A hip, funny, Latino rendition of Grease, this play features three cool muchachos who come to the aid of Martin, a chicano nerd who loves a beautiful, popular girl, Ceci, from afar.With the help of his friends, Martin changes his miage and impresses Ceci and her friends, without letting on who he is. This is a problem for Ceci, because, in the meantime, she's transformed herself into a Chicana nert to win the heard of her secret love--Martin. A totally modern, totally cool tale of teenage romance.
Gary Soto writes that when he was five "what I knew best was at ground level." In this lively collection of short essays, Soto takes his reader to a ground-level perspective, resreating in vivid detail the sights, sounds, smells, and textures he knew growing up in his Fresno, California, neighborhood. The "things" of his boyhood tie it all together: his Buddha "splotched with gold," the taps of his shoes and the "engines of sparks that lived beneath my soles," his worn tennies smelling of "summer grass, asphalt, the moist sock breathing the defeat of basesall." The child's world is made up of small things--small, very important things.
Presents ideas for identifying teen interests. Cites research about teen reading habits and preferences, and about the most popular genres. Presents techniques for booktalking such as obtaining self-confidence, dealing with disruptions, and what to say (and not to say).
In thirteen stories full of wit and energy, Gary Soto illuminates the ordinary lives of young people. Meet Angel, who would rather fork over twenty bucks than have photos of his naked body plastered all over school; Philip, who discovers he has a "mechanical mind," whatever that means; Estela, known as Stinger, who rules Jos 's heart and the racquetball court; and many other kids, all of them with problems as big as only a preteen can make them. Funny, touching, and wholly original, Local News is Gary Soto in top form.
In a 1995 interview, prolific Chicano writer Gary Soto noted, "Wonderment has always been a part of my life." This book surveys Soto's immense range of poems, stories, novels, essays and plays for audiences of prereaders to adults. Soto's world moves from the cotton and beet fields of the San Joaquin Valley to the blue-collar barrios of Fresno, and to urban and suburban settings in Oakland and Berkeley. Chapters analyze a wide variety of Soto titles, from his breakout works like 1977's The Elements of San Joaquin to the Chato the Cat illustrated books for children. With self-deprecating humor, particularly in his poems, Soto combines his wonderment with the trials and conflicts that beset him throughout life. In such novels as Jesse, Buried Onions and The Afterlife, and in his stories for YA readers, including Baseball in April and Petty Crimes, his broad array of characters confront the anxieties and annoyances of adolescence. Although he continues to motivate young Chicanos to read and write, Soto stakes his greatest claims to literary prominence through his poems, which are accessible to readers of all ages.
In a prose that is so beautiful it is poetry, we see the world of growing up and going somewhere through the dust and heat of Fresno's industrial side and beyond: It is a boy's coming of age in the barrio, parochial school, attending church, public summer school, and trying to fall out of love so he can join in a Little League baseball team. His is a clarity that rings constantly through the warmth and wry reality of these sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic, always human remembrances.
ChicaNerds in Chicana Young Adult Literature analyzes novels by the acclaimed Chicana YA writers Jo Ann Yolanda Hernández, Isabel Quintero, Ashley Hope Pérez, Erika Sánchez, Guadalupe García McCall, and Patricia Santana. Combining the term "Chicana" with "nerd," Dr. Herrera coins the term "ChicaNerd" to argue how the young women protagonists in these novels voice astute observations of their identities as nonwhite teenagers, specifically through a lens of nerdiness—a reclamation of brown girl self-love for being a nerd. In analyzing these ChicaNerds, the volume examines the reclamation and powerful acceptance of one’s nerdy Chicana self. While popular culture and mainstream media have shaped the well-known figure of the nerd as synonymous with white maleness, Chicana YA literature subverts the nerd stereotype through its negation of this identity as always white and male. These ChicaNerds unite their burgeoning sociopolitical consciousness as young nonwhite girls with their "nerdy" traits of bookishness, math and literary intelligence, poetic talents, and love of learning. Combining the sociopolitical consciousness of Chicanisma with one aligned to the well-known image of the "nerd," ChicaNerds learn to navigate the many complicated layers of coming to an empowered declaration of themselves as smart Chicanas.
