The (In)Visibilization of Urban San Diego: A City Storied for Young Readers

Inspired by the need to more adequately represent their students’ (and their own) spatial existences, the authors engage in a comparative critical content analysis of “brochure”-like San Diego stories and picture books that center the lives and experiences of San Diego communities of color to determine whose lives are celebrated, and why/how, in children's literature set in this popular Southern California city. We argue that picture books that center Black, Latiné, and other young people of color can powerfully retell dominant, problematic narratives that exclude them from the stories of their own cities and home places.