- Book Harvest
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
La Cultura Cura: Engaging and Embracing Families Through a Culturally Responsive Lens
By Dani Rangel, Book Babies–Durham Bilingual Literacy Coach, and Wilma Cintrón-Tyson, Books from Birth Implementation Specialist
At Book Harvest, our work is grounded in a simple truth: families are the heart of early learning. When we honor the cultural practices, traditions, and strengths that families bring, engagement deepens, leading to stronger relationships and richer learning outcomes. This approach can be especially powerful in our home visiting work with Latine families, whose cultural values and intergenerational knowledge provide an essential foundation for their children’s development.
Our deep commitment to families is reflected in the words of Dr. Concha Saucedo, a legendary Chicanx activist and mental-health practitioner, who coined the phrase “la cultura cura.” Her work in the mental health field pioneered bringing a cultural approach to providing mental health services to the Latine community. Specifically, she calls on us to embrace the powerful tools that are built into our cultural heritage.
In the vision statement for Instituto Familiar de la Raza’s La Cultura Cura Youth Program, which she founded in 2000, Dr. Saucedo writes:
"We believe that la cultura heals…all healing practices occur within a cultural framework where healing is about community building and empowerment. Each subculture in the trajectory of the Latinx/Chicanx/Indigenous experience has a set of embedded healing practices and coping mechanisms that should be celebrated and strengthened.”
Her words remind us that literacy is not just a skill; it is a cultural inheritance shaped by family, connection, and community.
Latine Families Are Not a Monolith
Latine families are diverse in lineage, traditions, and worldviews; Latino children are among the fastest-growing demographic groups, making up at least 1 in 4 children today (The Early Home Environment of Latino Children, 2019). Each Latine family’s experience can be viewed as a unique thread making up the tapestry of Latinidad. In our home visiting work, we understand that many families are navigating bicultural lives and experiences as Latine in the United States. Approaching families with curiosity rather than assumptions allows practitioners to genuinely seek understanding and uplift varied cultural identities, while avoiding flattening families into stereotypes.
Culturally Responsive Family Engagement
Culturally responsive family engagement is a multifaceted framework that affirms and centers the family and home, guided by cultural humility: an intentional stance of curiosity, openness, and continual learning. The framework validates cultural practices as strengths and prioritizes the unique culture each family is creating. This framework can also be a powerful way to subvert bias because it situates individual family culture (the unique practices within each home) as the most important part of engaging with families, as opposed to relying on identities or labels that color all families as being the same.
For example, while limited¹, the research highlights several common cultural values among many Latine communities, such as:
Familismo: deep commitment to family and community involvement
Confianza: trust and relational warmth between individuals and institutions
Orgullo and legacy: pride in one’s lineage and the transmission of cultural knowledge across generations
When practices rooted in these common values are honored, coaches build powerful connections that can strengthen family engagement and create meaningful learning partnerships. These values align naturally with Book Harvest’s work to nurture early literacy through relationships, trust, and shared celebration.
Book Babies: A Model in Practice
The Book Babies home visiting program is a five-year partnership with families. Beginning at birth and through the first four years of a child’s life, a family engages in quarterly literacy-coaching visits. During the final year of the program, families are supported in preparing for the child’s transition into kindergarten. Coaches bring high-quality, culturally relevant, age-appropriate books and learning resources directly into the home. Equally important, coaches bring respect for family wisdom and lived experience.
Book Babies uses a research-based curriculum designed to strengthen language development and parent engagement. As principal investigator Dr. Iheoma Iruka has described, the program’s impact is grounded in the relationship between parents and coaches — a relationship built on trust, affirmation, and shared purpose. Families are supported on multiple levels as parents and coaches work together to co-create the home learning environment.
Leveraging familismo, coaches ask about and invite all adults in the home—mothers, fathers, aunties, abuelos, and older siblings, everyone in the proverbial village—into the literacy work, expanding the circle of influence and support. Co-creating the home literacy environment really does involve every adult and child who has a hand in that space.
Findings indicate that families often adopt Book Babies recommendations not as external directives, but as part of their own cultural models, increasing the likelihood that literacy practices will be integrated into daily life (Barak & Gillanders, 2022).
Three Practical Recommendations from Book Babies
1. Validate Familial Practices
Every family has a home culture rich with learning. Coaches help parents identify and celebrate these practices. For example, many caregivers naturally sing lullabies with hand motions, which is a practice that strengthens motor development and hand-eye coordination. Sharing knowledge about the impact of these practices can make parents feel seen and empowered.
2. Lead with Curiosity
Rather than assuming what a family needs or does at home, coaches ask open-ended questions and listen deeply. Parents are treated as the primary experts on their children; this mindset shifts the power dynamic and honors parents’ cultural knowledge.
3. Celebrate with Families
Joy is a profound learning tool. Providing books that reflect families’ languages, cultures, and interests—and including siblings and adults—turns reading into a shared celebration. Parents in Book Babies consistently report that the whole-family book collections foster connection and spark excitement. Coaches also partner with families to set literacy goals and imagine future possibilities together.
Listening to Families: Stories of Impact
Families describe Book Babies as affirming and collaborative. Parents like Yesenia and Yamzir describe Book Babies as an experience that honors who they are and what they value. Coaches walk alongside families, not ahead of them—supporting parents as they co-create a home literacy environment rooted in culture, love, and legacy.
La Cultura Cura — Culture Heals
Culturally responsive engagement is not an optional “add-on” to early literacy work; it is essential to its success. Recognizing cultural strengths, building confianza, and uplifting family expertise inspire learning environments where children thrive, and families feel empowered.
When literacy is grounded in culture, it becomes more than a set of skills: it is a birthright carried across generations. By rooting a love of literacy in the beauty of our culture, Book Harvest nurtures not only reading but also identity, belonging, and healing.
¹ From The Early Home Environment of Latino Children: A Research Synthesis: “Our review of the research suggests that the evidence on how the early home experiences of Latino children help them grow and develop is limited in scope and breadth and is largely not based on theoretically driven research. It is striking that most of this research has focused more on the adversities that Latino families face, rather than on their strengths, that it confounds ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES), and that it does not consider the heterogeneity of Latinos in the United States.” (2019)
Sources
Barak, B., & Gillanders, C. (2022). In their own words: Parents’ voices about a book-provision program. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy.
Cabrera, N. J., & Hennigar, A. (2019). The Early Home Environment of Latino Children: A Research Synthesis. National Research Center on Hispanic Children and Families.
Instituto Familiar de la Raza (2000). La Cultura Cura Youth Program: Vision Statement.