Carmela Full of Wishes is about a young girl who’s living in Watsonville, California where my parents currently live. It’s a migrant community, where a lot of food is harvested. You also have a lot of migrant families. Carmela is growing up in a mixed-status family. That means her mother is an American citizen, her father is undocumented.
Sixteen million people are living in mixed-status families today in America, which makes it a common American story, but we don’t often think of it that way. So I wanted to tell that story. My dad grew up in a mixed-status family and so I wanted to kind of honor that part of our family history.
This is a book that takes place in a predominantly Mexican-American community which is very important to me. The end papers, which you probably know are the very first page and the very last page of a picture book, and there’s usually a picture. Well on this picture we see – we see migrant members of our community harvesting food. And that alone is an important part of the story. It’s sort of valuing that life and the importance of the food that is harvested.