Sleeping With the Light On

author: David Ungar 

illustrator: Carlos Vélez Aguilera 
Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press, 2020
grades 2-4
Guatemalan

In 1954, bombs rained down on Guatemala in a bloody coup d’etat.This first  covert CIA coup in Latin America overthrew the country’s elected President, Jacobo Árbenz, who had instituted agrarian reforms that gave land to impoverished peasants and ended exploitive labor practices. The coup greatly benefited the US agricultural giant, United Fruit Company, which traded in tropical fruit grown on Latin American plantations. The ensuing 36 years of what came to be known as the “Guatemalan Civil War” (1960-1996) claimed more than 200,000 lives, resulted in more than 45,000 missing, drove countless refugees to Mexico and the US, and wrecked the Guatemalan economy. 

For the terrified Guatemalan families, sleeping with the light on became their new normal.

Sleeping with the Light On is based on David Unger’s semi-autobiographical story, “La Casita: Forgetting Spanish,” first published in Spanish by CIDCLI Books in Mexico City (2012). Through the eyes of young Davico, it’s the story of a small Guatemalan family, how they deal with the terror of the unknown, and how the family’s tough choices land them in a new world where no one speaks Spanish, there’s plenty of food, and people sleep with the light off.

Davico, his slightly older brother Felipe, and their parents live on the second floor of La Casita, a small restaurant they are renting in Guatemala City in the early 1950s. Their life is typically middle class and, for Davico, something is always happening. Consuelo, the nanny, takes him to the market and prepares Sunday brunch. Augusto, the cook, and Otto, the waiter, play tricks on him that sometimes make him wet his pants. And Davico is fascinated with the restaurant’s huge glass tank of lobsters, each of whom he names: Don Quixote, Superman, Hannibal, King Arthur, and the largest, Genghis Khan. One by one, the lobsters disappear and are replaced. All but Genghis Khan. 

Suddenly, Davico’s family’s lives are interrupted. Airplanes are flying low overhead. Warning leaflets are raining from the sky. Sounds of guns and rifles are going off. Armies and tanks are filling the streets. Blackouts are taking place every evening. Davico’s and Felipe’s parents know exactly what is happening. They’ve survived “this nonsense” all before, in Germany. “This nonsense,” of course, is their child-friendly euphemism for the Nazi conflagration that the world had to end so those who survived could once again sleep with the lights off.

And because Davico’s family—along with thousands of others—recognizes this “nonsense,” they decide it may be time to pack up and leave everyone and everything they and their children know and love. As the boys bed down with their stuffed animals under the big wooden dining room table, Davico hears his parents whispering plans to go to “gringo-land.” The children will stay with an uncle while their parents take an airplane to this strange place to find work. 

When Davico goes downstairs to say goodbye to the lobsters, the tank has been drained and “all the lobsters are gone, including Genghis Kahn.”

“I should ask what happened to him,” Davico thinks, “but I don’t. Maybe someone bought him and ate him. I don’t want to know.”

While their parents are gone, Davico and Felipe stay with relatives. “We are in jail,” he says. 

We can walk around, but we can’t escape. We watch tons and tons of television, lots of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd cartoons. But we don’t find them funny anymore.

Finally, the boys board an airplane to reunite with their parents. In Miami, the land is flat. There are no mountains or volcanoes. There are no roscas, espumillas or canillas de leche, the Guatemalan candies Davico loves. There are no black beans, yucca or plantains. The avocados are big and watery. And no one speaks Spanish. 

Davico promises his parents lots of things:

Not to speak Spanish at school.

Not to complain about the food.

To learn English.

And, before long, all he remembers of Spanish is:

Buenos días.

Tengo hambre.

Necesito hacer pipí.

Forgetting Spanish. This is what coming to the United States means to me.

Soon, Davico is “fitting in, learning to put ketchup on everything.” 

But, of course, he misses his home: “sleeping under the table when the lights go out,” “the blue and yellow papers (the warning leaflets) twirling in the sky and falling into the courtyard,” all the people who worked at La Casita. And he misses “the lobsters in the kitchen, with their warts and their hairy legs. Especially Genghis Kahn.”

Mexican artist Carlos Vélez Aguilera’s cover art—using a combination of watercolors, colored pencils and digital color—is, at first glance, calm. On a peaceful blue background, the boys, clutching their stuffed toy animals, sleep comfortably in their bed. The night table holds a battery lamp with a revolving shade on which “sun, clouds and waves [roll] across the light.” But above the title, astute readers may notice the ghostly images of an armored tank and an airplane in the dark blue sky. 

The dark interior art, rendered solely in graphite pencil and black ink, reflect the tone of the story as well. In one especially somber piece, the young brothers are in “bed” under the wooden dining room table. While Felipe is sound asleep, a wide-awake and worried Davico holds on to his little stuffed pig and hesitantly peeks over the blanket. The dining room is meticulous: there’s a chandelier, framed art hangs on the walls, the curtains are open and the carpet is swept, and on the main table sit an untouched bowl of fruit and a vase of flowers. 

In focusing on one child’s narrative, Sleeping with the Light On effectively tells the story of the thousands of children who have been forced to leave their home countries to escape war and invasion. It would be a treat to read this story in its original Spanish. 

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

—Beverly Slapin

(published 9/28/20)

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.

Manuelito, una novela gráfica // Manuelito, a graphic novel

author: Elisa Amado

translator: Elena Iribarren 

illustrator: Abraham Urias

Annick Press, 2019

grades 7-up 

Mayan, Guatemalan

Amado dedicates Manuelito to “the real Domingo, who was disappeared by the Guatemalan army, and to his family and all other Maya who have experienced—and who continue to experience—so much social injustice and violence.”

In Spanish, as in English, “to disappear” (desaparecer) is a verb. When the word, “desaparecido” is used as a noun (“disappeared”) it means that the person was a victim of murder, usually by right-wing government forces. In Latin America, “disappearance” is a tactic to get rid of people who might cause “problems”—a political concept and political reality that’s been used for generations.

Sometimes, families don’t find out about these “disappearances”—numbering hundreds of thousands—until decades later. Beginning in the 1970s and ‘80s, grassroots organizations called Madres de los Desaparecidos (Mothers of the Disappeared) formed all over Latin America; and currently, August 30 marks International Day of the Disappeared.

Amado and Urias present Manuelito as a graphic novel, narrated by a 13-year-old Maya boy whose family sends him to the United States in order to find safety and refuge from the rampant government and gang violence in Guatemala. Manuelito knows that several of his friends and relatives have been disappeared, including his tío, Domingo. 

The story begins in the present and flashes back to Manuelito’s journey.

The first two fully illustrated pages are set in the form of a photo album and Manuelito’s brief, matter-of-fact description of almost all family and friends (except for the coyote—“a very bad man who gets paid to take people like me to the USA.”) Just about everyone is smiling and looking directly at the camera. Readers will notice from the text that Manuel presents some of them in the past tense, a signal that these people are no longer alive. 

In the lower left-hand corner of the second page is the gut punch: “My mother’s brother Tío Domingo. He was disappeared when he was 12, almost 35 years ago.” It’s apparent that family members had kept his last photo—of a boy smiling at the camera—and bestowed his relationship-name, tío, long after he had been disappeared, and long before his nephew, Manuelito, was born.

On the next page, Manuelito shows a photo of himself with his friend: “My friend Coco Loco. He was older than me. His father owned the village store.” Again, Manuelito describes his older friend and Coco Loco’s father in the past tense. Manuelito doesn’t say that they were disappeared as well, but it’s implied. 

The villagers are under armed siege from every angle—harassed by the government soldiers (soldados), the civil patrol (PAC), and the gangsters, the narcotraficantes and “maras,” and the reign of terror is palpable. Villagers frantically phone their relatives in the US, begging them to take in the boys before they’re killed or forced to join a gang. Manuelito’s parents find a coyote and, together with Coco Loco’s parents, raise some money to pay him and to purchase a cell phone for the boys. Manuelito pretends to be brave, and Coco Loco, who is a little older and whose father owns a small store, shores up his confidence a bit. 

The coyote often doesn’t show up as promised, and one of the boys at a temporary shelter warns the two that they had gotten a bad coyote, a dangerous guy: “Les tocó un coyote de los malos, un tipo bien peligroso.” He’s right. 

Manuelito, who is on the road with a family he has met, phones his father and tells him that the coyote they hired to see them across has threatened to kill Coco Loco, which is apparently what had happened. Still, Manuelito continues to hope that his dear friend is alive somewhere. In his imagination, Manuelito looks out the window of his home and sees the maras, the soldiers—and Domingo and Coco Loco. By now the reader suspects that Coco Loco has been murdered and learns that this—or joining the maras or the soldados—“entonces pensé en las maras, en los soldados y en mi tío Domingo”—might be the reality of the socio-political terrorist act known as “disappearance.”

After a two-day bus ride, the family escorts Manuelito and some new friends to the Río Bravo and tells them exactly what to say to the US Border Patrol on the other side. After crossing the river, Manuel recites the exact words he’s memorized:

Me llamo Manuelito López. Soy de Guatemala y pido asilo. Las pandillas dijeron que me iban a matar. (My name is Manuelito López. I am from Guatemala and I ask for asylum. The gangs said they were going to kill me.) 

After a day at a crowded detention facility, the children are escorted to another center—with books and computers, and a TV, and a caring director. He feels safe. But when the heartbroken director tells the children that there is suddenly “no more money from the new government” (read Trump) and the center is closing, Manuelito finds himself on a bus again. He wants to go home. He imagines his family, waiting for him. And he also imagines the mara, and the soldados—and Coco Loco and Domingo.

Arriving in Long Island, Manuelito meets his aunt and begins to settle in. His aunt cautions him not to open the door for any reason but, when he hears the pounding and shouting, he’s afraid not to. It’s an ICE raid, and he’s quickly nabbed and put on an airplane headed for home. 

Manuelito: A Graphic Novel, and Manuelito: una novela gráfica are complex stories that are neither sensationalized nor romanticized. This is how it was then. This is how it continues to be. 

In an afterword, Patricia Aldana presents a short, accurate historical and sociopolitical history of the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras), which she describes as “three of the most dangerous peacetime countries in the world.” Unfortunately, the US policy of “regime change” that has and continues to foment terror in this and in other areas of the world, is not discussed.

Urias’ dark and sometimes smudged charcoal illustrations appear rushed and, as so, complement the action and reflect the dread and horror in the story. As well, he portrays most of the faces of the gangsters, soldiers, border patrol, ICE agents and shelter staff, along with the hordes of other child prisoners, as anonymous blurs—the way that newly arrived and terrified young refugees would see them. But it’s the almost photo-realistic portraits of Manuelito and his friends and relatives—and also, his caring teacher and the sneering, menacing coyote—that readers will not soon forget. 

Neither the Spanish nor the English version is a direct translation of the other. Rather, each reflects, not only the natural flow of the language, but how specific characters might actually speak. However, while the coyote’s “street language” is totally realistic and threatening in the Spanish version—he’s a mean, sadistic dude—it appears to have been toned down in the English version. The Spanish appears to have been similarly toned down in other sections as well. 

This is a story without a happy ending and is age-appropriate for middle- and high school students who are coming to see that things don’t always work out for the best. Set in the Northern Triangle, this book is a contemporary, realistic complement to Phillipe Diederich’s Playing for the Devil’s Fire (Cinco Puntos Press), which takes place in Mexico.

Elisa Amado, a Guatemalteca who currently lives in Canada, is a brilliant writer and an excellent translator. And graphic artist Abraham Urias, a Salvadoreño who currently lives in the US, is a remarkable talent as well. For Manuelito: A Graphic Novel, and Manuelito: una novela gráfica, (the creation of which could not have been easy for either author or illustrator), they deserve every award there is. 

*In these difficult and dangerous political times for immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, both Spanish and English versions are highly recommended for all home, library and classroom collections. 

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

—Beverly Slapin

(published 1/12/20)

Gracias to my friends and colleagues, Judy Zalazar Drummond, Lyn Miller-Lachmann and Noam Szoke. And thanks to Annick Press for the interior image.

Update, 1/15/20

Since there was no translator credit listed in the English version, I mistakenly assumed that Elisa Amado, whom I knew often translates her own work, had been the translator for the Spanish version (which I had received several weeks after the English version). 

After communicating with Annick Press, I learned that (1) Elena Iribarren was the Spanish translator here, and that the order of operations was actually to finalize the English edition first (both text and images) and then to create the Spanish translation, in order to preserve the integrity of the image-to-text relationship. 

Kaela Cadieux, Annick’s managing editor, told me that the author, Elisa Amado, and the translator, Elena Iribarren, have a longstanding working relationship, and that Elisa closely and precisely guided the project, including the translation. Any discrepancies between the English and Spanish versions were the product of careful consideration. Elisa has extensive experience as a writer in both English and Spanish, in addition to her familiarity with the real-life situation that forms the foundation of the story. Working together with the publisher and translator,  the shared intention was to reflect the inherent differences between the two languages and to preserve the truth of each character’s voice. For example, in the Spanish version, the coyote calls Manuel and Coco Loco “cobardes” (cowards), while, in the the English version, he calls them “sissies.” These particular colloquialisms were meant to be accurate, both to the story and to the reading audience in each language.