This is an appeal to the book industry at large to acknowledge the ethnocentrism inherent in “world” and “foreign language” categories and to propose alternatives that do not alienate readers. 

My two-and-a-half-year-old daughter and I were recently at Powell’s on Hawthorne looking for books in Spanish. Finding books in Spanish in Portland is harder than it may seem. I am a native Spanish speaker. Many stores stock the same books. I always find the same Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a few old books from an obscure author that sat unread for decades on someone’s bookshelf until they got rid of them, and translations of airport bookstore bestsellers. Since I’ve already read Cien Años de Soledad and La Hojarasca, I decided to skip the adult Spanish section and walk straight to the back of the children’s section in search of books in Spanish for Cecilia. Technically, finding books with Spanish words in them for babies and toddlers is not as hard as it is for adults, but it is still challenging. The challenge is not necessarily in a variety of titles. The challenge is in how much, what kind of Spanish is in these books, and particularly, in understanding why these choices are made.

Often, books in the children’s Spanish section are bilingual, and the translations leave much to be desired and not just due to errors. Despite living in the United States, where the majority of Spanish speakers are Mexican and from other Latin American countries, bilingual books and translations often use Castellano Spanish . . . from Spain! No one from Latin America speaks Spanish the way the Spanish speak Spanish. No Latin American country speaks Spanish the same as the next Latin American country. After more than two hundred years of Mexico’s independence from Spain, the tools we have in the US to pass on our heritage to our children attempt to assimilate them to the king’s Spanish. It can turn the simple act of finding a toddler, cardboard vocabulary book for your child into a (mostly) futile act of resistance.

We found a book we both liked, and I bought it. When we arrived home, I noticed two stickers had been attached over the bar code. The older one was legible through the newer one, and it read “foreign language.” The second attempt at classifying the book was marginally more tactful: “world language.” I want to imagine that the author of the second sticker recognized that if a child read the word “foreign” on their book it might make that child see themselves differently from their peers who read books from the rest of the store. However, our sticker writer was still unsure of how best to proceed. Instead of accurately identifying the book as a Spanish book, they lumped it in with the rest of the books aimed at kids from the rest of the world, presumably because there were not enough for each of them to have their own shelf. It reminds me of people who are afraid to say Mexican out loud in public and instead identify me as Hispanic or Latinx, as presumably it is less offensive. As if calling me Mexican was an insult or something that required further explanation. They had good intentions, I’m sure.

I would urge book retailers and book publishers to put more effort into how books in languages other than English are categorized. While BISAC codes are widely used to classify books, they do not offer many codes to specify language or geographic region. Using Thema metadata codes provides the ability to differentiate by language and geography. The book industry needs to move past lumping everyone who doesn’t speak English into a single category and begin organizing books by their language and geography. The tools to do this exist; they just need to be widely adopted. I urge you to do so.

I had the privilege of growing up in Mexico until I was sixteen before moving to the US. I was able to have a childhood in which I wasn’t othered; I was simply myself. I didn’t have to look for my books in the foreigner section of the store. And perhaps it is because it wasn’t until much later in life that I directly experienced racism that these unremarkable, ubiquitous stickers on my daughter’s book affected me so much. Out of all the parenting workshops I attended while my wife was pregnant, none mentioned the isolation I would feel while trying to foster a love of books in Cecilia.

Written by Alan De Anda-Hall.