Twenty-Five Mixtec Cats

author: Matthew Gollub

illustrator: Leovigildo Martinez

publisher: Tambourine Books / William Morrow, 1993

grades 1-5 

Mixteca

Whenever I run into something described as “an original story based on the folklore of (insert people or place),” my fakelore alarm goes off. Loudly.

Story: A “good” healer, whose job consists of “swishing and swooshing,” acquires 25 kittens. When he tries to sell them, the “good” healer encounters the ire of the suspicious villagers, stupid as well as poor, who “imagine wild things” and demand that the “good” healer get rid of the cats, whom one calls “filthy rodents.” The “good” healer refuses, so the villagers enlist the aid of an “evil” healer, who sends a pack of coyotes to do away with the cats. The cats outsmart the coyotes, the “evil” healer casts a spell, and the quick-thinking felines save both a villager and the “good” healer, thereby becoming the village heroes. The End.

OK, everyone, pay attention.

The Twenty-Five Mixtec Cats is a mishmash of cultural components of European fairy tales superimposed on a Mixteca background and marketed as an “original story based on the folklore of Oaxaca.” As such, it doesn’t work on any level.

Some problems:

(1) Oaxaca is the Indian part of Mexico. Besides the Mixteca and Zapoteca peoples, Oaxaca is home to the Amuzgo, Chantino, Chicateca, Chinateca, Chocho, Chontal, Huave, Mazateca, Mixe, Nahua, Trique, and Zoque peoples. Each of these peoples speaks one of 14 indigenous languages and generally speaks Spanish as well. And each of these peoples holds their own traditional stories. So there is no such thing as the “folklore of Oaxaca” on which Gollub based his “original story.” 

(2) “Mixteca” refers to the ethnicity and culture of a people who live in Oaxaca, Puebla, and part of Guerrero. It also refers to the language. It does not refer to cats owned by Mixteca people. If you have any trouble conceptualizing this, try “Episcopalian-English cats.”

(3) “Healers,” by definition, are good. So the term, “good healer” is unnecessarily repetitive; and the term, “evil healer” is an oxymoron.

(4) Finally, and probably most importantly: the references to poverty, superstition, prejudice, good and evil, topped with ignorance, just hang there, decontextualized, as they might in European fairy tales. But European-American children reading versions of European fairy tales will not see themselves reflected in the characters. Mexican-American children reading The Twenty-Five Mixtec Cats, on the other hand, will probably be humiliated. Their personas are not intact; they are felinized. Plus they are easily identifiable by a specific locale. This is like saying that all Viennese are superstitious and ignorant. It is that specific.

Oaxacan artist Leovigildo Martinez’s glazed watercolors, on a palette of predominantly yellows, browns, blues and pinks, complement the story.

Reviews in School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, ALA Booklist, and The New York Times were all favorably uncritical. The School Library Journal review noted, for instance, that the faces of the villagers “resemble those of the cats, giving an eerie relatedness to the characters,” and that this story is “a sound introduction to some of the elements of Mexican folklore.” That’s exactly the problem.

Here are Gollub’s own words, from his website:

In 1990, I went to Oaxaca (wa-HAH-ka), Mexico, where a friend introduced me to Leovigildo Martínez. A jovial spirit and a magnificent painter, “Leo” introduced me to Oaxacan markets and villages. As a fine artist, he had never illustrated picture books but suggested we collaborate on Oaxacan tales for children. The idea was to take threads of existing folklore, then create original stories to be understood universally. The region's phenomenal array of indigenous cultures—their pyramids, textiles, fiestas, and crafts—posed too delicious a challenge to turn down. Although I had never written for children, I told Leo, “Me gusta la idea.”

Pues, a mi, no me gusta su idea. It’s cultural tourism for a piece of the “multicultural” children’s book market, plain and simple. The Twenty-Five Mixtec Cats is totally not recommended.

—Beverly Slapin
(published 4/5/13)

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)