The word 'authentic' has been thrown around more and more as publishers continue to expand their Spanish-language and bilingual offerings for the one in four children nationwide who are Latino
and the more than 43 million Americans speaking Spanish at home.
Authentic Latin American’ is like a catchphrase, says Catalina Holguín, director of the Colombia-based digital library platform MakeMake. But I feel that sometimes people don’t understand what that means.
Often, authentic is used mostly to indicate that a title was originally written in Spanish, but Holguín wants readers to think beyond that. Of course, it means that the books are correct in terms of the grammar and the spelling, but a book is not just for developing proficiency in spelling,” she says. “What’s important is the book as a window into a worldview from whoever wrote it or wherever it comes from, and that it actually represents a lived experience and a living culture.
Holguín is tapping into something that Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics, articulated: A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language.
