[Picture from the same article, copyright nytimes.com,
4/12/2012 – Image MOTOKO RICH]
4.12.2012. Like many of his third-grade
classmates, Mario Cortez-Pacheco likes reading the “Magic Tree House” series,
about a brother and a sister who take adventurous trips back in time. He also
loves the popular “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” graphic novels.
But Mario, 8, has noticed something about
these and many of the other books he encounters in his classroom at Bayard
Taylor Elementary here: most of the main characters are white. “I see a lot of
people that don’t have a lot of color,” he said.
Hispanic students now make up nearly a
quarter of the nation’s public school enrollment, according to an analysis of
census data by the Pew Hispanic Center, and are the fastest-growing segment of
the school population. Yet nonwhite Latino children seldom see themselves in
books written for young readers. (Dora the Explorer, who began as a cartoon
character, is an outlier.)
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