English’s Cristina Rhodes’s most recent article “Processes of Transformation: Theorizing Activism and Change Through Gloria Anzaldúa’s Picture Books” was recently published in online format in Children’s Literature in Education. The article explores how Gloria Anzaldúa’s picture books provide additional theoretical frames that complement her existing scholarship. While much has been said about her contributions to the fields of Latinx studies, little has been said about how her theories extend to children or children’s literature. Nevertheless, reading the picture books as theory reveals a process of transformation wherein characters must first transform themselves in order to effect change through activism. The narrative across Anzaldúa’s picture books illuminates and illustrates this concept by establishing how Prietita, the protagonist of both books, first comes into her own agency and then is able to ameliorate her circumstances. But this process is not just embodied by Prietita, but can instead be seen as a trend in other texts—hence how these picture books equally function as a theoretical frame for reading processes of transformation and resistance.
