February 17th | Week in Review

¡Hola a todos! I hope everyone had a wonderful Valentine’s Day. Below are numerous resources that touch on identity, family, and testimony. I know I’ve shared a lot, but there were just so many to choose from this week! I hope these are of use to everyone. Have a wonderful weekend.

— Rethinking Schools shared Tackling the Headlines: Teaching Humanity and History. One of the main takeaways: “The best antidote to Trump’s xenophobia, racism, misogyny, and fossil-fuel soaked future is critical thinking.”

– Our Lee & Low Books friends shared Valentine’s Day Children’s Books that Celebrate Familial Love. Even if it is no longer Valentine’s Day, it is important to stress the value of familial love. It’s a theme we’re talking about all month long.

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WWW: Social Justice through Music: Suni Paz and Her Música con Conciencia

Thanks to Alice’s review of Margarita Engle’s Drum Dream Girl, we’re inspired this week to feature another woman from Latin America who’s used music as a tool for social justice. In the case of Drum Dream Girl, we learn about the Chinese-African-Cuban drummer, Millo Castro Zaldarriaga, who broke gender divisions in Cuba during the mid-20^th century when drumming was believed to be a man’s purview. For this post, we want to draw your attention to another real-life woman, Suni Paz, an Argentinean singer and songwriter who has similarly used music as a tool for social change.

Much like Millo, Paz seems to have been born a musician, and one with a natural talent for teaching and sharing her music with others. Earlier in her life, during the 1960s and ‘70s, she used her music as a tool for engaging in social protest, singing in support, as Smithsonian Folkways describes it, “of United Farm Workers movement, dignity and freedom for Latina women, amnesty for Latin American political prisoners, and education for Latino children in the United States.” Later in life, she adapted her social consciousness-raising music to better suit children and classrooms, spreading her joy of Latin American culture and language among audiences spread throughout the Americas. A unique collaboration with two authors, Alma Flor Ada and F. Isabel Campoy (whom we deeply admire), introduced her moving music to many more young people.