Napí // Napí Goes to the Mountain // Napí funda un pueblo / Napí Makes a Village

author: Antonio Ramírez

illustrator: Domi 

Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press, 2004 

preschool-up 

Mazateca

At home on the bank of a river in Oaxaca, Napí loves to dream. She says she is poor, but that is belied by the richness of her land, her culture, and the community of which she is a valued part. In the shade of a pachota (ceiba) tree “that is so big, it protects our whole village,” Napí sits with her family; her naa (mother) braids her hair and her grandfather tells the old stories. In Napí’s world everything is alive, everything has volition and beauty; the afternoons dress themselves in greens, oranges and violets, and at night,  “the trees on the riverbank slowly bloom with herons.” 

With her umbilical cord buried in the roots of her beloved pachota, this Mazateca child is tied to the land in a very real way, and when she sleeps, the pachota brings her dreams of becoming a heron, flying along the river. Domi’s gorgeous acrylic paintings, on a rich palette of jewel-like tones, complement this quiet little story of an Indian child secure and at home in the loving arms of her family and her world. Also available in Spanish. Highly recommended.

author: Antonio Ramírez

illustrator: Domi 

Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press, 2006 

preschool-up 

Mazateca

One evening, Napí’s namí (father) does not come home from working in the field, and his worried friends fear he might have been taken away. A nightlong search in the mountains yields nothing, so the next morning Napí and her little brother skip school and go to search for him. Upriver and in the jungle, they find themselves transformed into deer and are guided by turtles, storks, a coral snake, a bat, a mouse, and an armadillo mama, who tells them, “The family is finally together again.” Accompanied by the animals, who are “like brothers and sisters, children of the same mother, the Earth,” the children race home to a joyful reunification. “It was so good to see him,” Napí says, “that I forgot to worry about where he had been.” Again, Domi’s amazing paintings, her bold colors this time surrounded by large areas of brown wash, are perfect.

Had Napí’s father been taken by Chicón, the Lord of the Earth, or by el patrón and his thugs? We don’t know. As in Ramirez’ and Domi’s previous story, the impoverishment and terror of being Indian in Mexico (and in much of Latin America) is only hinted at, but it’s there. For many Indigenous children in the south, the threat of having your parents “disappeared” is a daily reality, and these stories, while not solely “about” this terrible situation, certainly place it in its political and social context. Also available in Spanish, Napí va a la montaña. Highly recommended.

author: Antonio Ramírez

illustrator: Domi 

Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press, 2010 

preschool-up 

Mazateca

This third story in the Napí series is bilingual and based on Domi’s own life. Forced out of their ancestral homeland, San Pedro Ixcatlán, by the government, some 75 Mazateca families work together to build a new home. Here, Napí witnesses the “giving birth to Nuevo Ixcatlán, and that meant we had to make sacrifices.” The little girl fully understands the teachings of her elders and why her family decides to stay in this new, inhospitable land—“For us Indians, the best thing to do is to resist, to stay alive and to stay together.”

Domi’s bright, bold paintings of the lush jungle and Napí’s dreams are complemented by the browns and grays of portions of the land that the people have had to clear-cut for farming.

Told in matter-of-fact language that will resonate with young children, Napí funda un pueblo / Napí Makes a Village, without polemic, tells the story of what Indigenous peoples all over the world continue to face at the hands of rapacious and powerful governments. Highly recommended.

Ramírez and Domi continue to work for Indigenous rights, especially with the Zapatista movement in Chiapas through their Colectivo Callejero, the “streetwise collective,” an organization they helped to found.

—Beverly Slapin

(published 10/17/15)

Questions & Swords: Folktales of the Zapatista Revolution

author: Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos

illustrators: Domitila Dominguez and Antonio Ramírez

essayists: Simon Ortiz and Elena Poniatowska

Cinco Puntos Press, 2001

grades 5-up 

Maya

On the back of this book's striking cover appears a little tag: “The sequel to the infamous STORY OF COLORS.” And that's what it is, plus more. “Infamous” because The Story of Colors, Marcos’s previous book, encountered a blatant attempt at censorship—by the National Endowment for the Arts—before it was even published. The attempt failed, and the publicity guaranteed that book an extra print run.

Like that book, Questions & Swords is illustrated by “Domi” (Domitila Dominguez) who again gives us a stunning range of colors, moods, and imagination. The text is a more complex, even elusive creature than the first Marcos volume, with several voices to be heard and ambiguities to ponder.

“The Story of Questions,” which is bilingual, brings us old Antonio again with all the same wisdom, charm and humor we have a right to expect from his role in the previous book. But this time his words to Marcos defy even “el Sup” in a conversation about who Zapata was. To answer that question, Old Antonio tells the story of two gods who were opposites but really one, and struggled to resolve their differences with many questions about how to walk together, which path to choose. He draws out a profound message:

[Q]uestions are for walking, not just standing still and doing nothing…[W]hen true men and women want to walk, they ask questions. When they want to arrive, they take leave. And when they want to leave, they say hello. They are never still….[T]o know and to walk, you first have to ask.

When Marcos asks how this defines Zapata, old Antonio replies that Zapata speaks of two Zapatas who are really one and both were the same road for all true men and women to follow. A reader can be left wondering if perhaps this whole story is about leadership, the need for flexibility and openness. Or perhaps it is a lesson in dialectics? Or both? What matters is that we have been captivated by vision with deep Indigenous roots.

The other major piece in the book, “The Story of the Sword, the Tree, the Stone & the Water,” also stars Old Antonio. It is an “ethical metaphor,” as author Elena Poniatowska says in her short essay following that story. When those four different sources of strength go into battle, water triumphs in the end. Similarly, as Marcos observes, the Mexican government's February 1995 offensive against the Zapatistas made a lot of noise but like the sword, ended up rusting in the water and growing old. The water follows its own path and never stops.

The book then offers a short piece by Acoma poet and essayist Simon Ortiz, “Haah-ah, mah-eemah / Yes, it’s the very truth,” in which he speaks about the effects on Indigenous peoples in the United States when word spread of the 1994 Zapatista rebellion: “[T]he news from the South was good news!” All over the Western Hemisphere, he says, Native people have had to survive against 500 years of deadly foreign domination but they have maintained a sense of continual cultural identity that is the essence of Existence. The signal from Chiapas is clear and Simon Ortiz dares to dream, as he says, of what might happen: “What if Indians throughout the Americas rose in united force to seek the return of their land, culture, and community? Think of it!”

Mexican author and journalist Elena Poniatowska closes the book with the eloquence that has made her work respected and loved for decades. “Can a book explode like a bomb?” she asks. “Can it change minds? Should a government feel threatened?” The answer could not be clearer.

The idea of books having such power sustains El Colectivo Callejero (The Street Collective), dedicated to the expression of left political thought through art in Mexico, whose main founders are Antonio Ramírez and Domi. “Old Antonio,” indeed, we might suspect. And perhaps it is no accident that Domi, whose work makes this new book so vivid, so strong, bears the same first name as Domitila Barrios de Chungara of Bolivia. A tin miner's wife representing the “housewives' committee,” she electrified the UN Tribunal on Women in 1975 in Mexico with her cry of “Let me speak!” to the mostly middle-class women present. In Questions & Swords, Domi's art is also an unforgettable outcry. Highly recommended.

—Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez

(published 4/19/13)

This review first appeared in A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children, edited by Doris Seale and Beverly Slapin (AltaMira Press, 2005). We thank the publisher for permission.