VivirLatino

How the Garcia Girls Got Banned in North Carolina

12:19 H | Topics: Books - Controversia - Education - Literature - North Carolina

Sadly, banned books are not exclusive to third world countries run by alleged dictators. Banned books happen right here in the USA. One of the latest is a book by Dominican author Julia Alvarez : How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents.

A mother with a daughter in a Johnston County high school cites Julia Alvarez’s novel about four sisters who must adjust to life in the U.S. after fleeing the Dominican Republic as inappropriate for the high school age group.

Profanity in the book and graphic content were cited as the reasons.

After several meetings, and a review of the book, the district agreed, and banned the book from all county school libraries, and is following up with a district-wide book title review.

I went to a very small Catholic high school here in NYC and I remember how my class giggled when we were reading Dante's Inferno and came across the word shit. My school library was small but I live in NYC where I could find a wealth of books from Latino writers to read on my own and my parents, even when I was little, never told me not to read anything because they thought it was inappropriate, but we are talking about North Carolina here! I'm almost certain that the libraries don't have huge Latino lit sections plus it concerns me that one mom and daughter team thought that a little talk of sex, periods and the occasional use of the word fuck/carajo merits the book being banned completely. Parents- have you so little faith in your children? Have you so little faith in the parenting you have done by the time your kids get to high school?

Via / Ciudad Magazine

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