About Us

Del Alma Publications is a Latina-owned, independent book publisher based in South Texas. We pride ourselves in offering original bilingual and Spanish works written by US based Hispanic / Latino authors.

Currently, there is a dire need for more culturally relevant material for children, young adults, and educators of bilingual, bicultural, educational settings. We cater to the interests of U.S. born Hispanic / Latino children and our aim is to provide them with “mirror” books that accurately reflect their culture. It is our intent that these may also serve as teaching resource materials for bilingual/dual language education programs.

Biliteracy, the ability to read and write in two languages, is a challenge for U.S. Hispanics because for so many years, the emphasis has been on an all-English curriculum. Thus, we now face a great shortage of home-grown bilingual education teachers. The cycle has been perpetuated over multiple generations. Only in recent years, has society begun to see the multiple cognitive benefits of bilingualism and biliteracy. We aim to do our part and ameliorate this dilemma by being a resource for this generation of bilingual education teachers and parents raising bilingual children.

We hail from the fast growing Rio Grande Valley in the South Texas border area, where we have lived in a truly bilingual, bicultural world, where code switching is a way of life for us. Our books have a regional cultural focus and are written in the Spanish that is spoken in the border area and to a large extent the rest of the American Southwest. We feel the world needs to know more about the border and its people in order to dispel negative misconceptions and stereotypes.

Our Mission:

With an ever increasing Hispanic enrollment in the United States classrooms, Del Alma Publications, LLC believes that meeting the biliteracy challenges of the Hispanic learner has become imperative now more than ever. Therefore, it commits to producing quality, culturally relevant books and teaching materials in order to bridge the Hispanic achievement gap.

Our Objectives:

To provide culturally relevant English-Spanish bilingual children’s books
To provide English-as-a-Second Language materials
To provide Spanish and English readers for the young adult
To provide teaching resource materials for bilingual/dual language education teachers

Our Founder

Dr. María Alma González Pérez

With over 40 years of educational experience as both a teacher in the public schools and as a university professor, Dr. Pérez has dedicated her life to helping students.

She identified the need for more culturally relevant and bilingual books over 20 years when as a professor she observed teachers translating English books simultaneously in their bilingual classes. Many teachers back then, still did not know about or were not using bilingual and Spanish books in their classrooms. She then began purchasing all the bilingual books she could find and started a small library for her students to check out. She saw how the demand for these books was so needed in the bilingual education classes, and how there were not nearly enough books available.

After her retirement from the University, she decided to start a publishing company to produce more of these bilingual books and to promote more Hispanic authors and illustrators.

To learn more about Dr. Pérez, please visit her author website.