Sculpted Stones / Piedras Labradas

author: Victor Montejo

translator: Victor Perera

Curbstone Press, 1995

grades 7-up 

Maya

If our ancestors came to life

they’d surely give us, their descendants

thirteen lashes for being

sleepwalkers and conformists.

They always advised us

to struggle, build and forge ahead

so that no one’s left behind,

and no one’s forgotten by his brothers.

Yet today we Maya

remain hushed up

and have even forgotten the message

that might inspire us to break the silence.

That’s why if our ancestors came back to life

they’d give us thirteen lashes

to cure the amnesia of centuries

which has made us forget our names.

Victor Montejo is a poet, a human rights activist and an anthropologist, studying in depth his own people. After the massacre of his village in 1981, in which Guatemalan soldiers killed his brother, Montejo’s name appeared on a death squad list and he was forced to flee to the US. Since then, his life’s work has been to make known, in a variety of ways, the continuing human rights violations confronting the Mayan peoples.

After Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village, after The Bird Who Cleans the World and Other Mayan Fables, after a spectacular children’s version of the Mayan sacred book, the Popul Vuh, comes this book of poetry, Sculpted Stones. Here, in Spanish and English, Montejo’s poems express the resilience of the Mayan peoples, expose the Guatemalan army’s attempt to destroy the Indigenous population, and give lie to textbook anthrobabble about “history” and “culture.”

In the first poem, “Interrogation by the Ancestors,” Montejo asks,

Just think:

what can we say

to the ancients

when they return

with thunder and lightning

and ask about the fire

they left with us

in the cone of the great volcano?

And for the poor, betrayed, sad, humiliated, plundered, frightened people, there is this advice (beginning, of course, with an anthropological discourse):

Among the Maya

to cure a fright

you put a fresh-laid egg

in the armpit

of the frightened person

and in that way

the self-worth and health

that the phantom has stolen

will return to the afflicted.

But, how can we cure

the pain and fear

built up over the many centuries

of plunder and negation

of our Mayan identity?

Someone said

the egg is a great idea,

but in our day it’s better

to confront

and do battle

with those causing the fright,

then endure the centuries

warming turkey eggs

in your armpits.

This is really good advice. Sculpted Stones is testament to a people’s tenacious determination to survive in the face of centuries of colonization. Highly recommended.

—Beverly Slapin

(published 9/22/14)

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.

Gringolandia

(Note: This is an updated version of the review, which corrects the location of the swimming pool depicted on the cover of Gringolandia.)

author: Lyn Miller-Lachmann

Curbstone Press, 2009

grades 7-up 

Chilean, Chilean American

During the years of the US-installed and –supported Chilean military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean secret police (DINA) operated clandestine prisons in which they tortured or executed thousands of people. Villa Grimaldi—which the torturers referred to as “el Palacio de la Risa” (the “Palace of Laughter”)—was one of four of these torture centers on the outskirts of Santiago. From mid-1974 to mid-1978, the DINA killed or disappeared 236 of the 4,500 prisoners held there.

Sometime towards the end of the Pinochet regime, the torture centers were all but razed, probably as an attempt to erase from public consciousness what happened there. In 1978, Villa Grimaldi was sold to a developer and, after a public campaign was launched in the name of human rights and historical memory, the infamous torture center was transformed into the Villa Grimaldi Corporación Parque por la Paz, a memorial of the lives taken there.

Part of what is left of “El Palacio de la Risa” is a nondescript swimming pool that had been used in the tortures. Now, with discolored green tiles covering the bottom, it is fenced off for both citizens and tourists to view. A photograph of this swimming pool—with a dove flying out of it—is the cover of Lyn Miller-Lachmann’s amazing young adult novel, Gringolandia.

Having Chilean friends who were tortured in those years—as do I—Lyn told me that she started working on Gringolandia in 2004, after the revelations of the tortures committed by military police personnel of the US Army and other US agencies conducted at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Then, she said, as during the Pinochet dictatorship, people were generally shrugging off torture as an aberration or justifying it as a way of obtaining information. Meanwhile, FOX media, in its award-winning drama series “24,” helped create the kind of division and suspicion to convince people to “follow the leader” rather than protest.

Meanwhile, the stories of the Chilean people—victims, survivors, and disappeared—were not being told and, given the responsibility of our government for installing and supporting the dictatorship that tortured, murdered or disappeared some 35,000 people, Lyn told me, she set out to create a young adult novel that “was real, honest and truthful” to tell those stories.

Much of Gringolandia is narrated by Daniel Aguilar, an immigrant teenager living with his mother and younger sister in Madison, Wisconsin. Part One, entitled “Then,” is told in third person; detailing Daniel’s beating and the horrific arrest and torture of his father, Marcelo, an underground journalist and revolutionary, by the Chilean secret police.

Someone grabbed Daniel by the hair and jerked his head back. He looked up into the covered face of the tall one. The boss. The man’s eyes were black and terrifying in the shadow, and his mouth, a little round hole cut out of the mask, moved like the mouth of a robot.

“Boy, you watch this,” he snarled. “This is what happens to communists.”

The helmeted soldiers left. The tall man crouched and ground his knee into Daniel’s shoulder blades. Rough hands in his hair twisted his head back. The other three masked men pounced on Daniel’s father, aiming blows at his head and body. His glasses flew off and were crushed beneath a black boot. He fell to his knees. Blood ran down his face into his beard.

Daniel closed his eyes and tried to shut out the sound of his father coughing and choking, horrible gasps. They’re beating the life out of Papá. Someone…make them stop. When Daniel opened his eyes again, his father was on hands and knees. A soldier’s boot struck the side of his head. He flopped onto his back and lay motionless.

“Let’s get him out of here.”

Part Two, “Now,” begins almost six years later. While Papá remains imprisoned in Chile, Daniel, his mother and younger sister have fled to Madison, Wisconsin. Mamá works with the Latin America Solidarity Committee, and Daniel, now 17, has carved out his own niche: a junior in high school, he plays lead guitar in a rock band and is dating a minister’s daughter. But Daniel is also traumatized and silenced; he keeps his head low and doesn’t call attention to himself. “Here, nobody talks about it,” he says, “at least not outside social studies class. And when they do it in class, I make my mind go somewhere else.”

When he drives to the airport to pick up his newly-released father, Daniel finds Papá damaged in body and spirit: partially paralyzed, Marcelo is a self-destructive alcoholic who has nightmares, lashes out at his family and can’t stand to be touched—and is bitter at having been exiled to the place he calls “Gringolandia.” It would appear that the dictatorship has succeeded in silencing both Daniel and Marcelo.

In Parts Three and Four, we meet Daniel’s girlfriend, Courtney—“La Gringa”—a well meaning but naïve, self-centered young woman who passionately wants to be part of something she doesn’t understand—and unwittingly comes close to sabotaging the survival of both the family here and the underground movement in Chile.

Although the dictatorship succeeds in breaking up Daniel’s parents’ marriage, it doesn’t succeed in silencing Marcelo—and it leaves Daniel with an important decision to make: Should he remain in the relative safety of family and friends in Madison, or risk torture and death by joining his father in combating a brutal dictatorship in Chile? What Daniel decides will have teen readers thinking deeply and making connections between the microcosm of their own families and the macrocosm of the world outside.

In Part Five, “A Bird Named Pablo: A Metaphor,” the dictatorship has been defeated by, of all things, a plebiscite, and Marcelo, back in Chile, is healing from his wounds—physically and spiritually. Here, he has written an incomparably beautiful story about a conure (a protected species in Chile)—tortured by a torturer—whom Marcelo has rescued and rehabilitated—and who builds a family of his own. A metaphor that’s too close to home to be a metaphor.

Lyn Miller-Lachmann’s book is complex and multilayered and beautifully written. It takes twists and turns and shifting perspectives, but the overarching theme is Daniel’s struggle with guilt over his father’s arrest, and his struggle to reconnect with a person who is substantially different than the father he knew and loved. “Papa’s words race through my mind,” he says.

I want to think of him as a hero and me as the son of someone who did great things. Like investigating secret prisons and bearing witness to what went on there. But there’s a huge empty space in my chest when I think of all the time we missed together. Five years, three months, and sixteen days, to be exact. And when I walk out of the studio, my fists are again clenched, and my neck and shoulder ache, as I think of how he put us in danger, ordered us out of the country—and still wants to go back there.

The story of how one small family survives a cruel and sadistic regime is a gift to all of the survivors of dictatorships, those who have become permanent residents of the US and those who have repatriated. Without polemic, without didacticism, Lyn Miller-Lachmann has created a disturbing, thought provoking novel that succeeds in being “real, honest and truthful.” Gringolandia is highly recommended.

—Beverly Slapin
(published 7/15/13)

Note: A number of excellent videos exist about Salvador Allende, the 1973 coup, the Pinochet dictatorship, and the quest for justice. They include: the three-part The Battle of Chile, directed by Patricio Guzmán (1975, 1977, 1979); Chile: Obstinate Memory, directed by Patricio Guzmán (1997); The Pinochet Case, directed by Patricio Guzmán (2001); A Promise to the Dead, directed by Peter Raymont (2007); The Judge and the General, directed by Elizabeth Farnsworth and Patricio Lanfranco (2008); Archeology of Memory: Villa Grimaldi, directed by Quique Cruz and Marilyn Mulford (2009); Salvador Allende, directed by Patricio Guzmán (2011); and  No!, directed by Pablo Larraín (2013).  —BHS

Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village

author: Victor Montejo
translator: Victor Perera
Curbstone Press, 1987
grades 8-up 

Maya

Guatemala’s 36-year civil war (1960-1996), in which leftist rebels fought the army—with huge numbers of Mayan campesinos caught in the crossfire—was one of Latin America’s most violent wars in modern history.[1] From 1982-1983, the military regime headed by Efraín Ríos Montt was responsible for widespread massacres of civilians, as well as torture, rape, and genocidal acts against Guatemala’s Mayan populations. As with many Latin American dictators, Ríos Montt was supported by the US, which trained him[2] and gave him monetary aid in his fight against the rebels. During the period of his presidency, Ríos Montt deliberately targeted the Maya in the countryside, whom the army suspected of sympathizing with and harboring the rebels.

“With the rise to power of Efrain Rios Montt,” Montejo writes, “all remaining human rights were abolished, and the army became the sole arbiter over the lives of Guatemalans.”

This history is the backdrop for a particular massacre that occurred on September 9, 1982. This is Victor Montejo’s Testimony—the testimony of a young schoolmaster, through whose eyes readers will witness the brutality and sadism that the Guatemalan army unleashed in Tzalalá, a remote Mayan village in northwest of Huehuetanango.[3]

In Spanish and English, Montejo dedicates this book “to the memory/ of the many thousand/ Guatemalans/ who were killed or disappeared/ during this decade/ of aggression and struggle./ And even/ if there are attempts/ to blot out their names/ little by little/ I know that wild flowers/ are growing daily/ from their clandestine bones—/ scattered there in the ravines and the mountains.”

Montejo does not hold back, does not mince words. His language is raw, and Montejo is a gifted educator, poet and writer. But in Testimony, he is a witness, perhaps his most important role. After a particularly savage beating, Montejo relates,

I breathed deeply to offset the effects of the beating and tried to keep my legs from collapsing with fatigue. It was now midnight, and my thoughts flew toward my wife and children, who would be alone in our home, worried sick over my absence. My clothes were stiff from the mud and water and stained with blood: they clung heavily to my body, causing my muscles to tense so as to repel the cold that bit at the marrow of my bones….

I followed [the soldier] like a starving and filthy beggar, eager to curl up in some out-of-the-way corner and wrap himself in trash or anything else he can find that will keep the cold from freezing his bowels. I understood then why beggars love their treasure trove of old and ragged things and why they sleep with one eye open to protect them at night, and why they guard them so jealously during the day. Whatever beggars have, beggars love. Those tattered bags full of fruit waste and rotting leftovers were precisely what I craved that night.

I encourage teachers to use Testimony with their eighth-graders, just before they go on to the next stage in their formal education. I encourage them to keep returning to the cover. It’s a photograph of Mayan refugees in Chiapas, Mexico, in November, 1982—one month after the massacre. How many survived? Where are they now? 

There’s no polemic here, just a horrible, graphic description of what happened through the eyes of a young schoolmaster who survived it—and lived to tell about it. Along with Rigoberta Menchu’s autobiography, I, Rigoberta Menchu, Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village is essential reading. Thank you, Victor, for your courage in bringing this shocking event—one of far too many—to the world’s attention. Highly recommended.

—Beverly Slapin
(published 4/7/13)

__________________________________________

[1] More than 200,000 Guatemalans were killed in the civil war.

[2] In 1951, Ríos Montt attended the notorious school for torture called the School of the Americas; and in 1954, the young military officer was part of the CIA-organized and –financed coup against the democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán.

[3] Huehuetenango was also the birthplace of Ríos Montt.

América Is Her Name

author: Luis J. Rodríguez

illustrator: Carlos Vásquez

publisher: Curbstone Press, 1997

grades 3-8 

Mixteca, Mexican

América is the name of a Mixteca child from Oaxaca, living with her family in the Pilsen barrio, an economically stressed and depressed neighborhood in Chicago. Her mother cleans houses, her father works the factories when work is available, and her uncle also works—and drinks. There are “desperate men without jobs standing on street corners…stuck in a gray world where they can’t find their way out.” The child’s school experiences are equally depressing: her dismissive ESL teacher considers her students “difficult” and refers to América as “illegal.”

“How can anyone be illegal?” she thinks. “How can a girl called América not belong in America?” This child has dreams. She dreams of Oaxaca, her home. She dreams that her uncle doesn’t drink. But here, in this strange, hostile land, she is losing her voice.

And then, one day, a poet comes to visit, and everything changes for América. Speaking in Spanish, he encourages the students to write poetry, to talk poetry, to reach inside themselves and bring out their dreams. He tells the class, “When you use words to share feelings with somebody else, you are a poet, and poets belong to the whole world.”

Rodríguez based his story on his experience as a poet-in-residence, working with Spanish-speaking children and their parents in Chicago “on writing from their lives and imaginations.” “It is not enough to prepare our children for the world,” Rodríguez writes, “we also must prepare the world for our children.”

Carlos Vázquez’ vibrant full-color illustrations, which combine elements of folk art with surrealism, are amazing. In almost every picture, there is a little bird perched on América’s shoulder or nearby. When she dreams of home, the animals, the flowers, and a carpet of green are there with her. When she writes with her mother at the kitchen table, lines connect what’s on the paper with what’s in their hearts.

What sets this story apart is that it deals with the harshness and violence of poverty in a way that does not dehumanize people who are poor. Young América is neither hero nor victim; rather, she is simply a child with dignity and courage, a child who is finding her voice.

This title is also available in Spanish, La Llaman América. 

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

—Beverly Slapin
(published 4/5/13)