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Building on Strength: Language and Literacy in Latino Families and Communities Edited by Ana Celia Zentella Teachers College Press, 2005, 213 pp., ISBN 0-807-74603-7
Beginning from the perspective that Latino families and communities have many resources to offer, Zentella brings together the work of several researchers who have explored these resources. They use language socialization and anthropolitical perspectives to inform their exploration of diverse language and literacy practices in Latino homes, churches, and schools. The usefulness of this book for teachers is that through their indepth studies, researchers construct a diverse but distinct portraiture of Latino children and their families as individuals engaged in complex practices in their everyday lives. While the authors focus largely on Latinos, the lessons learned nevertheless apply to teachers in multilingual, multicultural classrooms where the resources of diverse children's language and literacy practices abound.
In the first chapter, Zentella identifies ways that the essentialist views of Latino families' language and literacy practices shared by researchers and educators alike sustain ideologies that privilege the literate behaviors of the dominant society. In particular, she draws on her ethnographic research with New York Puerto Rican families to challenge the imposition of teacher models of parenting and an "implied determinacy" about the potentially negative effects of Latino families' practices on their children's futures....