Photo from Flickr CC user: Casbr
Hello readers! This week I wanted to give you some resources on teaching about indigenous peoples and rights. Sadly, unjustly and unfortunately, the stories, histories and struggles of Native peoples are left out of history, literature and culture. But their stories deserve to be heard, to be understood and cherished. Many children in our schools identify as a Native American, or a Native Central or South American, we owe it to them to enlighten ourselves to the resources available that showcase their culture and share it with their classmates. Not all of these books are award winners, but I will highlight the ones that are and the links are directly to the book’s Amazon page. Continue reading
To wrap up the end of the school year, Katrina, Adam and I will be compiling lists of books for you to check out for use in your classroom. These lists will be thematic and we’ll provide the links to Amazon. Because we are trying to give you a broad swath of the available literature, we won’t only be suggesting award winners, though we will denote which ones have won an award. This list is fairly short as our blog, through 
As we shift our focus from poetry to human rights, I found myself sadly unsurprised at the lack of great children’s and YA literature on human rights and Latin America. On the one hand, everything can be boiled down to human rights; and indeed, much of what we discuss on Vamos centers on the idea that one of those rights is the right to be in a diverse, culturally sensitive, exploration centered classroom, where all students see themselves and their future potential in the books they read, the stories they hear and the arts they craft. On the other hand, if everything is boiled down to human rights, does that take away some salience from those pillars of 
To close out our posts on National Poetry Month, I wanted to follow up last week’s post (which gave resources for younger readers–
Hello blog readers! Thank you so much for your comments on last week’s ¡Mira Look! post.The LAII is gearing up for another GREAT conference, 
¡Today’s Mira Look! kicks off our National Poetry Month posts with an exquisite stroke of paint and prose. Cantando Naranjas y Limones (Singing Oranges and Lemons) written by María Nieves de Abajo Bajo and illustrated by Azita Golarai is, to put it simply, magical, vibrant, soft and picturesque. 
Well, it’s that time of year again: we’ve decided the sun should get up and go to bed later, the birds have decided to chirp their twitterpated spirits, slowly the flowers are stretching their stems and UNM is rounding the corner for the final sprint to the end of another semester. At Vamos A Leer, we are finishing up our section on Race in YA Literature and will be moving on to Poetry in Latin American Literature. Really though, most of what we do is undergirded by the daily race trials that Latino-Americans walk through, so rightly so, we are never truly ‘done’ with race. 
Vamos a Leer 