A Hero Kids Should Know
/Book Review: Philip Vera Cruz (Leaders Like Us Series),
By Karen Su / Rourke Educational Media.
Have you ever been treated unfairly? Have you ever seen injustice that you wanted to help change?
Karen Su’s book Philip Vera Cruz (©2023 Rourke Educational Media)
Su answers her own question by introducing the hero of the story: “Philip Vera Cruz saw oppression firsthand. It made him a champion of farmworkers’ rights.”
With clear and accessible language, aimed at students in first to fourth grade, Su traces Vera Cruz’s decision to leave his family in the Philippines to study in the United States and how hard it was for the young pensionado to earn a living by working in a factory in Chicago and as a cannery worker in Alaska.
In the chapter “On Strike!” Vera Cruz joins other Filipino farm workers to protest the harsh working conditions and low pay in the grape vineyards of California. When the Filipino and Mexican American unions unite, they are successful. “The Delano grape strike lasted five long years,” Su writes, “Workers lost pay, housing and faced many hardships. But they kept going. They made labor history.”
The slim volume is illustrated by Arlo Li with bright, whimsical drawings. Li conveys a wide variety of facial expressions with his paintbrush, and his settings – from the fly-infested grim labor camp to the lush farm lands of the Central Valley – provide a beautiful backdrop to Su’s story.
Philip Vera Cruz is illustrated by Arlo Li (©2023 Rourke Educational Media)
Su includes a helpful glossary and a time line. At the end of the book, she provides questions and proposed activities for young readers, making Vera Cruz’s story connect directly to the lives of young children today.
[Sidebar]
Why Author Karen Su Chose to Write About Philip Vera Cruz
(©2023 Rourke Educational Media)
That is why she was especially thrilled to be selected by Rourke Educational Media to create biographies of Asian American leaders for the its Leaders Like Us series, targeted for students in grades 1-4.
As Su was able to choose her subjects, she first examined biographies that were currently available, hoping to focus on people who had not yet been widely recognized. She found that although many books focused on the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez, there was very little about the role that Filipinos played in the grape strike. That is why she chose to write about Philip Vera Cruz. Her other subject was the Chinese American scholar and activist Grace Lee Boggs.
“Both are passionate about changing the world for the better,” Su explains, “They figured out how to contribute toward movements for justice. They not only fought with and for Asian American communities, but also with and for Black and Latinx communities.”
As a college professor, Su is on the faculty of the Global Asian Studies Program at the University Illinois, Chicago, she faced some challenges writing for very young readers. She knew she had to use a limited number of words, and words that are familiar to children. She did not want to water down concepts like anti-immigrant sentiment, racism and the greed of the agricultural growers, but she needed to figure out the vocabulary and the context that would help young children understand the obstacles that Vera Cruz faced and overcame.
Su took several classes on writing for young people, including one sponsored by the Asian American Writers Workshop in New York. “The combination of literature and art in picture books fascinated me – and these books allowed me to follow my interest in life stories, especially of people who are not well-known.
She was gratified when she was invited to speak at several Chicago-area elementary schools and asked the students about a world problem they would want to address. Within seconds they responded: gun violence, racism, global warming, world hunger.
“This let me know that these are issues they want to know more about, and they want to be engaged.”
Su, who received her BA from Mount Holyoke, her MA in Chinese Literature from Stanford, and her PhD in English Literature from U.C. Berkeley, was awarded the Many Voices Prize by the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Illinois in 2022.
She previously taught at and helped develop Asian American Studies departments and student programs at the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Mills College, Temple University, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago.
Despite her academic credentials and higher education teaching experience, Su believes that focusing on children’s literature is crucial. She hopes that all young readers, “no matter what their background, will learn that there have been and are important Asian American leaders from all walks of life.”
“It’s truly life-changing for everyone to see all communities included fully in the curriculum.”
In this era of pernicious government efforts to ban books from schools and school libraries and to narrow the voices that are available to students, Su’s work is especially important. She is optimistic because of current efforts in many states to teach more Asian American curriculum at the K-12 level, noting that Illinois became the first state to pass a curricular mandate to teach Asian American history in elementary and high schools.
In addition to the biographies of Vera Cruz and Boggs, Su has written two more books for the series, which will be released in August. They profile Dalip Singh Saund, the first Asian American member elected to Congress and Yuri Kochiyama, whose family was incarcerated during World War II and who founded Asian Americans for Action and became a close colleague of Malcolm X.
To purchase book, click here: https://www.amazon.com/Philip-Leaders-Guided-Reading-Level/dp/1731656319/ref=sr_1_2?crid=KRZ4UAA14GWV&keywords=philip+vera+cruz&qid=1687923273&sprefix=philip+ve%2Caps%2C199&sr=8-2
Elaine Elinson, coauthor of “Wherever There’s a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California,” represented the United Farm Workers in Europe during the international grape boycott.
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