Reviewed by: Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature Culture by Marilisa Jiménez García Hilary Brewster (bio) Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature Culture, by Marilisa Jiménez García. UP of Mississippi, 2021. Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature Culture by Marilisa Jiménez García is a complex analysis of the historical, cultural, and artistic relationship between Puerto Rico and its mainland colonizer, the US. Her nuanced study examines authors, actors, playwrights, and librarians and the textual productions of these iconic Puerto Ricans—or Nuyoricans—in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and how each plays a role at the intersection of Puerto Rican and American youth cultures. Jiménez García expertly weaves history, politics, textual and media analysis, cultural critique, and scholarship to demonstrate their connectedness and transnational impact on one another. Although this connectedness is a result of complicated, often fraught and detrimental policies enacted by the United States lauding its colonial power over the people of the (now) territory of Puerto Rico, Jiménez García ultimately urges readers to celebrate the people whose stories are not only art and means of cultural expression but acts of resistance. In the introduction, Jiménez García lays out myriad frameworks as a precursor to the subsequent five chapters. In this rather dense beginning, she details how texts for youth and literacy programs for youth in Puerto Rico have a longstanding history with political protests on the archipelago (4), as well as how "literature for children" and other culture aimed at youth continues to have a seemingly negative standing in the academy, within pop culture, Latinx and Ethnic studies, and literature studies. Furthermore, she outlines the ways in which children's and youth literature is frequently coded as Anglo-British, white, and white [End Page 220] American in academic discourses (7); how picture books in particular play a role in replicating and upholding a racist, colonial hegemony; and also how children's literature has fallen out of the larger realm of Latin literary studies (12). Although Jiménez García notes that the relatively recent public attention to the need for "diverse" literature in the children's publishing world is ultimately positive, she also makes clear that this diversity generally overlooks authors, characters, and settings from Latin America and the Caribbean (16). Perhaps the most important point made in the introduction that becomes a recurring thread—even more than the others, given the nature of the cultural texts examined in the chapters—is that there has been a hesitancy to view the US as an empire, preferring an immigrant paradigm in locating difference rather than a settler colonial model regarding past and present land acquisition, occupation, removal, and continuous displacement of Indigenous populations. Particularly in the case of Latinxs, the dominant discourse lingers on issues of immigration and the border [rather than the US as an empire]. (14) This depiction of the US as "benevolent conqueror" has been a longstanding tradition in US K-12 classrooms (19). Jiménez García's critique of the US K-12 and higher education systems in upholding much of the aforementioned hegemony is perhaps the strongest section of the introduction, although also the thread that disappears most quickly in the other chapters. The first chapter centers two questions: what representations of Puerto Ricans occupied the bookshelves in the New York City public library from the late 1800s through 1960 (after the US invasion of Puerto Rico in 1898 through Operation Bootstrap and the beginning of the establishment of the commonwealth in the 1950s), and how did the general US public learn about Puerto Rico and its people in children's texts? (30). Divided into two sections, this chapter is focused first on early primers and illustrated texts by white US writers, then shifts to discuss Puerto Rican writers responding to US imperialism (31). Drawing on scholars such as Nathalie op de Beeck and Lara Saguisag, Jiménez García argues that the "faux history books [primers especially] contain aspects one has come to expect...
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Apr 18, 2023
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