All the Stars Denied

author: Guadalupe García McCall

Tu Books / Lee & Low, 2018 

grades 7-up

Mexican

Beginning in 1930, in the throes of the Great Depression, the U.S. government “repatriated” more than one million Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Sixty percent of them were U.S. citizens—children born in the United States to one or both parents who were Mexican nationals, spouses of Mexican nationals, and people whose papers were not available at the time they were detained and dropped on the other side of the border. For these people—and others who, like today’s Dreamers, had come to the United States as young children—Mexico was an unknown country. Many did not speak Spanish or have family members in Mexico who could take them in. The arrival of a million refugees strained Mexico’s capacity to take care of them, as that country suffered as well from the Depression and churches were quickly overwhelmed.

Guadalupe García McCall’s sequel to her award-winning Shame the Stars (Tu Books / Lee & Low, 2016) takes place one generation later, when Joaquin and Dulceña are parents of 15-year-old Estrella and toddler Luis, known as Wicho. Their large ranch, Las Moras, has been in the family for generations, but Estrella’s less privileged schoolmates are disappearing one by one. After she and her remaining friends in the town’s segregated school are arrested for demonstrating against discrimination and deportation—and she and her father speak up at a town council meeting—unknown persons set her family’s house on fire and kidnap them. Estrella, her mother, and Wicho are driven across Texas to the border crossing in El Paso; they have no idea where Joaquin has been taken. They spend a week in a crowded corral in the rain and cold, deprived of food and medicine, before shipped by train to Mexico City, where they must begin a new life, find Joaquin and other missing family members (including Dulceña’s parents, the publishers of a newspaper), and try to make their way back home as Wicho’s health deteriorates.

All the Stars Denied is a gripping adventure story of a family confronting catastrophe and ruin. At the beginning, Estrella is the spoiled daughter of a wealthy family, complaining about having to help take care of her equally overindulged brother. Like her parents, she believes her wealth—the extended family owns a large amount of land, as well as a newspaper and a bookstore, and employs a dozen farm workers and domestic servants—will insulate her from the spreading racism and violence. Yet the family’s wealth only means there’s more for those in power to take from them. McCall shows that at the root of racism lies the effort by those in power to take what others have, whether it be jobs, money, or property. Estrella and her family are helpless before the power of the white-controlled State; all they can do is survive in conditions in which they thought they would never have to live.

As the current administration separates families at the border and threatens to strip permanent residencies and birthright citizenships at will—confiscating homes and property in the process—it’s important for readers to understand that the United States has committed similar atrocities in the past. By choosing a seemingly privileged protagonist, McCall shows that no one is safe, and an attack on one group is an attack on all of us.

For more information about this little-known chapter of history, read Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s by Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez. Rodríguez, who died in 2013 at the age of 87, lost his father in the repatriation.

Strong pacing and McCall’s thoughtful, brave, and necessary portrayal of the repatriation.

*Highly recommended for all home, classroom and library collections.

—Lyn Miller-Lachmann

(published 12/5/18)

An earlier version of this review first appeared in The Pirate Tree (thepiratetree.com). We thank The Pirate Tree for permission.

They Call Me Güero: A Border Kid’s Poems

author: David Bowles  

Cinco Puntos Press, 2018

grades 5-up

Mexican American

Memories from the author’s own childhood experiences—as well as those of his son, his friends, and the young men he worked with as a middle-school teacher—inform this too-slim book of poetry from the perspective of a 12-year-old Chicano border kid entering the seventh grade. Here, our super-smart protagonist and poet clearly knows who he is and what he comes from. And he’s learning what he’s been given to do. 

Like his idol, the great Mexican boxer, Saul “Canelo” Álvarez, the boy whom everyone calls “Güero” is cinnamon-toned, too. Observant readers looking back to Zeke Peña’s digitally rendered cover art will notice that, as Güero and his dog run through the chaparral, the boy’s freckles and hair—along with the Huehuehcoyotl (“Feathered Coyote”) Nahual mask he wears—perfectly match the cinnamon-colored sand. The boy belongs to the land. He is “puro mexicano.”

As a child of dual cultures who has learned to float between different groups, Güero uses variations of language to express himself. He communicates in Spanish and English with his elder relatives (especially with his bisabuela, who enjoys instructing him traditionally through dichos), mostly English with his teachers and friends (“los Bobbys”), Spanish first with new arrivals, and an effortless combination of English, Spanish, Espanglish and code-switching with everyone else, including family and readers. It’s especially refreshing that there is no italicization of anything: the languages and word-images blend with an authenticity rarely seen in middle-grade stories. And it’s appropriate that the glossary does not distinguish between language types, which readers will be able to infer from context. 

In school, Güero’s woke English teacher, Mrs. Wong, keeps a long-eared white rabbit in her room and talks about the Moon Rabbit in Korea and Mexico, gifts her class Aztec and Mayan and Chinese and Korean legends, and plants seeds in the lives of her young charges. It is from her that Güero comes to know that “poetry is the clearest lens for viewing the world.” 

Güero’s own poetic styles include free verse, and rhymed and unrhymed couplets, tercets, quatrains and quintets; as well as sonnets, haiku, senru, and rap. In authentic sneak-dissing (or “come-and-get-me”) rap, for instance, Güero stands his ground by lobbing taunts back at classroom bullies like Snake Barrero (who has just slammed him into a locker and called him “güero cacahuatero” and “gringo nerd”):

Yo, bullies: lero, lero

I’m the mero Güero

a real cacahuatero,

peanuts and chile

all up in this cuero,

this piel, this skin—

it’s white, that’s true

but I’m just as Mexican

as you and you and you.

If there’s anything that Güero can’t handle, he can rely on his new fregona girlfriend, Johanna, to jump in. She’s sort-of a cross between the beautiful, stereotype-busting Mexican movie queen, María Félix; and the strong, courageous Mexican artist, Frida Khalo. Among her other talents, she uses judo skills to throw down bullies, crawls under cars to change the oil, and easily swaps out blown tires. And she “knows the perfect chile for all snacks.” 

Among those relatives Güero remembers are his abuela Mimi, who hardly ever raised her voice. Rather, she told stories, creepy tales with supernatural threats “to punish little devils” who steal cookies off someone’s plate. Such as La Mano Pachona, a “hairy claw that crawls through the night,” a long-ago Mayan wizard who, to this day, continues to wreak revenge on the Inquisition and “naughty boys with Spanish blood.”

He also tells of his Uncle Joe, the family chronicler, whose teacher wouldn’t let him call himself José and would smack him for speaking Spanish. And the forced lies of history:

When I was a chavalito,…didn’t nobody teach us

about our gente, about the Revolución.

They made the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

sound like a blow struck for democracy

instead of the violent land-grab it was!

This should be México, m’ijo. The border?

It crossed right over us.

And Gúero speaks of the dangerous lives of refugees, the hunger and fears of deportation. When he tutors a “quiet and shy” newcomer, the boy, suddenly triggered by a few English words in a math problem—“a family takes a train”—runs from the room. Güero finds him crying in a small alcove and asks “¿Qué te pasa?”

His story comes streaming out—

threats against the family,

abandoning Honduras,

risking life and limb on la Bestia,

the black train that rattles

through Mexico bottom to top.

Hopeful and dreaming of new lives,

refugees from all over cling

to that dangerous metal.

One terrible day, its wheels

sliced off his brother’s leg.

“We lost everything

but each other

to coyotes and cops

and bandits,” he says.

“Now we live in a tejabán

in a colonia. No water,

no light. But safe.

Except when I dream.”

They Call Me Güero is as far from cultural tourism as one can get. Rather, Bowles has taken to heart the advice of his Uncle Joe, who told him this: “Represent us, m’ijo, all the ones they kept down. You are us. We are you.” Indeed, his evocative story-poems are filled with family and culture and memories and sadness and humor and everyday experiences and playful language and hard history lessons, all told in the voice of a Tex-Mex almost-teen the author knows well. Middle-grade readers (especially, but not limited to, border kids) will easily relate to this young person, who easily relates to them. 

*Highly recommended for all home, classroom and library collections.

—Beverly Slapin

(published 12/2/18)

Muchísimas gracias a mi amiga y colega, Judy Zalazar Drummond; and to my young associate, Juan Camilo Prado, for his patient explanation and examples of sneak-dissing. (Addendum to post, 12/7/18: Juan also informed me that there are other, similar forms of rap: "throwing shade" and "the dozens," a series of insults played before a gathering of spectators.)