Reflection on Set

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The reason I chose these three books was because I feel that each of the books does a great job of representing Mexican Americans. Mexican Americans are a growing minority and Latinos as a whole are now one the largest minorities within the United States. Since Latinos are the largest minority in the US, it is inevitable that we as future teachers will run into students who have a Latino background. I believe that it is important for us as future teachers to become aware of where are students may possibly be coming from. To do this we have to learn about Hispanic culture and history. I chose to specifically focus on Mexican Americans not only because Mexico is so close to the US border, but because I have family members who are Mexican American. As I read each of these books I was pleasantly surprised and pleased at what I read. A common stereotype given to Mexican Americans or any individual of Latino decent is that they only eat beans and rice and that most of them are illegal immigrants. Each of the authors was an insider and I really appreciated and enjoyed knowing that information as I read the books. I found no trace of either one of those stereotypes in any of the three books. Each of these books mainly showed pieces of the authors own personal history. There were few if any stereotypes within these books since the text was mainly the authors own story. Also each of these books had equal amounts of text written in both English and Spanish. I felt that this definitely added to each book and would be beneficial to those students whose first language is Spanish.