translator: Juan Felipe Herrera
illustrator: Elly Simmons
Children’s Book Press / Lee & Low, 1995
kindergarten-up
Mexican American
Calling the Doves is a prime example of two of the qualities that
draw me to Juan Felipe Herrera’s work again and again: the richness of his
poetic language and his fluent writing in both Spanish and English. While some
of Herrera’s books (like Featherless / Desplumado and Super Cilantro
Girl / La superniña de cilantro) embrace broad social-justice themes like US
immigration policy and the experiences of children with disabilities in school,
Calling the Doves is profoundly personal. It describes Herrera’s
childhood with his migrant farm worker parents in a way that leaves me in awe
of its richness. In metaphor and simile, he paints the California mountains and
valleys in gorgeous colors; his relationship with the land is deeply personal.
The sky is his blue spoon, the “wavy clay of the land” is his plate. His dirt
patio is “a sand-colored theater where I learned to sing.” The tarp that makes
the family tent is a “giant tortilla dipped in green tomato sauce.”
Even more powerful than his
description of the land that he grew up in is the way he evokes his parents and
their family life. When his father builds them a one-room house on top of an
abandoned car, he tells us the house was “a short loaf of bread on wheels.
Inside it was a warm cave of conversations. Mexican songs and auctions blared
from a box radio on the wall.” The wonderful artwork on this page makes you
feel like you are nestled in that cave listening to the music and family
chatter. His mother and his father are both full of wonder—his father knows
birdcalls that bring the doves to him, and his mother recites poetry over
dinner and heals injured sparrows and the neighborhood children.
In contrast to books that
paint migrant workers as both materially and culturally impoverished (and
sometimes evenly morally bereft), Calling the Doves never sees the
people and lands of the author’s childhood as “less than.” There is a sense of
both excitement and loss when, at the end of the book, the family decides to
settle in one place so that Juanito can go to school. Even as Juanito envisions
a new life for himself, he imagines it as part of his parents’ legacy: “As the
cities came into view, I knew one day I would follow my own road. I would let
my voice fly the way my mother recited poems, the way my father called the
doves.”
Simmons’ artwork is
beautiful; she uses colored pencils, casein, and acrylic paints on rag paper to
render the soft, vibrant, colorful land of Herrera’s childhood. The characters
have expressive, human faces that make them compelling and relatable. These are
bold, often whimsical paintings that would look just as stunning hanging on a
wall as they do in the pages of a children’s book. I would certainly love to
have one in my own living room!
Calling the Doves reads well in both Spanish and English,
something I have come to think of as one of the hallmarks of Herrera’s work.
There are ways in which the languages interweave. In Spanish, there is the
distinct mark of English in terms like “troca del Army” (Army truck) and
“trailas” (trailers), which helps set the book in California. Spanish words,
like carpa, plantillas, campesinos, and fiesta, also work their
way into the English text. There are a few awkward moments, especially when it
comes to the long translations of food names. For instance, “huevos de papas
o huevos revueltos” becomes
“huevos revueltos—scrambled
eggs or fried eggs with potatoes.” But ultimately I appreciate that the Spanish
and English versions seem interdependent. For anyone growing up speaking
Spanish in California, the two languages are interwoven, and this is true in
Herrera’s writing as well.
Calling the Doves could be read to children as young as
Kindergarten, but could also be used with much older children to study metaphor
and simile. The best part is that, if your students are curious about what
happens to Juanito once he goes to school, you can pick up Upside Down Boy /
El niño de cabeza—an
equally beautiful sequel. Calling the Doves / El canto de las palomas is
highly recommended.
—Grace Cornell Gonzales
(published 2/28/14)
(published 2/28/14)
*Highly recommended for all home, classroom and library collections.
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