Spanish is the language spoken by many of the multilingual learners in classrooms in many regions of the USA. Getting students to share their own story, and ask older generations to share the stories of their own experience, are often part of language-learning classroom and social studies classroom activities

A bilingual English and Spanish source set on one family's experience, making explicit the importance of family stories as history, with audio clips, family photos, posters, and key passages in two languages is a resource I want to share here on the TPS Teachers Network. 

Link to StoryMap "Aquí, pero allá"

The storymap was the creation of two Georgetown University graduate students, Tatiana Cherry Santos and Melissa Flores, as their capstone project for Georgetown's School of Foreign Service. The research guide they created was added to guides for all the countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Europe with materials at the Library of Congress:  guides.loc.gov/hispanic. There are 47 of them as of now! 

In Santos' and Flores's introduction to their work, after telling a bit about their families' reasons for coming to the US from Chile and Brazil, Melissa Flores noted:

• "Our examples are two out of the seventeen countries that comprise Latin America – and that’s not even counting the Caribbean. Despite these “major” differences between how our families got here [exiled from Chile, economic migration from Brazil], their experiences living here are eerily similar. It consists of learning how to speak English, creating community with others that share the same nationality, remaining connected to a “home” country through food, music, and traditions. I’ve learned about my family’s experiences in this country through the countless stories they re-tell, family scenes not much different than the one we have highlighted."