¡Sí, Se Puede! / Yes, We Can! by Diana Cohn

Reading these stories was like seeing my life in print for the first time, and I can remember feeling a true connection to this Latina writer. The story is told through a series of vignettes depicting young Esperanza Cordero, a young girl growing up in one of Chicago’s Latino neighborhoods.

I read it in high school as it’s not exactly a children’s book, but there is nothing in it you couldn’t read to a first grader. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros Must-Read Children's Books That Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month While the stories themselves don’t necessarily have a cultural connection to our community, at least they’re in our native language, which connects him to our heritage. This year we were thrilled to discover that one of his favorite series, The Diary of a Wimpy Kid, is available in Spanish, so we piled up on those. In the meantime, I take advantage of Hispanic Heritage Month and make a trip to the bookstore each year to pick up new Spanish books we can read together. I figure the more I expose him to it, the more connected he will feel to our heritage, and the better the chances that he may one day choose to become fluent. He’s not fluent in Spanish, nor can he read it very well, but he can understand just about everything.

Now that my son is turning ten, he obviously reads on his own, in English, but I still do what I can to read books in Spanish together. Even when he was too young to understand what I was saying, I would read to Javier on our rocking chair, the same one his Colombian grandmother used to sit on to read to his own father when he was a little boy. I had amassed the “Spanglish” library during my baby shower, when I asked friends and familia to gift me with their favorite children’s books in both English and Spanish.

¡Sí, Se Puede! / Yes, We Can! by Diana Cohn