Why Are Librarians Pushing Queer Mariachi Children’s Books?

The American Library Association Needs to Focus on Quality, Not Politics

Donald Trump said this week that “our country will no longer be woke.” Maybe so, but the culture wars aren’t over. Progressives are still determined to indoctrinate children with left-wing sensibilities and this resolve is particularly evident when you examine what sort of children’s books the American Library Association (ALA) is promoting in its magazine’s best books of 2024 issue. The ALA’s Booklist publication, particularly its year-end best books issue, is worth examining because the editors’ selections influence the purchasing decisions of thousands of school and public librarians, not to mention bookstores across the country. If you think wokeism is dead, then why is the ALA pushing stories about trans socialists in Appalachia, queer mariachi, “gay ass Iranians,” and homophobia in Honduras among other uber woke “best books” of the year?

For starters, the ALA wants your children to read Canto Contigo, a “queer love story” about mariachi music that they claim is a “masterpiece about queer youth redefining traditional customs in Texas.” If your kids aren’t into the queer mariachi genre, how about Compound Fracture, a “queer Appalachian thriller” about Miles, an autistic trans “16 year old socialist and proud West Virginian.” Forget God, country, apple pie and baseball, give our children queer Appalachian thrillers about trans socialists and plenty of queer mariachi too, right? The edgy, esoteric woke hits on the list keep coming with Libertad, a novel that “struggles with homophobia and political unrest…in Honduras, where the right-wing party that staged a coup in 2009 aims to maintain power.”

There’s a novel on the list that “analyzes poverty in privilege in Jamaica,” there’s Boy Like Me, a “timeless story of forbidden love” about two boys who fall in love in 1994 England, when gay relationships weren’t allowed to be discussed in UK schools, and The Breakup Lists, a novel about a brother and sister who fall in love with the same boy. If those titles aren’t avant-garde enough for your kids, Booklist also thinks that Dear Wendy, the story of “two aromantic and asexual college students who engage in an online feud and then become friends in real life” is one of the best books of the year.

Booklist’s editors also love another LGBTQ novel for kids called Hot Boy Summer, which is told through the protagonist’s “joyful, gay AF voice” and features four gay teens who “transform the summer into a celebration of themselves and their queerness.” They also endorse a novel that “introduces teens to the struggles of women and Mexican Americans for equal rights in the 1970s,” a novel about a disabled girl who “pushes back against systemic inequalities at her prep school,” a murder mystery with a “sapphic side plot,” and another where the protagonist exposes the “sordid, racist history of his small town.” Desert Echoes, another Booklist best book of the year, is about “gay ass Iranian friends who navigate love and loss” that “explores racism, homophobia, and relations between the United States and Iran along the way.”

The ALA’s best books list also features If You Knew My Name, which features a protagonist whose mother is a BLM activist and an unarmed black man who is killed by the police. There’s also a “queer literary romance novel” about two girls who “navigate the changing nature of I love you,” and, though it wasn’t published this year, Booklist worked in another recommendation for Gender Queer, a graphic-novel memoir with pornographic depictions by a nonbinary, asexual author who uses the pronouns e, em, eir, thanks to the release of the title’s audiobook edition.

On the non-fiction side, Booklist recommends Represent, a book about voter suppression by MSNBC commentator Michael Eric Dyson that’s endorsed by Rev. Al Sharpton and Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, as a perfect classroom pick for teens and tweens. In the same section, they also endorse a book on Republican Senator Joe McCarthy and the red scare, along with an Afro-centric title co-authored by anti-racism activist Ibram Kendi.

For middle school fiction, among Booklist’s recommendations are Black Star, about a 12-year-old girl who wants to be the first female baseball pitcher but is undone by racism, Black Girl Power, an anthology of 15 black girl power stories, and Mani Semilla Finds Her Quetzal Voice, a novel about a Guatemalan girl that “focuses on the disparities against women…and femicides occurring in other countries” while shedding light for middle schoolers on “topics such as consent and the #MeToo movement.”

For students in kindergarten through 3^rd grade, Booklist recommends Do You Even Know Me, “an empowering picture book about a girl who stands up for her Muslim culture and identity,” Free to Learn: How Alfredo Lopez Fought for the Right to Go to School the tale of an illegal alien whose family fights for his rights to attend school in Texas. And then there’s Marley’s Pride, recommended for kids age 3-8, the story of a black, non-binary child who overcomes her fear of crowds in order to see her grandmother win an award at a Pride parade. The book teaches children about obscure pronouns, has a glossary of 11 different LGBT flags, coaches children on how to use gender neutral pronouns, and defines a person’s gender identity as “who they know themselves to be on the inside.”

In a section on “perfect classroom picks” for elementary school students (ages 8-12) Booklist recommends The Every Body Book of Consent: An LGBTQIA-Inclusive Guide to Boundaries, Bodies and Beyond, an illustrated guidebook which “introduces consent in all its many forms - in a way that is inclusive of orientation, neurodiversity, gender identity, faith and ethnicity.” Booklist also wants young children to read a hagiography of Paul Robeson, a Black singer and actor who “used the power of his voice to speak out as America’s conscience, but when his nation was not yet willing to listen, he found a more-supportive reception in the USSR.” For grades 1-4, Booklist recommends, Who Needs a Statue, which “examines some of the women and BIPOC figures included at the Capitol.” Another “perfect classroom pick,” this one for children in grades 4-8, is a progressive title on voter rights and voter suppression co-authored by a librarian who “started the Read Woke challenge in response to the shootings of young unarmed black people, the repeal of DACA, and the lack of diversity in young adult literature.”

Another title Booklist wants children to read, Cancelled, sounds promising until you read that it “exposes the culture of misogyny” at the protagonist’s school. In fact, there are no conservative themed books anywhere in the issue, for children or adults. And of course, the adult picks are nearly as woke as the kid’s books. But adults aren’t nearly as impressionable as children and while the ALA’s adult picks impact what you’ll find at bookstores and public libraries, at least they have little or no impact on what school libraries purchase.

According to Zippia, 91% of library directors are Democrats, and so, one could argue that Booklist and the ALA represent their constituency of left-wing librarians around the country. Maybe so, but most Americans want their children to be educated not indoctrinated. Booklist isn’t putting every LGBT children’s book under the sun in its best books issue thanks to their literary merit—it’s doing so to advance a political agenda and to brainwash children during their formative years. School districts and public libraries in communities that are fed up with the ALA’s left-wing bias ought to cancel their Booklist subscriptions and ALA memberships until the group decides to prioritize literary merit over politics.