Field Guide Proposal

Because I have basically dedicated my life to music making for the last ten years, I easily neglect other of my passions and forget to spend time enriching my knowledge about them. That’s why when I had to come up with a field guide topic, literature seemed like a good idea. However, the thought process didn’t quite work like that. Since my brother got married a few years ago, my family and I have been looking forward to adding a new family member, and, lately, my mind has been wandering around the topic of what my legacy would be for this child. And I realized, I want to teach him to read, I want to buy him books and immerse in the magic worlds I have explored. But then I realized that of my favorite children’s books, only one is actually written by a Latin American writer. So I decided to change that, and research other books written by Latin American authors and that hopefully captivate the essence of our culture.

Thus, the purpose of my Field Guide is to create a basic introductory guide to Latin American children’s books. In order to keep my research narrow, I will focus to find 5 to 10 books that reflect the richness of the culture, its large diversity, and the way they deal with ethnicity issues.

I hope that the list of authors will represent a wide range of nationalities across the continent and that I’ll find common elements throughout the books I choose.

Since I’ve partially started my research already, I have noticed that a lot of children books are songbooks or poetry books; however, my goal is to pick prose that are either novels, short stories, or collections of short stories.