The folktales have been a source of unity. Again, it’s a wonderful thing to be together with groups of parents that have different backgrounds, and when one mentions one of those stories, they will know it maybe with variations. Many of the stories have different endings and different developments, but they have the same characters, and so that’s a wonderful source of commonality; as are the nursery rhymes. And that’s why those two books Pio Peep! and Mamá Goose are so important to me, because they are not only rescuing for other generations the nursery rhymes that we learned and our grandparents knew, but it’s also showing the children that, regardless of what part of the Spanish-speaking world they come from, some of these are the same. And others have evolved and now have many different versions, but that’s also part of the richness.
You know, people make a lot of issue about the Spanish language, saying, “Oh, but that’s Mexican Spanish,” versus, “That’s Colombian Spanish,” or, “Castilian Spanish,” as if it wasn’t the same language. And I try to emphasize the fact that all these variations are synonyms and that what makes the Spanish language rich in that respect is precisely that there may be multiple ways of saying the same thing.