Imagine // Imagina

author: Juan Felipe Herrera
translator (Spanish): Georgina Lázaro

illustrator: Lauren Castillo
Candlewick Press: 
Imagine, 2018 
Imagina, 2020

preschool-grade 4 

Mexican

[Note: This review developed as a conversation between María Cárdenas and Beverly Slapin.]

María: This morning I cracked open an egg and was delighted when I discovered two yolks—in the culture of my family, a symbol of good luck and abundance. It transported me back to my childhood and my heritage—of the imagination my family encouraged in me and my siblings.

In considering my own childhood—the traumas and the joys and the things in between—I thought deeply about how important imagination is for all children, but especially for those who are struggling in their lives, who are trying to find a way for things to be better. As a long-time educator, I’ve found that imagination can have the power to redirect children in sometimes-problematic circumstances—to inspire them to see themselves positively.

Beverly: In Herrera’s series of short, evocative, free-verse poems—each of which ends with the whisper, “imagine” or “imagine what you could do”—he welcomes young children into his own life, encouraging them to enlarge their own perspectives and consider their own possibilities. As well, youngsters will learn to embrace compassion, humility and empathy.

Immigrant, migrant and refugee children who are hablantes will easily imagine young Juan Felipe’s life as a farmworker child, helping his mom feed the chickens, walking to the next town to fill a bucket of water, feeling the tadpoles swimming across his hands in a creek—and waving a sad adios to his amiguitos when his family has to move yet again. 

And there’s the incomparable beauty of an unfettered imagination that could belong to every child:

If I let the stars

at night

paint my blanket with milky light

with shapes of hungry birds

while I

slept outside,

imagine what you could do…

María: As I read, I’m also thinking about the desperate and frightened children from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and México. Educators need to be careful to remember where the children are in their lives. Of course, all children need support and love—and also the capacity to imagine themselves in positive circumstances. They need to be encouraged to see themselves outside in the rain or in the sun or in a field or going somewhere they have never been. Or reunited with their families. 

Beverly: As the young hablante enters school in the US—confronted by a language he doesn’t understand but everyone else speaks and reads—young readers born here will catch sight of his difficulties and immigrant young people will recognize them.

As he matures and immerses himself in two languages, the young student collects discarded “gooey and sticky ink pens” whose ink flows “like tiny rivers across soft paper”—and his love of creating poetry emerges:

If I grabbed a handful 

of words

I had never heard and

sprinkled them over a paragraph

so I could write

a magnificent story,

imagine

Talented translator Georgina Lázaro is the perfect partner for Herrera’s short, lyrical verses. Rather than a word-for-word translation, Lázaro’s Spanish version beautifully evokes Hererra’s rhythm and voice in the original. In her expressive and sometimes playful Spanish, Lázaro often switches metaphors, dancing between the two languages. 

Si de niño

recogí flores de manzanilla 

en los prados doblados por el viento

y les susurré a sus caritas vellosas

imagina

And, no less importantly, in translating Herrera’s repeated line, “Imagine what you could do,” Lázaro employs the familiar “tú” rather than the formal “usted.” (“Imagina lo que tú podrías hacer.”)

Lauren Castillo’s luminous artwork, in pen-and-foam monoprint, brings young readers into Herrera’s life. Heavily textured, red-earth tones with dappled light and color in backgrounds suggest the Mexican countryside of Herrera’s childhood. Other spreads contain lots of white space and detail, such as the youngster’s helping his mamá feed the chickens while laundry dries in the sun. 

María: Imagine // Imagina are deep enough—in meaning and symbolism—for older readers as well. For instance, younger readers may not immediately understand the importance of walking to the next town to fill a bucket of water for the whole family, but older readers will. And older kids in the city may not know what it feels like to have tadpoles slipping though their fingers, but younger campesino kids will.

Sometimes young people struggle to imagine good things, or even being in a place that’s not chaotic. In particular, Latinx kids who may be struggling with issues at school will see themselves supported in Herrera’s work. That said, I don’t see Imagine // Imagina as  “bootstrap” stories. Rather, they're hopeful stories that encourage young people to think about who they are and to imagine what they can do.

María and Beverly: In Imagine // Imagina Herrera (US Poet Laureate, 2015-2017) extends his hand to the many child refugees, migrants and immigrants here in the US—and encourages them to think about who they are and imagine the possibilities of their own lives. He’s created  deeply satisfying and empowering books that will help build resilient kids who can imagine a better world. 

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

—María Cárdenas and Beverly Slapin
(published 5/4/20)

IMAGINA. Text copyright © 2018 by Juan Felipe Herrera. Illustrations copyright © 2018 by Lauren Castillo. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA.

Happy Like Soccer // El fútbol me hace feliz

author: Maribeth Boelts
illustrator: Lauren Castillo 
translator: unknown 
Candlewick Press 
English, 2012; Spanish, 2016 
kindergarten-grade 3

The game of soccer, also known as fútbol, is played all over the world, both professionally and just for fun. Anywhere there are patches of space—sometimes even in war zones—one can find children playing soccer. (One of my favorite middle-grade books is A Little Piece of Ground by Elizabeth Laird. In Ramallah, occupied Palestine, a boy risks his life to get out and play soccer with his friend.)

Here, Sierra, our young Latina narrator, has been chosen to join a new (white, middle-class) suburban girls’ soccer team. Comparing her regulation uniform and equipment and this pristine soccer field with the deficits of her own neighborhood (including that anyone who shows up can play), she says,

My shoes have flames and my ball spins

on this spread-out sea of grass with no weeds,

fields with no holes, and real goals,

not two garbage cans shoved together

like in the lot by my apartment, 

where soccer means

any kid who shows up can play.

Sierra is a stranger in this new place; although everyone cheers for her, no one knows her name. She lives with her auntie in an ethnically-mixed urban neighborhood, where “no buses run.” Auntie works at Café Garcia, and is unable to attend her niece’s games. So, Sierra says, while “nothing makes me happy like soccer… nothing makes me sad like soccer, too.” One Saturday, when her auntie is finally able to take the day off and join her niece—the game is rained out.

So, convinced that her “auntie’s boss won’t do two favors right in a row,” Sierra convinces herself to ask her soccer coach if it would be possible to move the game to her neighborhood—just once and on a Monday—so her auntie could attend. Coach Marco—who, besides Sierra and her auntie, appears to be the only other brown person in the story—pulls it off. And in this game, Sierra is cheered on by people who know her name.

Castillo’s illustrations, in ink and watercolor with acetone transfer, accentuate the ethnic and class differences in the two areas. While the suburban neighborhood in which Sierra’s team plays contains a spacious green field with grass and trees and lots of white people, Sierra’s ramshackle urban neighborhood appears to consist solely of dark gray buildings, an empty lot, and few or no people. Even the neat and clean apartment in which Sierra and her aunt live is dark gray and very small—the two share a bedroom, there’s a tiny kitchen, and a phone with a long cord hangs on the wall. The only hint we have about the rest of Sierra’s family is an open photo album containing “old pictures,” that sits on the coffee table.

It’s clear that the uncredited Spanish translator put a lot of care and thought into El fútbol me hace feliz, giving this weak story a much better feel than its original English counterpart. For instance, the first lines in the English text read:

Nothing makes me happy like soccer—

picked for this new team,

with these shiny girls.

And the Spanish reads:

Nada me hace más feliz que el fútbol.

Estoy en un nuevo equipo

con chicas muy listas.

(Nothing makes me happier than soccer.

I’m on a new team

with girls who are ready to go!)

While Boelts allows Sierra a little piece of agency in bringing the team to her barrio for one game, for the most part the young narrator disparages her own neighborhood. I’d rather see a story in which a young protagonist happily plays fútbol in her barrio’s makeshift soccer field, with garbage cans or used tires as goal posts, a game in which “any kid who shows up can play.” As it stands, Happy Like Soccer has a condescending and patronizing feel to it and is not recommended. This is too bad, because the story’s strong Spanish translation, El fútbol me hace feliz, showed some promise.

—Beverly Slapin

Gracias to Juan Camilo Prado.