Wanted: Latino book characters: TUCSON- Christina Cuevas and Emma Peterson are two eighth-grade students who love to read.
“I like imagining the stuff that happens in the books, it’s fun to go to a new world,” Cuevas says.
But it’s a world they’ve noticed is sometimes hard to relate to. “There aren’t any specific Latino characters in any of the books I read,” Peterson says.
According to the Pew Hispanic Center, Latino students now make up nearly a quarter of public school students across the country.
Yet, Kathy Short of the UA’s “Worlds of Words,” says less than three-percent of books published in 2011 featured a Latino as its main character. “The kids are right,” Short says.
