gap narrowed as Hispanic students’ scores increased more than White students’ scores. In five additional states (Delaware, the Department of Defense Education Activity, Michigan, Missouri, and Oregon) the gap narrowed between Hispanic and White students since the first NAEP assessment year for that state or the first year for which Hispanic student results are reportable. Since all states did not participate in the grade 4 NAEP mathematics assessment in 1992, the first NAEP assessment year varies.

• In 2009 at grade 8, fifteen states had a smaller Hispanic-White gap than the nation, and six had a gap that was larger.
• At grade 8, in 14 of the 15 states for which 1990 data were available, the mathematics scores of Hispanic and White students were higher in 2009 than in 1990. In both Connecticut and Rhode Island, the gap was narrower in 2009 than in 1990.
• In three additional states, Delaware, Hawaii, and Missouri, the gap narrowed between Hispanic and White students since the first year for which Hispanic student results are reportable.
• In Maryland, the gap was wider in 2009 than in 1990, as White eighth-graders’ scores increased more than those of their Hispanic peers.
• In Utah, the gap was wider in 2009 than in 1992, the first NAEP assessment year for that state. Since all states did not participate in the grade 8 NAEP mathematics assessment in 1990, the first NAEP assessment year varies.

Reading

At the national level, reading scores increased for both groups significantly, but the achievement gap between Hispanic and White students did not change for fourth- or eighth-graders when comparing 1992 to 2009.

• From 2007 to 2009, scores did not change significantly for either group at the fourth grade. The 26-point gap for fourth-graders in 2007 was not significantly different from the 25-point gap in 2009.
• The 25-point gap for eighth-graders in 2007 was not significantly different from the 24-point gap in 2009, though scores for both Hispanic and White students have increased.
• At grades 4 and 8, the 2009 reading achievement gap for Hispanic and White students eligible for the National School Lunch Program was narrower than in 2003.
• At grade 4, thirteen states had a smaller Hispanic-White gap than the nation, and six had a gap that was larger.
• At grade 4, in 11 of the 21 states for which 1992 data were available, the reading scores of Hispanic and White students were higher in 2009 than in 1992.

Both New Jersey and New York had a narrower gap in 2009 than 1992. In Colorado, the gap widened when comparing 2009 to 1992. In Indiana the gap widened between Hispanic and White students when comparing 2009 to 2002, the first NAEP assessment year for which Hispanic student results are reportable for that state. All states did not participate in the first grade 4 state NAEP reading assessment in 1992, so the first year for which data were available varies.

• At grade 8, seven states had a smaller Hispanic-White gap than the nation, and no state had a gap that was larger.
• At grade 8 state-level data were available for 22 states starting in 1998.
• When comparing 2009 to 1998, the grade 8 reading gap did not change significantly in any state. In Wyoming, both Hispanic and White students scored higher in 2009 than in 1998.
• In Alaska, the gap narrowed between Hispanic and White students when comparing 2009 to 2003, the first NAEP assessment year for that state.
• All states did not participate in the first grade 8 state NAEP reading assessment in 1998, so the first year for which data were available varies.

[Photo By Justin_D_Miller]