Like many of his third-grade classmates, Mario Cortez-Pacheco likes reading the “Magic Tree House” series, about a brother and a sister who take adventurous trips back in time. He also loves the popular “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” graphic novels. But Mario, 8, has noticed something about these and many of the other books he encounters in his classroom at Bayard Taylor Elementary here: most of the main characters are white. “I see a lot of people that don’t have a lot of color,” he said.
When even young children are expressing their disappointment with the dearth of Latino characters in children’s literature, there’s a problem.
And unfortunately, the adults in charge of fixing the problem tend not to notice it, or to try patching it up with tokenism.
