My Friend / Mi amiga

author: Elisa Amado
illustrator: Alfonso Ruano 

Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press, 2019 

grades 1-4 

Indigenous, Mexican, Guatemalan

What does it mean to be alone and lonely in a strange place? What might it mean to feel safe? To be loved and accepted? To have a friend you can rely on? And what does it mean when that relationship becomes strained and possibly disrupted? 

In this intimate, heart-wrenching second-person narrative, a newly arrived refugee girl relates the story of her tenuous and emotional relationship with a white girl. In a sense, this narrative style invites young readers into the young girl’s life and challenges them to be like her friend. 

On the cover, the young narrator wears a red-and-white striped polo shirt and her dark hair is neatly braided and pulled into traditional Indigenous chongos. She faces a white girl in denim overalls, whose blond hair is casually pulled back into a loose ponytail. In the background are the Brooklyn Bridge and the East River. 

Amado frames this young girl’s story between two versions of a song written in 1915 by José López Alavés, an Indigenous man from Oaxaca, after he had migrated to northern Mexico. The first, in Spanish—entitled “Canción Mixteca—My Father’s Version”—appears on a front end page. The second, in English—entitled “Mixteca Song—My Translation” is on a back end page. Both languages portray the song as a lonely, mournful yearning for home. In a brief note, Amado informs the reader that her translated version is what she thinks her “favorite family song sounds like in English.” 

“For us, in Spanish,” she writes, “it’s exactly how we feel about living so far from the home that we left behind, that we miss.”

Told from her perspective to her white friend, My Friend is a poignant chapter in a young girl’s refugee story. The second-person narration throughout—without identifying the young girl by name or her family’s specific ethnicity, while inclusively incorporating the various heritages and pan-Indigenous images from the southern Mexico-Guatemala region—transports young readers directly into the story and heightens its intimacy. 

Amado hints at the backstory, so readers will learn from the song—and from a few words from the girl’s father—that this family has survived tough times, has limited choices, and, for better or worse, is settling into a community of strangers. And, for this story, that may be enough. There’s no further explanation because none is necessary.

Soon after the narrator and her family arrive in Brooklyn, she forms a fast friendship with a white classmate; the two are always there for each other. “I knew you would be my best friend the day I came to school the first time,” she says. “I know you and you know me. That is why we are best friends forever.” 

But when she invites her new friend over for a special dinner with her family, things appear to go awry. The girl’s best friend does not seem to like the food. Or the loud music, a song “that makes us remember where we were before we came here and what it was like.” Or the shouting and arguing. “That was so weird!” she says, and decides to go home early.

The narrator is bereft; she’s internalizing the horrible thought that her best friend doesn’t like her anymore. Echoing the song, she says she “feels like dying.” This is not hyperbole; it’s her pain, the loss and betrayal that wrap around her.

“I want to go home,” she cries. “I hate it here!” But for this refugee family, as for so many others forced to come here, returning to their homes and communities is not an option. Her family’s loneliness and sorrow are palpable. “We can’t go back,” her father tells her. “We have no choice. Just be glad you are safe…”

That night, she plays the sad song over and over. “I know you and I thought you knew me…. But you don’t know anything about me!…I was so mad at you that I never wanted to see you again.” On her way to school the next morning, she worries. She’s lost so much and now she’s lost her best friend as well. But as she reaches school and sees the girl, she remembers, among other situations, when her best friend challenged the mean kids who were bullying her: “Drop dead! She’s way cooler than you!”

And when her white friend thanks her for dinner and says that she “really had fun,” the two walk in the door together. Best friends.

Ruano’s art, rendered in watercolor on paper, effectively complements this refugee family’s realities, emotions and dreams. In one particular full-bleed double page spread, for instance, while the self-conscious white girl sits on the family’s couch, the young narrator and her father—their exuberance demonstrated by the rainbow colors that pass through them and the Indigenous art that frames them—belt out the song from their homeland and their hearts.

Elisa Amado was born in Guatemala, and it appears that My Friend might be part of her story as well. While the family sings this mournful song of loneliness and despair, the father is enraged at a situation he can’t control—they must stay here. For refugees desperately fleeing to the US—“into the mouth of the shark,” so to speak—this story couldn’t have been published at a better time. 

My Friend will resonate with youngsters who are immigrants, migrants or refugees everywhere. Amado is an amazing translator as well, and I look forward to seeing her Spanish version. Highly recommended. 

—Beverly Slapin

(published 7/11/19)

Muchísimas gracias a mis amigas y colegas, Rachel Byington y Lyn Miller-Lachmann. 

author: Elisa Amado
translator (Spanish): Elena Iribarren
illustrator: Alfonso Ruano 

Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press, 2019 

grades 1-4 

Indigenous, Mexican, Guatemalan

Elisa Amado is a wonderful writer and an excellent translator. Although Elena Iribarren’s Spanish translation here is adequate, it doesn’t reflect the nuances of the story—especially the child narrator’s own voice and her sense of self. 

Central to the story is “Canción Mixteca,” a song of loneliness and despair and wanting desperately to go home. It’s this refugee family’s favorite song, and the child narrator deeply feels the song’s refrain, “quisiera llorar, quisiera morir” (“I would like to cry, I would like to die”).

Most of the problems children have to deal with in middle school include being dissed and not having friends. For newly arrived immigrant or refugee children, their troubles and anxieties may be multiplied. Both the English and Spanish versions deal with this anxiety; however, Amado’s English version appears more realistic than Iribarren’s Spanish, which is stilted and sometimes misleading.

When kids at school mock the young newcomer as “weird,” her friend immediately shuts them down: “Who cares? We’re best friends. Is that a problem?” In the Spanish version, however, her friend’s words appear self-conscious: “A mí no parece rara. Es mi mejor amiga. ¿Cuál es el problema?” (“She’s not weird to me. She’s my best friend. What’s the problem?”) Today’s tweens don’t talk like that—they’re more confrontational when a friend is dissed. Like, “¿Qué les importa?” (“What do you care?”)

After a special dinner that the new child’s refugee family has prepared, her friend laughs and remarks: “That was so weird!” The child is bereft: “I felt like dying.” 

But the reason for her deep hurt in the English version is not reflected in the Spanish. In that version, her friend says, “Sabes que? Nunca he estado en una cena como esta!” which can be interpreted as curiosity about or enthusiasm for the meal rather than disdain (“You know what? I’ve never been to a dinner like this!”). Yet the protagonist is heartbroken, thinking, “Yo me quería morir” (“I wanted to die”), an emotional disconnect resulting from an awkward translation.

The refugee child is miserable. She doesn’t know how she will exist without a best friend. But then she remembers her friend’s confrontation with the kids who had made fun of her clothes: “Drop dead! She’s way cooler than you.” In the Spanish, however, her friend says, “Callate. Ella es míl veces más interesante que tú.” (“Shut up. She’s a thousand times more interesting than you.”) 

While “callate” would be appropriate here—unless you really wanted a person to die, in which case you’d say, “muerate”—the rest doesn’t even come close to a rejoinder to kids who are trying to embarrass your friend. Rather, you’d probably say “¡Callate—Ella es mucho más chida que tú!” (Shut up! She’s way cooler than you!”)

In comparison to the vividness and specifics of Amado’s English version, Iribarren’s Spanish feels flattened and generic. It doesn’t reflect how tweens express themselves; it fails to convey the passion of a child in pain or the validation she feels when her best friend defends her. While My Friend is *highly recommended for all home, library and classroom collections, Mi amiga is not.

—Beverly Slapin

(published 12/16/19)

Muchísimas gracias a mis amigas y colegas María Cárdenas, Amy Costales, y Lyn Miller-Lachmann.

Illustrations copyright © 2019 by Alfonso Ruano. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Groundwood Books (www.groundwoodbooks.com).

Somos como las nubes / We Are Like the Clouds

author: Jorge Tetl Argueta 

translators: Jorge Tetl Argueta and Elisa Amado 

illustrator: Alfonso Ruano

Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press, 2016 

grades 2-up 

Pipíl, Salvadoran

Even before the Monroe Doctrine, which declared that all of the Americas belonged to the US, this country has wreaked havoc through invasion, setting up companies to put native products in the hands of American corporations, and creating and supporting regime change to fit the agenda of big business, all of which have resulted in political and economic destabilization. What ensued is mass unemployment, social chaos, and the terror of government death squads and the murderous narcotraficante gangs. As of now, few holdouts remain—among them, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua. Meanwhile, refugees from the most dangerous of the US “client” countries—such as El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico—have fled by the hundreds of thousands into the US. They are not coming here for a “better life”—they are fleeing to save their lives. And they flee, as a colleague aptly described, “into the mouth of the shark.” 

In Somos como las nubes / We Are Like the Clouds, poet and storyteller Jorge Tetl Argueta—himself a refugee from the 12-year war following the US-sponsored military coup in El Salvador—writes from the perspectives of the frightened children caught up in the horrific  aftermaths of these wars of conquest, understanding only what they see around them, yet still with large hopes and limited choices. Argueta told me that, as a Salvadoran man, he “can’t do anything else but talk about this great injustice; to be the voice of the voiceless children, whose hearts, minds, souls, and spirits have to endure such sadness in their young lives.”

Argueta’s evocative free verse in Spanish and English communicates to young readers the dreams, fears, and hopes of the refugee children who have been forced to leave everything—and sometimes everyone—they know, to get to a temporary place of safety where strangers will decide their fates. Some will be reunited with their parents or other relatives. Many will not. But for now, they are safe.

Accompanied by paid “coyotes” who guide them—the children, carrying only backpacks and jugs of water, sometimes with a parent, most times only with each other—take the perilous journey for hundreds of miles through the desert, cram themselves onto the top of “La Bestia” (the train they call “the beast”), encounter the Border Patrol, and pray to El Santo Toribio, saint of the immigrants, to be shown the way:

Don’t let us fall

into the hands of the migra,

and never into the hands of the traffickers,

or worse, the minutemen.

You who are the good coyote,

protect us, lead us.

Deliver us from all evil. Amen.

Ruano’s acrylic on canvas paintings beautifully show, rather than tell, the children’s emotions. Here is a young child, covering his ears, not wanting to hear the voice of a gangster. Here, in the background, are tiny figures of a family, leaving their neighborhood, in which there is a whistling dog, a dancing cat, and a rooster looking in the mirror. Here are the scary, expressionless, one-eyed, tattooed gangsters, one holding a machete. Here are lots and lots of children, seen from the back, beginning their dangerous trek, some holding the hands of even younger children. Here is a little boy, in the desert, riding on his father’s shoulders. And here are perhaps hundreds of children, piled onto the top of “La Bestia.” Of all of them, only two children in the foreground are looking directly at the reader.

Finally, for these children, there is shelter. A mother tells her child in his dream: “This is not a dream. You are in my arms.” And in Los Angeles—the City of Angels, where the children will stay, for now—there are paletas, fruit popsicles in every color and shape:

Llevo paletas

para cantar

y paletas para volar.

Llevo paletas para bailar

y paletas para soñar.

Llevo paletas

como las nubes.

Somos las nubes.

In the end, “Somos como las nubes”—the simile, becomes “Somos las nubes”—the metaphor. We are the clouds. We will reunite with our families. We will get through this. Nothing and no one can stop us. A strong message of hope for lost, lonely, terrified young children. An important and gorgeous book, Somos como las nubes / We Are Like the Clouds is highly recommended. It’s my hope that Groundwood will donate a copy to every Spanish-speaking child in every refugee center in el norte.

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

—Beverly Slapin

(published 9/10/16; revised 9/11/16)

Tricycle

author: Elisa Amado 

illustrator: Alfonso Ruano

Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press, 2007

grades 2-up 

Mayan, Guatemalan

Margarita lives in a large house in an unnamed Central American country. Her family has plenty to eat and even has servants. On the other side of the hedge is the cardboard shack of the family from whom Margarita’s family buys tortillas. Margarita sometimes plays with Rosario, the girl from the other side of the hedge. One day, though, she leaves her tricycle outside, and Rosario and her brother steal it.

Margarita knows that she has much, and Rosario and her brother have nothing, not even a house strong enough to withstand a volcano. When her mother asks her about the tricycle, and a family friend says the poor are “thieves” and “should be shot,” Margarita lies to protect her less privileged neighbor.

The Guatemalan author offers a gentle, though thought-provoking introduction to issues of social class, poverty, and the responsibilities of those who have more. Margarita is just old enough not to need a tricycle any more, at an age when children become aware of social differences, injustice, and what it means to do the right thing. Families may have different takes on how she handles the theft of her tricycle, but the situation is realistic and universal. Ruano’s signature style, which served well Antonio Skármeta’s award-winning picture book The Composition, complements Amado’s quieter story as well. The illustrations set the book in Guatemala, with the native trees and the traditional weaving and clothing of the Mayan people.

Tricycle is also available in Spanish, El Triciclo. Both are highly recommended.

—Lyn Miller-Lachmann
(published 4/8/13)

Composition

author: Antonio Skármeta

illustrator: Alfonso Ruano

Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press, 2000

grades 3-up 

Chilean

The acclaimed Chilean author’s short story about the dilemma of a young boy in a brutal dictatorship has appeared in various publications in Spanish and English, including A Walk in My World: International Short Stories about Youth (Anne Mazer, ed., Persea Books, 1998). This picture book version has been edited for young readers; both translator and editor have removed explicit language and specific information about the country where the story takes place.

Pedro enjoys playing soccer but is disappointed when his parents can only afford an inexpensive imitation ball. While he is playing with his friends one afternoon, police arrest his friend Daniel’s father for speaking out against the dictatorship. That night Pedro learns that his own parents are against the dictatorship and that they listen to clandestine radio programs at night. The next day, a military official comes to class and announces a mandatory essay contest with an award for the best essay. The topic: “What my family does at night.” Pedro wants to win a real soccer ball, but too many of his friends’ fathers have been arrested lately, and he doesn’t know what to write.

Even without the explicit words, the story has many realistic and earthy details that make it of special interest to boys. While the problems Pedro faces are unfamiliar to most children in the US, the appealing story and well-rendered illustrations make this book an excellent starting point for a discussion of human rights and of the way children have been used in many countries to inform on parents. Because of its origins as an adult/young adult story, this title is also an excellent choice for teenagers and adults who are learning to read in English. Highly recommended.

—Lyn Miller-Lachmann
(published 4/6/13)