“KidLit” Authors Taking a Stand for Children

The Children are Watching

Children’s books are the best! The children in my family – and my friends’ families – always know that their gift from Aunt Linda will include at least one new book.  When a sticker on The Very Hungry Caterpillar announced "over a million copies sold,” one of my daughters asked, “Mom, how many copies of that book have you bought?!”

Well, not a million, but from Corduroy to Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes and Snuggle Puppy (and of course Sandra Boynton’s Barnyard Dance), there is nothing like a wonderful children’s book to give music to a hug, pause to a tantrum, and rhythm to picking up toys or rocking to sleep. 

If the writers and illustrators of books for toddlers and big kids did nothing but write and draw and paint, they should be honored with statues in town squares (in front of the library!) and boisterous parades of grateful parents and inspired children.

But “KidLit” writers are doing more: they are standing up for children. They are marching with children.  A compelling article in the September 7 New York Times by Maria Russo tells the story of writers taking action:

“When photos began circulating of migrant children separated from their parents and placed in what looked like giant cages in detention centers, the young adult novelists Melissa del la Cruz and Margaret Stohl had an immediate response.”  They texted several other author friends and drafted a statement denouncing such practices  that “should be restricted to the pages of dystopian novels.”  They gathered thousands of signatures of writers of children’s books and raised nearly $240,000 for legal services assisting the migrant children and their families.

Children’s book writers had already organized “KidLit Marches for Kids,” encouraging their colleagues to join in the March 24 marches for gun control organized by the student survivors of the Parkland, Florida school shootings.  “We wanted to boost the signal of the kids,” explained one of the authors.

Boosting the signal of the kids! Not preaching to them or exhorting them or dismissing them as too young, too inexperienced, too novice to organize demonstrations across the whole country.  No, “boosting their signal.” First, listening to what the kids were saying, then taking it seriously, then marching alongside them.  

 Some of these authors have created a PAC dedicated to supporting Democratic candidates in state and local races, and others have established a PAC to advise “giving circles” on ways to more effectively direct their contributions in support of children.  As one publisher said, “Our life and work revolve around the children.” 

Thank you, KidLit writers, for all the picture books and storybooks and chapter books we – and our kids – can’t live without. And thank you for risking your audience, your “market,” and your precious writing time to stand with and march beside and act for the children.

They, and their grateful parents and teachers, are watching.

Reverence For Life, An Immigrant Mom, and the Nun on the Bus

The Children are Watching

What can be more sacred than a nursing baby, safe in its mother’s protective arms?  That moment of nurture and love and connection calls to mind Albert Schweitzer’s writings on The Teaching of Reverence for Life.

Does anyone read Schweitzer any more? Is his affirmation for all life – including the lives of people who seem very different from ours – taught in our schools?  

I don’t know. But I do know that Schweitzer’s reverence for life — and our calling to live it — has a powerful voice in the person of Sister Simone Campbell, the attorney-nun who came to fame as one of the “Nuns on the Bus,” speaking out for the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed right here in our country.  Why do we need the voice of Sister Simone?  Because today’s news story tells me that the reverence for life — our humility before the very essence of human existence —is in jeopardy.

Read this news from CNN. You'll stop breathing. You may feel tears.  You may wish you could get on a plane to McAllen and go find that baby.  (And you wish you could just shake that immigration officer – but that would be fueling the cycle of inhumanity—we can’t let them make us cruel.)

" McAllen, Texas (CNN)The undocumented immigrant from Honduras sobbed as she told an attorney Tuesday how federal authorities took her daughter while she breastfed the child in a detention center, where she was awaiting prosecution for entering the country illegally.

When the woman resisted, she was handcuffed, Natalia Cornelio, the attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, recalled from her interview with the woman, who had been detained under the Trump administration's zero-tolerance policy to refer anyone caught crossing the border illegally for federal prosecution. "

Surely none of us is so cruel to as rip a nursing baby from her mother.  But if we do nothing, we are complicit. Complicit in an action we could not have imagined, or might have imagined  as being the actions of a “third-world” despot. Surely not in a democracy. Surely not in a country with laws.

Right now the laws are being inverted, perverted, controverted to impose cruelty, not justice.    But there is a lawyer who can teach us how to reclaim our humanity:  Sister Simone Campbell, one of the Nuns on the Bus!

Sister Simone is one of my heroes: she keeps speaking out about poverty when no one (most notably not even one of the presidential candidates in 2008 or 2016) is mentioning this growing crisis. She doesn't tolerate silence when there is injustice.  She speaks candidly about the human costs of war, about fairness and equity.  

And she is eloquent on the matter of the peoples whose perilous lives are bringing them to the US even when they know their dreams of a safe place for their children are now threatened by the policies of an administration hostile to them as people.  (I won’t repeat the words the president and attorney general use to describe these, their fellow human beings – you’ve already heard them and I don’t want a word search to attach them to my name). 

Here is a video of how Sister Simone describes the situation:

What is at stake?

What Sister Simone sees at stake is the values and ethics of a nation complicit with the poor and inhumane treatment of immigrants, specifically immigrants crossing the Mexican border. Here is an article citing her condemnation of the use of the Bible to justify separation of families at the border.

What should we do?

She calls on us to treat migrants in a way that is “humane, just, and fraternal” by improving our detention and deportation practices. “It is a mandate of our faith and our nation. Laws that separate families are unjust and immoral and are no laws at all," she says in regard to the cruel immigration laws enforced by the Trump administration. Here is a Link to the Federal Policies Sister Simone and NETWORK supports as well as some Policy Solutions they have put forward (scroll down to see their ideas for solutions). 

I could not be more grateful for the life, the work, the mission, the example of Sister Simone.  She would  ask us to turn that gratitude into action, that admiration into advocacy.   Her example is powerful to the extent we follow it.

To share your ideas about Sister Simone, babies taken from their moms, and actions you are taking to end the immigration cruelty, please click on the “comments” pencil.

We Need Our Little Brother Back

The Children are Watching

When my father’s father was five years old, he was orphaned.  His parents died three years apart, each at age 42.  Everything changed. My grandfather recalled standing on the back stoop bawling while Old Bessie, the beloved family milk cow, was led away – and she was bawling!  The three older boys went to live with an aunt and uncle.  My grandfather was quite literally “farmed out,” sent to live with a farm family “down the road.”

He was too little to remember how much time passed, but he loved to tell this story:  at some point his next-oldest brother, then about 9, hitched up the horse to the wagon and set out for that farm down the road.  His purpose was clear:  “We need our little brother back.”  And so he took him home.

A sweet story of family ties.

The story is not so sweet for the thousands of families at our southern border whose children have been ripped away from them. Their already perilous lives are being shattered by the cruel, arbitrary and completely unnecessary decrees of a callous, un-American attorney general who, for whatever reason, is afraid of people who don’t look like him.   Jeff Sessions, defying all human decency, international human rights, and morality, has completely upended the American tradition – and laws – of welcoming refugees and asylum seekers.  People who are fleeing the immediate hazards of war, persecution, kidnapping, drug cartel violence, and other dangers may by law present themselves at the border to immigration authorities to request asylum.  They are, by law, entitled to a review of their situation and their plea, without prosecution.  The proceedings are not criminal.

That is, refugee and asylum petitioners are not themselves breaking a law; they are not criminals.  But their current treatment under the new Sessions directives is criminal in its cruelty and perhaps its illegality.  Sessions has declared that adults coming into the US are presumed to be lawbreakers, “illegal.” And to be “processed” as “illegals,” they must be taken into adult custody where they cannot take their children.

Most of the migrants coming to our borders are families with children, many of them young , even babies.   

Here is what is happening:

1,475 children are unaccounted for between October and December of 2017. According to the Guardian between May 6 and May 19, 658 children were separated from 638 parents bringing the total known separations to over 2,400.

Here is what the president’s own chief of staff said about where the children are being taken:

On May 11, John Kelly assured the American people, “The children will be taken care of – put into foster care or whatever.” 

Here’s what this means:

The children – and their separation from their parents – are the new border wall.   We as Americans, as parents and grandparents and heirs to the stories of our elders as they built “family” over the generations, must join together to stop this cruelty.

My next posts will highlight two heroes in this effort:  a senator who demanded to see – and show the nation -- the conditions of internment and detention these migrants face, and the lawyer nun who can tell us ways to intervene.

To leave a comment, please click on the "comments" pencil

The Children are Watching

Image Source:  http://pix11.com/2017/09/11/artist-creates-giant-photo-of-toddler-looking-over-u-s-mexico-border-wall/

A child, wide-eyed, peers over a wall. 

He does not know barriers. He know curiosity, questions, possibilities.  

Who has power?  The builders of tall, menacing columns of steel lined up as far as the eye can see?  The fear shouters?   The definers of out and in, us and them, friend and foe?

Or the child whose mind leaps over the barricades of exclusion.  The child who can’t help exploring beyond what he can see.  The child who reminds us that our actions--and, even more, our failures to act--are being watched.  The child who must wonder if this wall of steel will always form the backdrop of his life.

The artist JR brilliantly and imaginatively takes us to the border and, through this beautiful child, takes down the wall.  I could not be more grateful for his creative vision, his kindness and humor, and his courage in shattering the silliest – and scariest – monuments to fear.   And I am grateful to the mom and little boy who, living in the shadow of oppressive (and insulting) barriers, bring grace to the border.  

Ten-year-olds tackle ‘The Lie’ of demeaning stereotypes in video

Video source:  Washington Post

Albert Schweitzer (I believe it was in the "Teaching of Reverence for Life") wrote that we do harm to children -- and to our world -- when we encourage them to "grow out of" their natural early idealism.  When I circulated this video made by children speaking up against hate, Pansy Gee, recently retired teacher of 10-year-olds, sent this spontaneously eloquent and hopeful response:

I am pleasantly not surprised by the kids' reactions.  For the most part, kids are open- minded, blind to skin color, tolerant, and much more loving of their fellow man than adults.     The indignant reactions of children, when confronted with issues of prejudice or stereotypes is the one of the truest forms of social justice and  hope for the future.  It is when the adults in their lives deem that children are "old enough" to be "taught" about the "real world" that they begin to conform to their parents' world.  It is why I chose most of the books I did.  I wanted to open those lines of communication.  Sometimes I was not well liked by the parents. 

Reading those books about the prejudices of post-civil war times in Mildred Taylor's Friendship, the way the Okies were treated in California as depicted in the Cobblestone Magazine, or issues of personal freedom in The Giver and the discussions that ensued are what I miss about the classroom.  I am not just another adult voice that perhaps the kids would listen to.  I hope I am encouraging open minds, blindness to skin color, tolerance and love (or at least respect) for all. If children learned to read, write and talk skillfully and understand that we don't all have to agree on everything, their community, our world would be a bit more sane.  I hope teachers see the importance of reading REAL texts about REAL issues and give the boys and girls the opportunity to not just know the material, but to wrestle with it.  It's good to let them think through and struggle with the problems of their world. Teachers should give them chances to form opinions and to stand on the knowledge they're learning as support. Every teacher should have a classroom community where ideas are encouraged and can be exchanged safely, where minds can change more than once and no matter what-- as a class we care about each other! 

TEACHING THE US-MEXICO BORDER, Part 6
SIGNS AND STORIES

“Using in one tongue the word for a thing in the other makes the attributes of both resound:  if you say Give me fire when they say Give me a light, what is not to be learned about fire, light and the act of giving?  It’s not another way of saying things:  these are new things.” 

Makina, in Signs

How do we learn the new things we need to live with each other in a world of increasingly harsh divisions, of rigidifying claims of “us” and “other,” of rising barriers physical and metaphorical?

I find power – if not always answers – in story.  And for this series on teaching the US border with Mexico as more than a line, as more than a contested territory or symbolic conflict zone, I can recommend no more compelling story than this new novel by Yuri Herrera:  Signs Preceding the End of the World.

Signs is a slim book, almost minimalist. Yet even the most spare sentence is, as one critic said, both “poetic and defamiliarizing.” Makina, a young Mexican woman, journeys north to carry two messages:  one from her mother to her brother who has preceded her in crossing the border and one from a character almost mythically representative of violence and shadows and unanswered questions.

I just discovered this book (thank goodness for Brazos, our neighborhood independent bookstore!) and got lost in the poetry of the words, the perils of unknowns, the insights of this courageous and perceptive young woman.  I’m planning to re-read it this summer just for the beauty of it. And I want to see how I might use it with my students who are preparing to teach in our urban schools, schools where many of the students will know a Makina or who will see something of their family’s story in hers.   

Teach this book in your US history class, your world studies or cultures courses, your literature classes in English or in Spanish (how interesting it would be for students to compare this masterful translation with the original Spanish), or save it for your teacher book group.  As Makina notes how even slight shifts in word choice can say “new things,” Herrera gives us fire, gives us light, shows us new things we could not have known without Signs.

BORDERS:  WALLS OR BRIDGES?

TEACHING THE US-MEXICO BORDER, Part 5

Into the Beautiful North: Nayeli’s Magnificent Border Story

The Jaguar’s Children, the brilliantly written novel by John Vaillant, tells of the harrowing journey of two young men who, for every different reasons, put their lives in the hands (and sealed up water tanker truck) of ruthless coyotes to make their way from Oaxaca and Mexico DF to “the North.”  Hector’s mother wants him to stay, but his father urges him to go –for reasons hidden in the father’s past and hoped for in the son’s future. César is on the run for a more urgent reason.  Their suspenseful saga calls forth the powers of the ancient symbol of the jaguar, sees strange new claims on their people’s life source: corn, and holds out the promise of a bright new future for smart young men who made it to university.   

Theirs is a tale of men, strong and able and intelligent and educated young men, leaving for El Norte.  Into the Beautiful North shows what remains of life – of family life and community life --in the villages where all the men – all but the very oldest – have left to cross the border in the collapse of their local economy.  Into the Beautiful North, by the poet, novelist and journalist Luis Alberto Urrea, is a laugh-out-loud picaresque novel about one such village, the absence of men, and a young woman who decides to do something about it. 

Nayeli, a 19-year-old former high school soccer star and server at La Mano Caída, “The Fallen Hand” taco stand.  She despairs that her father has gone north to “Los Yunaites,” as have all the eligible young men of her generation. Her village, Tres Camarones (Three Shrimp), is dying and she is dying of boredom from watching the town’s only movie, The Magnificent Seven.

The movie inspires her quixotic quest:  she will go to the North to round up her own “magnificent seven” men to move back to re-build, and re-populate, her village.  And she’ll find and bring home her father, who years ago quit coming back. 

The novel could be paired with Huckleberry Finn in their journey motif (his escape on a river, hers a river crossing), their picaresque and episodic structure, and the merging of social commentary into the adventures and mishaps and unforgettable people they meet at each new place.  Just as Huck Finn sees right through the piety of the “respectable” people, Nayeli and her side-kicks (yes, some colorful friends come along) learn that the most generous people are the family they encounter living on the Tijuana garbage dumps.   The book is full of contemporary cultural references high school students will recognize (Kanye West, Sabado Gigante, internet).  And, yes, political realities:  the Border Patrol and, by inference, NAFTA:  “Twenty pesos! You couldn’t even afford corn tortillas anymore on twenty pesos.  The Americans were buying up all the maize for fuel and none of the rancheros could afford to use it for food.”

Into the Beautiful North gives voice and unforgettable personality to the ones “left behind” in Mexico and, even more important, in delightfully painful and funny and startling clarity, the story holds a mirror up to taken-for-granted luxuries (electricity, elevators, “small cartons with mushrooms piled inside like snowballs and vegetable bins [that] periodically sang ‘Singin’ in the Rain’” when the sprinklers sprayed the produce”).  And it holds a mirror up to the absurdities that a single line of political geography can make in who has and who needs, who leaves and who stays.  The book provides great fun (and no small amount of poignancy) when Nayeli declares, “We didn’t come here to get boyfriends! We’re on a mission! …. We came to save Tres Camarones!”