I grew up in Southern California and am from an immigrant family. We moved to the United States when I was 4, so it’s with a certain amount of confusion that I look at the books I was taught were the only acceptable books to read: they were inevitably from the British school of literature or, later, from the American school. (My parents foisted Wuthering Heights on me at a very young age, followed by Ivanhoe and Jane Eyre; later, Mark Twain made an appearance, and in school, it was Shakespeare, Browning, and Austen.)
And yet, all around my American childhood was Spanish. My dad was a doctor in an area populated by Mexican immigrants;
