Spoon for Every Bite / Una Cuchara Para Cada Bocado

author: Joe Hayes

translator: Joe Hayes

illustrator: Rebecca Leer

Cinco Puntos Press, 2005

grades 2-up 

Mexican

In my family, we ate tortillas at every dinner meal, fresh off the comal. Sometimes we ate tortillas for breakfast and lunch as well. If there were any tortillas left over, we would reheat them for another meal, but my dad refused to eat them unless they were freshly made.

I was the oldest of eight kids and it was my job to help my mother make the tortillas. She and I cooked them as the family ate; we had to keep getting up to make more and I don’t remember ever being able to sit down for a whole meal. One day I decided that my younger sisters and brothers would only be allowed two tortillas per meal; that way I wouldn’t have to keep getting up. My dad, though, got as many as he wanted, so my idea was short lived.

There are many versions of the old Mexican joke involving tortillas. The one we were told involves an argument between Moctezuma and Cortés, but sometimes it’s between a peasant and a conquistador. Generally, the argument begins with one person saying to the other, “I know someone who eats each bite with a different spoon.” In any case, the underdog wins.

In Hayes’ hyperbolic morality tale, a young couple, so poor that they own only two spoons, asks a wealthy neighbor to be the godfather of their baby. Saving up enough to buy a third spoon, they invite him for dinner. But he mocks their poverty, bragging that he could use a different spoon every day of the year if he wanted to. When the couple tells him that they know someone who uses a new spoon for every bite, their obsessed neighbor buys so many spoons that he goes broke. The couple introduces him to their friends, who scoop up their beans with—tortillas. Having bested extreme arrogance with cultural common sense, the couple plans to sell the mean-spirited neighbor’s discarded spoons, thereby assuring themselves that “they would live the rest of their days in comfort.”

Hayes’ Spanish version reads as well as the English, so that both Spanish-speakers and English-speakers can learn and enjoy the idioms of the other language. Leer’s artwork is rendered in pastels on a palette that reflects the colors of Southwestern flora, fauna, and architecture. I especially like the facial details—the Mexican aristocrat’s out-of-control handlebar mustache and his look of horror when he finds out he’s been had, his servants’ bemused expressions at their boss’s extravagance, the couple’s loving and semi-conspiratorial glances at each other. Perfect.

Sometimes when a joke or a riddle is stretched out into a story containing characters and dialogue, the turns and twists become contrived. Here, my problem is suspending my disbelief that the poor couple doesn’t eat tortillas, because to do so would have given away the punch line. Maybe there are Mexicans who don’t eat beans with tortillas; I haven’t met any.

Nevertheless, the story resonates with me—arrogant rich people getting their comeuppance from poor people just makes me feel warm inside. A Spoon for Every Bite / Una Cuchara Para Cada Bocado is recommended.

—María Cárdenas
(published 3/27/14)

¡El Cucuy! A Bogeyman Cuento in English and Spanish

author: Joe Hayes

translators: Teresa Mlawer, María Cristina López, Sharon Franco, Honorio Robledo

illustrator: Honorio Robledo

Cinco Puntos Press, 2001

grades 3-up 

Mexican

When I was a girl, I used to tell scary stories to my younger brothers and sisters. I made a lot of the stories up, just for the pleasure of scaring them. But it never occurred to me to tell them a Cucuy story because Cucuy was real, out there somewhere.

Our parents would warn us of the Cucuy to frighten us into good behavior when we were misbehaving or about to misbehave: “If you’re bad, the Cucuy will come for you.” The Cucuy was also lurking in the dark, waiting to grab us up, so we would not want to be out alone at night or wander too far away from our parents. The lesson was that it’s dangerous out there—you’d better behave or else!

The power of the Cucuy is that it grabs you and takes you away—it separates you from your family forever. Sometimes, if it’s hungry and your behavior was really bad, it’ll eat you! But my parents never threatened to call the Cucuy to come and get us—and I can’t imagine any Latino parents who love their children doing this. What’s more, our parents never described the Cucuy; it was scarier that way. The Cucuy we feared never had a shape or form, except in our wildest imaginations; since it came from the oral tradition, it was more of a surreal “presence.”

In Hayes’s version, two lazy sisters refuse to help their dutiful youngest sister, who toils all day long, cooking and cleaning for their widowed father. After their father threatens to call the Cucuy on them if they don’t help, the girls, loudly dismissing the idea of Cucuy’s existence, become even more defiant. Their father makes good on his promise; the Cucuy arrives and takes the older girls away to his dark, spider-filled cave, where they have plenty of time to reflect on their bad behavior. A young goat herder rescues them, and the girls, scared out of their wits but knowing that their father and sister have also been searching for them, change their ways: “From that day on those two girls were the most polite and helpful girls living in that little town.”

This is not the purpose of a scary story. Scary stories, such as that of the Cucuy or bogeyman, frighten children into behaving. They don’t get a second chance. They don’t get to meditate on the error of their ways. There’s no time for remorse! They’re gone! That’s it!

The Spanish translation is idiomatic and poetic and very nicely done. For instance, while the English reads, “The boy put the girls on his burro and started down the winding path to the valley,” the Spanish reads, “El muchacho acomodó a las niñas en el burro y se fue rumbo al valle por la vereda retorcida.” Here, you can see the goatherd assisting the girls and helping them down the seriously winding path.

Robledo’s stylized acrylic illustrations, on a bright palette with background shading, aptly convey the terror of the grotesque Cucuy. Unfortunately, his other characters’ faces—also with bugged-out eyes and weird grimaces—are scary as well.

Besides the girls’ father actually giving them over to the Cucuy, my problem with Hays’ story is its artificially happy ending, done to “soften” the story. But many of our children hear and experience many scary stories—such as the threat of La Migra (ICE), a modern-day Cucuy that has nothing to do with bad behavior, but that often separates parents from their children. Scary stories are certainly not therapy, but they can give children an opportunity to talk with trusted adults and process their fears. 

As it stands, ¡El Cucuy! A Bogeyman Cuento in English and Spanish is not recommended.

—María Cárdenas
(published 3/15/14)

Juan Verdades: The Man Who Couldn’t Tell a Lie/ El hombre que no sabía mentir

author: Joe Hayes

illustrator: Joseph Daniel Fiedler

Cinco Puntos Press, 2001

grades 3-5

Mexican

Hayes’s story is a revision of a European variant of “The Faithful Servant,” and also draws on versions from New Mexico. In this telling, which appears to be set in colonial Mexico, a wealthy man bets his ranch that his foreman is so honest that he could not tell a lie. In order to win the bet, the beautiful daughter of the other rancher conspires to seduce the foreman into stealing all the apples from his employer’s “manzano real”—“royal apple tree”—and lying about how the apples disappeared. Foreman steals the apples yet maintains his integrity, foreman and daughter fall in love, ranch is lost but remains in the family, and everyone celebrates.

Rather than enhancing the story, Hayes’s “literary treatment”—assigning names to the characters, softening the plot, and inserting a lot of dialogue to “carry the narrative and clarify the characters’ motivations”—raises questions about the story’s cultural content:

• Why does the rancher’s daughter demand that the foreman strip the apple tree and bring all its fruit to her? It would have made more sense had she demanded that a prized animal be slaughtered and its meat brought to her. But in “softening” the story so as to avoid the scene of an animal’s being butchered, Hayes erases the story’s cultural logic.

• Why would the foreman agree to pick all the apples? Even if he were in love with the rancher’s daughter, he’d know that a whole wagonload of apples would benefit nobody. They’d spoil before they were consumed.

• Why would wealthy Mexican ranchers care so much about apples? Among apple aficionados, there might be some competition, but not to this extent.

• Why would a wealthy rancher’s daughter fall in love with the foreman, and continue to conspire against him?

• Why does the rancher’s daughter, an upper-class colonial Mexican woman, appear as a “barefoot seductress” in every illustration of her: inside, outside, even at her own party? Besides “gang girlfriends,” this is a common Hollywood stereotype of Latinas.

• Finally, in the English text, the rancher wants to know who picked his apples: “Some fool picked them?” And the honest foreman begins to explain: “The father of the fool is my father’s father’s son.” But in the Spanish text, he says, “El abuelo de ladrón es papá de mi papá” (The thief’s grandfather is my father’s father). This is totally different. Why is he a “fool” in one language and a “thief” in the other?

Fiedler’s oil paintings, on a palette of bejeweled earth-toned colors, are darkly depressing. Especially so is the one of the worried rancher riding away after having bet his ranch. It reminds me of James Earle Fraser’s 1915 iconic sculpture, “The End of the Trail,” in which a dejected Indian guy slumps over his equally dejected horse. I mean, really depressing.

Had Hayes decided against a contrived “literary treatment,” infusing his version with culturally logical content instead—and way fewer words and dialogue—Juan Verdades: The Man Who Couldn’t Tell a Lie / El hombre que no sabía mentir could have been an entertaining story. As it stands, it’s not recommended.

—María Cárdenas
(published 3/5/14)

La Llorona, the Weeping Woman: An Hispanic Legend told in Spanish and English

author: Joe Hayes

illustrators: Vicki Trego Hill and Mona Pennypacker

Cinco Puntos Press, 2004

grades 4-up

Mexican

The author is correct, totally correct: There are many, many variations of this ancient legend. Hayes writes, “the stories weren’t told merely to entertain the children. Storytelling was a way for older ones to pass some wisdom and understanding on to the young.” It seems that Hayes’ version is meant to show young people that pretty, even beautiful, women are vain, jealous, and will destroy anything that, and anyone who, gets in their way.

The young woman in this story is so beautiful that she won’t give the time of day to the young men of her village and will only go with the most handsome man in the land, who eventually kicks her to the curb for a woman of his own class. He is a dog, but also a man, so that makes it OK for him to treat her like chattel. She is beautiful, and since no woman should have any rights—beautiful or not—she kills her children because she is jilted. The double standard is so strong here it reeks. Most Llorona stories tell of a woman so overburdened she snaps, whether La Malinele or La Malinche, under the strain of oppression, not vanity. Hayes’ message to children is a patriarchal one: Be a sexist man and you will be rewarded. Be a beautiful woman and you probably should hide under a rock because you won’t be a good person.

There are too many good versions of this tale to bother with this one. It is sexist and an affront to women. Not recommended.

—Judy Zalazar Drummond
(published 4/7/13)