This chapter studies Latin American children’s literature from the 1980s to 2017, written in Mexico, the Southern Cone, the Caribbean, and US Latino countries. It examines a variety of authors from countries such as Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, among others, as well as US Latino children’s literature and its central themes, such as migration, exile, and bilingualism. It pays attention to the way children’s literature has dealt with ideas about race, gender, and class, questioning ethnic essentialisms and stereotypical gender roles. It analyzes the incorporation of new and alternative family models, and how these works have foregrounded historical and political contexts, as well as the use of orality, regionalisms, and vernacular language, together with the incorporation of humor and an increasing emphasis on the visuality of texts. New technologies have helped establish new relations between different codes, offering new levels of meaning. Children’s and young adult literature has opened up to explore linguistic and cultural diversity through multilingual and intersectional books. Texts discuss and reflect on the role of different ethnic, social, racial, and gender minorities, conveying pacifism and anti-authoritarianism. Around the start of the twenty-first century, texts started to address issues linked to globalization and migrations, crossing the borders between Latin American countries and between Latin America and the United States.

In his well-known autobiographical essay, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” Rorty observed two contrasting dispositions that he developed as a young boy. On the one hand, as the son of two radical, fellow-traveling Trotskyists, he absorbed a firm commitment to social justice and democratic politics. At the same time, as a solitary, even lonely child, living in rural isolation, he also had “private, weird, snobbish, incommunicable interests,” such as an obsession with various species of wild orchids that grew near his home in northwest New Jersey. Much has been written about Rorty’s politics, about his “Trotsky” side. But relatively little has been said about his encounters with wild orchids, “Wordsworthean moments” in which he felt “touched by something numinous, something of ineffable importance.” Rorty said “there is no reason to be ashamed of, or downgrade, or try to slough off, your Wordsworthean moments.” Yet no one said less about these moments than Rorty himself; he seemed to slough them off. Why? My argument is that even acknowledging having had such moments (which he rarely did) seemed to him to pose a threat to his antifoundationalism, to his remarkably extreme view of human autonomy, and to his resolutely anti-authoritarian temperament. Alas.