OXNARD : Women, Minorities Put on Reading List

Starting next fall, novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez will be sharing shelf space with William Shakespeare at schools in the Oxnard Union High School District.

The district board this week approved a proposal to add 13 books written by women and minorities to its core reading list.

The additions will supplement the district’s original 29-book list, introduced in 1986 in response to state-stipulated curriculum standards, said Assistant Supt. Gary Davis.

All of the authors on the original list are white and all but two are men. Among the titles are Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck and “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway.

Latino, African-American, Asian-American and Native American men and women authored the volumes on the new, expanded list.

Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is on the new list, as are “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison and “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” by Dee Brown.

The new list includes an additional 15 multicultural titles approved last spring. Teachers will be asked to require students each year to read two books from the original list and one of the recently added volumes.

“This is part of an effort to make the curriculum more relevant to the cultures of the students,” Davis said. “It also gives us the chance to make them aware of other cultures.”

About 55% of the students attending the district’s six high schools are Latino, Davis said.