Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature and Culture
Marilisa Jiménez García
Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature and Culture, with a foreword by Sonia Nieto, examines how children’s and young adult literature became a tool for negotiating the colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico. During the early colonial encounter, children’s books were among the first kinds of literature U.S. writers produced to introduce the new colony and its people, and the U.S.’s role as a colonial power, to the American public. Marilisa Jiménez García draws on young adult fiction, textbooks, television, comics, music, curricula, and youth movements to argue that youth literature and media later became important tools of Puerto Rican cultural and educational institutions negotiating U.S. assimilation while asserting a distinct Latin American, Caribbean identity. The book stands as the only comprehensive study of Puerto Rican and diasporic contributions to American youth literature and culture, and won the Children’s Literature Association’s 2023 Book Award.
The Author
Marilisa Jiménez García is Associate Professor of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University-Camden.
The Introduction
In Side by Side, Marilisa Jiménez García focuses on the contributions of the Puerto Rican community to American youth, approaching Latinx literature as a transnational space that provides a critical lens for examining the lingering consequences of US and Spanish colonialism for U.S. communities of color.
Through analysis of texts typically outside traditional Latinx or literary studies, such as young adult literature, textbooks, television programming, comics, music, curriculum, and youth movements, Side by Side represents the only comprehensive study of the contributions of Puerto Ricans to American youth literature and culture, as well as the only comprehensive study into the role of youth literature and culture in Puerto Rican literature and thought.
Considering recent debates over diversity in children’s and young adult literature and media, and the strained relationship between Puerto Rico and the U.S., Jiménez García’s timely work encourages readers to question who constitutes the expert and to resist the homogenization of Latinxs, and other marginalized communities, that has led to the erasure of writers, scholars, and artists.
The Reviews
“An important and necessary contribution that sits at the intersection of Youth Literature and Latinx Studies,” Adriana De Persia Colón writes in the International Journal of Young Adult Literature, calling the book a strong source for comparative work on power dynamics across the lands and peoples of the U.S. settler-colony and empire.
Jillian M. Báez, author of In Search of Belonging: Latinas, Media, and Citizenship, praises the book’s comparative analysis of how childhood was invoked in literature and popular culture by white U.S. authors and by Puerto Ricans on the island and in the diaspora, arguing it shows how Puerto Rican children are central to both historical and contemporary debates about Puerto Rican cultural politics.
William Orchard, writing in Cento Journal, situates the book alongside scholarship by Vanessa Valdés, Lisa Sánchez González, and Sonia Nieto, noting its clear prose and rich historical detail make it highly adaptable to the classroom.
Trevor Bofone, in Latino Studies, calls it a timely intervention that will engage readers seeking a comprehensive, well-researched study of Puerto Rican literature and culture.
Hilary Brewster, writing in Children’s Literature, describes the book’s arguments as groundbreaking and calls it a thoughtful, unapologetic addition to the academic discussion.