children | ZETEO

Children Challenging Borders

December 24, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

The Physical and Psychological Journeys that the Children of Immigrants Make for their Families By Alexia Raynal Click here for PDF version. {Note: This is the sixth in Zeteo‘s Fall 2014 series of pieces related to borders, the borders here being between countries, between families, and between generations.} [print_link] [email_link] One summer morning about two years ago, as I was finding my seat on a plane in New York that would take me to Mexico, I noticed a group of elementary-school […]

Categories: Article, Fall 2014 Issue • Tags: borders, child labor, children, family roles, immigrant bargain, immigration, Joanna Dreby, Mexican-Americans, Robert C. Smith, second generation, traveling, unaccompanied minors

Leave a comment

Augie March’s Christmas

December 19, 2014 by William Eaton

[print_link][email_link] For an unsentimental take on Christmas, and a view of not-so-loving, cat-and-mouse relationships between adults and children, I went back to Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. In this scene the young Augie is in the Chicago department store where he has been hired as one of Santa’s helpers for the Christmas season: Painted and rouged with theater greasepaint and dusted with mica snow, Jimmy and I marched around the store with tambourines and curl-tongued noisemakers, turning […]

Categories: Catherine Vigier, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, children, literature, reading

Please come back. . .Next Year!

December 15, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

Alexia Raynal is heading home for the holidays. Her commentary in the fields of children and childhood will return next year. Wish her luck as she tries to keep her hands off the keyboard! From Duncan Tonatiuh’s book Dear Primo: A Letter to My Cousin. Watch him read the stories of two cousins—Carlos and Charlie—about their lives across borders here. — Alexia Raynal, Zeteo Associate Editor To read more posts in the fields of children and childhood by Alexia Raynal, visit her ZiR page here.

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: books, childhood, children, Duncan Tonatiuh, reading

Leave a comment

Ronald McDonald and Boy, arms spread, Christ-like

McDonald “inspires” through magic and fun

December 8, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

How the food industry limits children’s healthy choices I first heard about Fed Up—a documentary about obesity in the United States—when a review by The Huffington Post made it to my news feed last week. In the article, Corinna Clendenen addresses the documentary’s stories of children’s struggles to lose weight. She is not entirely convinced about the health facts in it, but she shares concerns about the manipulative strategies of the food industry. For example, Clendenen explains: The film takes a hard look at the post-war food industry and […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiLL • Tags: capitalism, childhood, children, Erik Ravelo, Fed Up, film, McDonald's, Michelle Obama, politics, The Huffington Post

Leave a comment

Feminist Hacker Barbie “Fixes” Mattel’s Vision

December 6, 2014 by William Eaton

The holiday season is always a chilling time for me, witnessing the mad rush of consumerism that now blatantly supersedes any pretense of familial bonding. On this topic, I was amused to hear of Mattel’s timely release of a new book entitled Barbie: I can be a Computer Engineer. Sounds great, or as good as we can expect from a toy giant like Mattel that thrives on creating a gendered toy market! But alas, apparently (somehow!) they fell short of the mark on […]

Categories: Caterina Gironda, ZiR • Tags: children, technology, women

Leave a comment

Iconic, but of what?

December 3, 2014 by fritztucker

[print_link] [email_link] If a tree falls in a forest and six different news channels capture footage of it, does it matter? The Internet has changed, ever so slightly, the definition of mass media. Major networks still create most of it. Now, however, anybody has the potential to create iconic images if they get enough retweets and ‘Likes’ on Facebook. Recently, a photo of a crying Afro-American boy embracing a compassionate, Euro-American cop at a Ferguson solidarity protest in Portland, Oregon has gone viral, typically accompanied […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: African-Americans, art, children, civil rights, ethics, New York City, politics, race, technology

Leave a comment

Parents look back and children do too

December 1, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

Last morning, as I skimmed through my favorite books, I bumped into Marjorie Orellana’s Translating Childhoods: Immigrant Youth, Language, and Culture. I had not picked up the book since last year, but it was easy to remember why I like it so much. While speaking mostly about children’s work as translators for their monolingual parents, Orellana also dedicates a brief section to Immigrant Childhoods. She begins this section by explaining: Immigrant families differ from those who have resided in the United States for generations on dimensions […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: books, childhood, children, families, immigration, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Translating Childhoods

Leave a comment

Why we feel ambivalent

November 24, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

(Towards Migrants and Migration Acts) Many liberals and human rights advocates supported president Obama’s executive action on immigration last week. Many others, however, are ambivalent about their take on this act. Should we protect families even if parents are undocumented? While the response is obvious to me (yes), I take this ambivalence as a healthy sign of thoughtfulness and change. It also reveals a common social response to others and outsiders. Professor Jacqueline Bhabha discusses this issue in her new book Child Migration & Human Rights in a Global […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: children, civil rights, Harvard University Press, immigration, Jacqueline Bhabha, law, Obama's immigration act, otherness, politics

Leave a comment

Deportation is also about those who stay

November 17, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

On Saturday, the Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece by Diane Guerrero, the Colombian actress who plays Maritza Ramos in “Orange Is the New Black.” It tells the story of how Guerrero lost her parents to deportation when she was barely 14, starting with her worst fears growing up: Throughout my childhood I watched my parents try to become legal but to no avail. They lost their money to people they believed to be attorneys, but who ultimately never helped. That meant my childhood […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: childhood, children, civil rights, deportation, Diane Guerrero, immigration, LA Times, Los Angeles Times, politics