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Loida Casares Ruiz

Wife, Mother, Writer, Advertising Manager

Loida Casares Ruiz grew up in Northeast Houston. She graduated from the University of Houston with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Minor in English. She received a Master of Arts in Communication in 2001. She works in advertising by day and is a mother, wife, and writer by night. She has al...

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Literacy and Being Hispanic in America

Loida Casares Ruiz

When I was a little girl my mom, who lived in Mexico until she was thirteen and who was Spanish-dominant, used to read American and English novels voraciously.  She was an avid reader and thus my older sisters and I all grew up to be readers.  My mother only took some English classes when she married my father, but she was still mostly comfortable speaking in Spanish.

My father, a third generation American, reads a lot of his literature in Spanish, but when it comes to reading the encyclopedia and daily newspaper he reads in English.

I grew up in a reading household. It was just the norm and now as an adult I realize that it wasn’t that way in every home, but it was that way in many homes.

My sisters all read novels and I, being much younger than them, followed in their footsteps, scooping up the Victoria Holt and Phillipa Carr novels they finished. I read The Thorn Birds when I was only ten years old and I remember even then being intrigued by a good story.

Now as a writer, and as a Hispanic woman in America, the stereotypes that exist intrigue me.  I’m always in awe when people state that Hispanics don’t read.  In fact, recently I was quoted in a trade journal saying “When TV stations make the argument that Hispanics don’t read, what they are really saying is that Hispanic television viewers don’t read.”  I honestly believe that. When a company chooses to only advertise to Hispanics via broadcast they miss out on a whole audience of educated buyers who read newspapers.

Another stereotype that I find interesting is that we only read Spanish or English and that we can’t read both.  I’ve read my work several times over the past five years with a local literary group, Nuestra Palabra, Latinos Having Their Say.  I’ve also been on their radio show on 90.1 KPFT. And different variations of the same question always amazes me. “Is this going to be in Spanish?” “Is the radio show in Spanish?”  I usually answer, “Sometimes it’s in both, but for the most part it’s in English.”

It’s not that the question bothers me exactly. There’s nothing wrong with speaking Spanish. The question I have is this: Why do people assume that it’s only in Spanish because it’s a Hispanic literary group? And, why can’t it be in both?

Also, why do people assume that Hispanics don’t read? Yes, education has a lot to do with it for the most part, but people without a formal education also read. My mother only had a sixth grade education and my father only had a high school education. He earned his GED when I was in middle school. Yes, they are only two people, and I am not my own focus group, however, I really believe that if they read there are thousands of Hispanics with little education that are also passionate readers.

A few years ago I sat in on some real focus groups with Hispanic readers.  Two groups were in Spanish and two were in English or bilingual.  We asked several questions and among them were questions about what they read.  In the Spanish language groups they named several authors, but they named one self-help author the most.  It was refreshing to hear this group of Hispanics say something I had known all along.  Hispanics read!

I knew this when my mother read her English novels, but then spoke to me in Spanish. I knew this when my father pored over his encyclopedias in English and then spoke to me in Spanish.

Yes we read, yes we can read both languages in some cases, and yes we can speak in one language, even if we prefer reading in another. Yes, we can live biculturaly in America. We’ve been doing it in Texas for more than two hundred years.