In My Family

Carmen Lomas Garza is a painter and children's book illustrator who does large-scale paintings based on her life growing up Mexican-American in Texas in the 1950s. Her paintings illustrate moments from her childhood, such as family meals and holidays. I saw one of her large paintings in the children's wing of a hospital where I had taken my 3-year-old for a checkup, and did a little research on her and found her books. My kid loves them; she loves to look at all the details in the illustrations and imagine what each of the people's names are and what their relationships are to each other. To be clear, these are not really storybooks: There's no plot or dialogue. Each page is a different illustration of a moment in the author's childhood, with a little bit of text from the author explaining what's going on in the picture. Parents should be aware that these are realistic depictions of childhood in the 50s and there is some very slightly graphic content, for example her uncle bringing a freshly killed rabbit into the kitchen to cook for dinner, a picture that includes a little blood from the rabbit. But mostly these are pictures celebrating family.

I used this book, along with Family Pictures, during a personal narrative writing unit when student-teaching third grade at a Spanish/English bilingual school. The majority of the children were immigrants from Mexico and they found these books engaging and easy to relate to. I think it was powerful for them to see experiences like their own in a published format. We studied the way the author described small events from her life, then the students each wrote three short personal narratives based on small events from their lives. Finally they each chose one piece, translated it so that it was in both English and Spanish (like the mentor texts), and illustrated it. Then we bound all of the stories together into one book and made a photocopy of the book for each student. It was a wonderful way to celebrate the work they'd done and they really felt like published authors at the end.

We used this for artist study in our homeschool, when we were focusing on Latin America (artist is from Texas, but family is Mexican, I believe). Nice that the descriptions are in English and Spanish. Art is appropriate for kids.

Garza creates the world of a Mexican-heritage family living in Texas. She captures the closeness of family life and the colorful beauty of the culture and landscape. The bilingual component helped me improve my Spanish vocabulary, and the drawings delighted me. As more and more people speak Spanish, the culture of the U.S. benefits from the language, ideas and art brought from Latin heritage into everyday life. This book is great for children and as something families can read together.

This book has lovely illustrations and is written in both Spanish and English. It is probably best suited for a high school Spanish class to enrich reading and culture. I bought it to use in an ESL class at the elementary level but it is clearly not suited for young children.