Light Foot / Pies ligeros

author: Natalia Toledo

author: Francisco Toledo 

translator: Elisa Amado 

Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press, 2007 

all grades 

Zapotec

It all began when Death saw that all the humans and animals were having baby after baby but no one was dying, and the world was getting way too crowded. To put an end to this population explosion, Death challenges everyone to a rope-skipping contest and, being immortal, she thinks she is sure to win. One by one, Man, Toad, Monkey, Iguana, Coyote, Rabbit and Alligator keel over, and Death even manages to steal a pair of leather shoes from Man’s body. Then along comes Grasshopper….

Francisco Toledo, one of Mexico’s best-known contemporary Indigenous artists, created a series of engravings of Death skipping rope with the animals, and Natalia Toledo wrote the accompanying story in Zapotec. Interpreted into English by Elisa Amado, the story appears here in Spanish and English.

Young readers will giggle as each animal is enticed into Death’s game; and they will find out why you never hear Death when she comes into a house, and why Grasshopper never did stop jumping. Light Foot / Pies ligeros complements the celebrations of el Día de los Muertos. Highly recommended.

—Beverly Slapin

(published 10/17/15)

Beneath the Stone: A Mexican Zapotec Tale

author: Bernard Wolf
photographer: Bernard Wolf
Orchard, 1994
grades 4-6
Zapotec

Wolf’s photographs here are absolutely wonderful. I know these people. There is a real feeling of the family, at home, at work, and in the marketplaces of Oaxaca.

A few things particularly bother me, however. When Leo and his father have kept poverty at bay by selling their tapetes—I do this myself at the local flea market—they visit Monte Albán, the Zapotec city that was a thriving metropolis and trading center about 2,500 years ago. His father tells Leo “that the Zapotecs leveled the entire top of this mountain to build this city. How did they do that? he wonders. No one knows.” This disbelief comes more from the author than from Leo’s father, who would have known that the Zapotecs had sophisticated technology and were incredibly talented builders. And Wolf states that from the mountaintop of Teotitlán, “It is believed that, either by signal fire or reflected light, the ancestors ‘spoke’ to the Place Beneath the Stone.” Here, Wolf’s use of quotation marks around the word “spoke” tells the child reader, “but it really wasn’t so,” which trivializes the complex belief system of a people.

In the marketplace, the reader is treated to photos of all kinds of delicious food, and then we see that even “fried grasshoppers!” are sold here. It is a fact that insects are eaten all over the world; they are an important and cheap source of protein. But here, Wolf’s use of an exclamation point signals otherness, weirdness to young readers, who will invariably think that it is “yucky” for people to eat grasshoppers.

Finally, Wolf’s section on Zapotec history is fairly accurate until the end, where he says that life for Mexico’s “diverse Indian cultures has vastly improved. In spite of lingering racial prejudice, these people are treated with some respect now. Most importantly, they are left to pursue their own life-styles and traditions.” The Zapatista Revolution in Chiapas belies this; one need only read the newspaper to see that Indigenous rights have been negated for many years and are being fought for on a daily and continuous basis. Not recommended.

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

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.

Woman Who Outshone the Sun and the Zapotec Water Rights Struggle

authors: Rosalma Zubizarreta, Harriet Rohmer, 

David Schechter 

from a poem by Alejandro Cruz Martinez

illustrator: Fernando Olivera

Children’s Book Press / Lee & Low, 1991

kindergarten-grade 3 

Zapotec

In the The Woman Who Outshone the Sun / La mujer que brillaba aún más que el sol, Lucía Zenteno arrives at a village, and because of her great beauty and her magical ways, all the creatures of the earth, air, and water—and the river itself—fall in love with her. The jealous villagers run her out of town, so she takes the river with her, leaving only “a serpent of sand.” The villagers find Lucía, the elders convince them to apologize, and, after a few words about the necessity of treating everyone with kindness, she returns the water and disappears again, coming back as a fond memory: “Lucía had not really left them. Though they would not be able to see her, she would always be there, guiding and protecting them, helping them to live with love and understanding in their hearts.”

Oaxacan artist Olivera’s gorgeous oil paintings, saturated in rich, bold colors, are full of “magic realism,” where fishes and otters swim in and out of Lucía’s hair, butterflies fly in and out of her skirts, and her sorrow at the behavior of the villagers is palpable. Olivera’s Zapotecanas are big and beautiful, and his Lucía is lush and glorious—a dark, zaftig Indian woman, with big hips and big feet, a Mother Earth figure.

The book, winner of an Outstanding Children’s Book Award from Parenting Magazine, has garnered numerous positive reviews praising it for its strong moral message about kindness and understanding and respect for nature and responsibility for the earth.

As a long-time educator, I’m always looking for children’s stories that teach conflict resolution by encouraging kindness, caring, empathy and respect. So, after the first reading, I really liked this story. But there was something about it that made me vaguely uneasy. A second read and a critical look at the copy at the back of the book made me think more deeply. “Alejandro was killed in 1987,” the copy said, “while organizing the Zapotecs to regain their lost water rights.” Why, I wondered, would a water rights activist write a poem about a holy person who takes away a village’s water?

A few days later, a colleague gave me a copy of the poem that Cruz Martinez had written, called “la voz del poeta canta” (“the poet’s voice sings”), which he published in San Jerónimo Ixtepec, Mexico, in 1984. The only thing that his poem has in common with the children’s book is the name of its central character. In Cruz Martinez’s poem, Lucía Zenteno, with her skirt full of butterflies, roams the land, stealing not only the attention of all the men, but the men themselves. She has no friends, no morals, and no conscience. She comes to wreak havoc and bring misery; and when she gets angry, she takes away the river and everything that depends on water to live. And she doesn’t return. She is that pure evil we warn our children about and guard our men from.

Last week, I viewed Maureen Gosling’s excellent film, “Blossoms of Fire,” and all of this came together for me.

A brief digression to set Cruz Martinez’ poem into historical context: The Isthmus of Tehuantepec is one of the most fertile areas in the world and the fact that it’s an isthmus has left the land accessible to plunder. For at least four centuries, the Zapotec people here have struggled against colonialism in one form or another. In 1981, the people of Juchitán successfully challenged the one-party system of the PRI (Revolutionary Independence Party), which had ruled for over 60 years, and voted in a progressive party, COCEI (Coalition of Workers, Peasants and Students of the Isthmus). Under the new government, roads and schools, clinics and libraries were built, public programs flourished and there was a cultural flowering. In 1983, to break the power of COCEI, the PRI sent in repressive forces that openly murdered and disappeared movement leaders, who became known as “los desaparecidos.” Fighting for the land and water was their crime, and Alejandro Cruz Martinez was one of the many casualties of this repression.

This is exactly what water rights struggles are about: right-wing governments and vulture capitalists’ diverting the water and effectively killing villages. This happens all over the world, and the Indigenous peoples rarely, if ever, win. Africa is rife with this history, over and over; where once were fields full of food for entire populations, nothing is left but deserts. Nowhere in reality—or in Cruz Martinez’s poem—does the Zapotec people’s begging and pleading bring back the water once it’s been stolen. That is what Cruz Martinez died for: the basic right to life.

There is nothing real or dignified in Children’s Book Press’s teaching our children about how Zapotec villagers begged for life-giving water, and then honored the one who stole it in the first place. Rather, it’s an insult to the memory of Alejandro Cruz Martinez and the Zapotec members of COCEI who struggled and died for access to the resources on their own land. The Woman Who Outshone the Sun is not recommended.

—Judy Zalazar Drummond
(published 4/6/13; revised 9/9/18)

Note: Below is Alejandro Cruz Martinez's original poem, la voz del poeta canta, and its English translation, The Poet's Voice Sings.