Hispanic and Latino History and Culture Books

There are televisions in restaurants, at the airport, in school, in the smallest place. And even if they’re aren’t, strangers who once talked to one another in bus stations are now swiping or watching or listening. To me that’s not a moral judgment to say we should be cautious.

I don’t fear that we will stop telling stories. We’re finding ways to tell them now, through film, through blogs, through books and poems and music. What I feel is that we’re reaching a place where it becomes difficult to listen to someone else’s story, to stop, to be still. You see it requires stillness and attention. And it makes, you have to quiet your own mind to not want also to interrupt and become self-referential.

The art of conversation, which is one of the things that is in danger, I think, and critical to everything from wooing others, to love, to business dealings, to negotiating conflicts. The art of listening is critical to that. And that means that you have to listen to the other person without thinking the entire time, “This reminds me of this, oh, this happened to me, oh that’s just like,” … and it’s very natural because we spend our days twittering and Facebooking, and I do Facebook. This is part of where we live.

I’m a grandmother, what about these young children who are seeing the world through a lens, who can be in a place where a building is burning down and you see a camera taking a picture of them taking a picture of the disaster.

Or a child’s birthday party that they’re experiencing through the lens. You say well, what’s wrong with that? Well, because when they want the story of what happened that day, they will return to the recording. They will not return to the memory. They will not know how to reconstruct it and recount it using words. They will lose the art of story, I think. And I think that would be a terrible loss in this manner. I mean, the way we tell stories, because stories, we have the studies, it actually connects human beings, neurologically we connect when we tell stories. How cool is that?

I think a picture book is, I’ve always said is sort of you take War and Peace and turn it into haiku. And so the challenge is to take out every single possible word that you don’t absolutely need. Or that can be seen in the pictures. Why say that the mouse has a red vest when he’s wearing a red vest in the illustration?

So although the writing comes first you think ahead, what can I remove? So that it’s a process of sort of truncating and truncating and truncating until the story comes very clean. With a novel I loved it, because I kept writing these tiny little short chapters, Randall and I, Randall Wright. And he had written novels before and that’s how this story came together. We were at a conference in Utah and we were swapping stories and I told him the one about the Cheshire Cheese Cat. And he said, “Have you written it?” And I said, no, it’s a novel. He goes, “I’ll write it with you.” And, of course, as the writer I went, “My story, my story. My precious, it’s mine.”

But he convinced me. He said, “Look, you’ve never written a novel, we could do this together?” And I said, “But we’ve never … how do we get one voice?” He said, “I don’t know, that’s the great thing, we haven’t been ruined yet. We don’t know how to do it right or how to do it well or how to do it poorly. Let’s just try.” So he flew out and my husband made countless meals for us, we worked 12 and 14 hour days and loved every blessed minute of it.

He would write a chapter then I would rewrite it and then he would write it, because we had an arc, you know, we had a story. And then he would give it to me, we’d do it half dozen of times, a dozen times. And then the person who finished that chapter would sit back and say you do the next one. And then say I would write that one, hand it to him. We’d go through the same process, slowly a voice emerged.

And a lot of, you know, wonderful nitpicking, I don’t want this in there, I do what this. And so sometimes you win by attrition.

I’ve never had so much fun working on a story. It’s a gentle story. No one gets blown up, although there’s a lot of tension and there are betrayals and there’s skullduggery and there is cheese. But it’s about the old Cheshire Inn I visited in London with my daughters. And it’s marvelous. Samuel Johnson used to hold court there and Charles Dickens not only wrote there there’s actually a brass plaque that says this is the place where the author Charles Dickens often sat to write. It was marvelous.

And in the story of course Dickens, it becomes ancillary. He is not a primary part of the story, but you read as he being a writer is observing what’s going on and putting together his own version of what he thinks is happening in this inn with these animals. It is an animal fantasy historical fiction, sort of, kind of thing. And a mouse and a cat become friends. And then they don’t. And then they do. And then there are many surprises. And some are lost. And some are found.

I have a book called Martina the Beautiful Cockroach. And when I first say the name to children they all go, “Ewww!”, because they’re kids, and are like, “Tell us more.”

Because they love things that are disgusting. And the idea of a beautiful cockroach? Oh, please, how could that be? That’s what’s wonderful about that story. When I researched that story, as it was nearing publication, I wasn’t comfortable with what I’d found. Yes, it was a Cuban folktale because it was told in Cuba from the time even my grandmother’s time and before. But it was also Central American.

And then I find this fantastic little book of folklore. It’s out of print and it was Persian folktales. And inside there’s a story called Mistress Cockroach. And there’s Martina. Only in the Spanish version and Central and South American version she has a peine (a hair comb) and a mantilla, a lace shawl, and she sit on a balcon (a balcony).

In the Persian one, she had a purple dress made from the skin of an eggplant used often in Persian cooking. It’s marvelous. But the story’s the same. It’s wonderful, wonderful. So why are these stories wonderful? I think they connect us, that’s one of the things. They remind us we’re part of one human family, with one narrative that changes clothes or eggplants from one place to the other.

It changes manner of dress. It travels now to, maybe to the U.S. And now the story becomes about a South Georgia farmer and he has a cockroach that keeps getting into the corn pen. And he sees he one day seated out there in her beautiful scarf and his fan and that, “How you doing this morning?”

In Last Stop on Market Street, thematically I had been trying to cover this territory in a young adult book and it just wasn’t working. And then I was alerted to an image on a young illustrator’s blog. It was a grandmother and her grandson on the bus. 

And I remember the minute I saw that, my agent sent it to me, who ultimately became the agent for Christian Robinson, and it was his blog. And when I saw that image I was like, “Oh, my gosh, the book I had been trying to write as a young adult needs to be a picture book.” And so, then I started to think about this grandmother figure. 

And for me, I had a grandmother who was the center figure in our family, my Grandmother Nettie. And so I thought of her and I thought of me because I spent a lot of time with her when I was a kid. I even lived with her for a while. And so I thought of her presence in my life and so I sort of wrote the story with that in mind. And it was kind of an “own voice” thing, where I had taken public transportation much of my young life. 

But then when I was still in the process of revising the book, I was introduced to Christian Robinson for the first time, who I knew was going to illustrate it, and he was with his grandmother. And I remember I got to talk to them for about fifteen or twenty minutes. And I just saw the grace and dignity that she had. 

You know, she had raised Christian in a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles with a few of his cousins. And I realized at the end of that interaction that I actually had to take myself out of the book and I had to lean toward his experience. It had to be that way. And you know, there’s no “find and replace” for race, on your keyboard. So it means you basically have to rewrite the entire book with this new vision in mind. 

So I’ll actually say, the book was in a way inspired by multiple grandmothers. It started with my own grandmother. It sort of leaned toward Christian’s grandmother ultimately. But I also got to pull in my daughter’s two grandmothers. My own mom and my wife’s mother. And they both sort of fed the story too. So it’s interesting, I think. There’s a power in the relationship between a grandchild and a grandparent that had to be part of that story. 

Originally in Last Stop on Market Street, one of the themes was that CJ wasn’t raised by his parents. It wasn’t a traditional family and that was stated directly in the story. But then I realized that I needed to be cleaner and more efficient in the story. So I took all of that out except for one tiny detail that most people don’t really see as kind of residue of this theme. 

When CJ closes his eyes on the bus, he imagines a family of hawks. And so that’s the one illusion to the traditional family. And it’s just a passing thought because he’s a young boy growing up in America, influenced by the media that surrounds him. So in all the commercials, he’s probably seeing traditional families. In all of the books he’s read, he’s probably mostly seeing traditional families. So there is that residue. But obviously you see that that relationship between CJ and his grandmother is what raises him. 

I think ultimately Milo Imagines the World is a journey of a boy learning how to understand how others see him, and also how he sees himself. And so there are two things going on there.

He’s speculating about the people around him on very little information. So he imagines this scraggly-faced guy who’s doing a crossword looks a little disheveled. He imagines him going off to an apartment that maybe has a lot of cats and trash and maybe he’s a lonely man. So he makes that leap from this visual information, he’s slightly disheveled and he has a little bit of a scraggly beard, to a lonely existence.

Well, I think part of the journey on the subway to visit his mother, part of that journey in terms of his interior journey, is that he’s also beginning to connect the way he’s making these judgments based on very little information, and the way people might be judging him similarly with very little information.

And there’s a young boy who he thinks dressed really nice, and he’s got a perfect part and shoes with no scuffs. And he thinks, “Well, this kid, this light-skinned boy, is probably living in a castle. He’s got a great life.” And there’s one moment I think that’s to me the most important moment in the book where they look at each other and in that strange moment of connecting visually, I think Milo’s heart sinks.

Because when he looks at this boy he sees all the possibilities that this boy has that he doesn’t have. And in that way he’s actually stereotyping himself, which we don’t often talk about with this book. And I think he’s building walls around himself in that moment, that he’s not fully aware of.

And I’ll tell you, this comes from my own childhood. I remember we never went to restaurants. And one time a friend’s family took me to a restaurant and I was so nervous because it had cloth napkins and the waitress was actually asking me what I wanted to order. And I had never experienced this, like, “What salad dressing do you want?” And I was so confused, and like, literally sweating.

And then I saw this other boy who was the same age as me at a couple tables away. And I remember he just seemed so confident. And two things ran through my mind at that moment. First I thought, “This kid, he just has different access to the world than I do and I’m never going to have the opportunities he has,” and it made me feel like my life was more limited. And then I also thought, “If I ever have any money, I’m going to go to restaurants every day so I know how to do this,” and I also thought it was fun.

But I think, in that moment, Milo’s feeling something similar. He’s actually building walls around his own possibilities by judging himself against somebody else. Now, when he sees that this same boy is going to the same destination that he is, that he also has an incarcerated mother, it pops something. And now he has to confront that, “Maybe these judgments that I have, that are based on stereotypes, lazy stereotypes, maybe they’re in need of revision, or maybe I need to be less confident about them.”

And so I think what I was really trying to challenge young people to do is, is understand that when you see somebody on the street and you sort of do lean on these lazy stereotypes that we all lean on, try to be more generous with people around you, because behind every face we see on the street there’s an entire story that we don’t have access to. And I think if we understand that, we will be more generous with people around us.