ABOUT
THE BILINGUAL SPARK

Most Spanish curriculum wasn't built for your students. This one was.

When I came to the United States at 18, I began to see how often culture is taught as a checklist rather than a lived experience.

After more than 25 years teaching Spanish, I created The Bilingual Spark to help learners experience language through curiosity, culture, and connection — not translation or surface-level activities.

This work is grounded in real classrooms and real communities, designed to help students live the language, not just learn it.

Por qué escribo estos libros

Mexico is not chapter four.

It is not a unit. It is not a month. It is not a recipe card or a flag on a bulletin board.

Mexico is a living civilization with roots that go deeper than most people in this country have ever been invited to explore. A civilization that gave the world maize, chocolate, vanilla, chile, avocado, the tianguis, the milpa, and a culinary tradition so complex and layered that UNESCO declared it a cultural heritage of humanity. A civilization whose fingerprints are on the food, the language, and the daily life of tens of millions of people who have no idea.

I write these books because 10.9 million U.S. residents were born in Mexico. Because Mexican-Americans are the largest immigrant group in the United States, nearly one in four of all foreign-born residents. Because their children sit in classrooms across this country and open textbooks that mention their heritage in passing, if at all, and then move on.

I write for those students. The ones who carry a last name they cannot explain, who speak Spanish at home but feel like guests in both languages, who have grandmothers who make ponche every December and have no idea that the tejocote floating in that pot has been in Mexican markets for thousands of years.

I write to connect heritage learners to a world they belong to but have not yet been given the chance to fully discover.

I also write for every student who did not grow up Mexican. Because the story of Mexico belongs to all of us. Because each Latin American country, each Indigenous culture, each community that crossed a border or survived a conquest or kept planting the same seeds through impossible circumstances, each one deserves to be understood from the inside out. From what makes it who it is.

Being Mexican is not a race. It is an identity. It has roots that go all the way down. Through the tianguis, through the milpa, through the nixtamal, through the cacao, through the words we still speak without knowing they are Náhuatl.

I am giving these books to the world because my culture has given the world so much, and most of the world does not know it yet. I want to season the learning environment in the United States with material that transcends vocabulary lists and moves toward something more honest: the knowledge of who we are and where we come from.

That is worth teaching.

That is worth writing.

That is worth carrying.

Edgar Serrano, M.A. The Bilingual Spark

Certifications

Senior Lecturer at University of Mississippi

JNCL Board Member

NNELL President

MFLA Executive Director

2018 AATSP National Spanish Teacher of the Year

Our Mission

To create meaningful, bilingual learning experiences that feel like home — combining culture, storytelling, and joy to help children grow with language and pride.

Our Vision

A world where every child can explore language with wonder, connect through culture, and see themselves in the stories they learn.