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The Pura Belpré Award is named after Pura Belpré, the first Latina librarian at the New York Public Library. The Pura Belpré Award, established in 1996, is presented annually to a Latinx writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth.
We have been marking the award’s 25th anniversary in different ways on the blog. Today, Dr. Sonia Rodriguez and Emily R. Aguiló-Pérez talk about Viva Frida by Yuyi Morales. The book won the 2015 Pura Belpré Illustration Award.
ABOUT THE BOOK: Frida Kahlo, one of the world’s most famous and unusual artists is revered around the world. Her life was filled with laughter, love, and tragedy, all of which influenced what she painted on her canvases.
Distinguished author/illustrator Yuyi Morales illuminates Frida’s life and work in this elegant and fascinating book.
Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez, PhD is an Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College (CUNY) where she teaches composition, literature, and creative writing. Her academic research focuses on decolonial healing in Latinx children’s and young adult literature. Sonia is a Mellon Emerging Faculty Leader.
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Emily R. Aguiló-Pérez is an Assistant Professor of English (Children’s Literature) at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. Her teaching and research are in the areas of children’s literature (particularly Latinx literature), girlhood studies, and children’s cultures. Her published work has focused on girlhood as represented in literature and Puerto Rican girls’ identity formation with Barbie dolls. She has presented research on Latinx children’s books at various conferences and has served on children’s book award committees such as the 2017 Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award and the 2018 Pura Belpré Award. Currently, she is part of the Pennsylvania Center for the Book’s “A Baker’s Dozen” committee.
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Reviewed by Alexandra Someillan
DESCRIPTION OF THE BOOK: Natalie is living her dream: topping the charts and setting records as a Brazilian pop star… until she’s dumped spectacularly on live television. Not only is it humiliating–it could end her career.
Her PR team’s desperate plan? A gorgeous yet oh-so-fake boyfriend. Nati reluctantly agrees, but William is not what she expected. She was hoping for a fierce bad boy–not a soft-hearted British indie film star. While she fights her way back to the top with a sweet and surprisingly swoon-worthy boy on her arm, she starts to fall for William–and realizes that maybe she’s the biggest fake of them all. Can she reclaim her voice and her heart?
MY TWO CENTS: Like a Love Song was the ultimate light-hearted book to get me out of my book funk, and it was the kind of book that reminded me why I love rom-coms so much. Gabriela Martins captures pop culture celebrities today and what it’s like living in a microscope. Natalie faces the pressures of being an international pop star as a young Latina trying to please everyone while dealing with one of the most humiliating breakup in front of the whole world.
As a registered celebrity-obsessed addict, nothing fascinates me more than a book that discusses the complexities of social media and how every move a celebrity makes is dissected and judged, even more so when it comes to young female stars. Natalie is the kind of character that reminds us of famous pop stars like Selena Gomez or Britney Spears and the intense media scrutiny they endure daily. She faces the heartbreaking reality of the constant expectation to be the poised and perfect pop star even after having her celebrity boyfriend break up with her on live television seconds before receiving her award.
Just like in the typical pop culture of today, Natalie getting dumped becomes a meme that is constantly posted and retweeted on social media. The author explores the distinction between male and female celebrities in a nuanced way and provides a realistic portrayal of who the public usually chooses to target in the aftermath of a scandal. Unfortunately, Natalie is the target, and her ex-boyfriend Trent comes out unscathed while her PR team scrambles to save Natalie’s career. Of course, the PR strategy involves getting her a fake boyfriend when all Natalie wants is to hide under the covers and stalk her ex-boyfriend’s Instagram.
Even though I thought that the relationship between Natalie and William was one of the most adorable opposites-attract love stories with all the rom-com feels, I came out of the story wanting more between these two characters. Normally, I am all about insta-love stories. Still, I felt that the relationship that developed between Natalie and William was a bit rushed, and this is probably due to the book being a relatively short read. Other than that, there were plenty of swoon-worthy parts in this book, and there were many times I caught myself smiling from ear to ear, loving the dynamic between a world-famous, glamorous pop singer and an indie actor with quirky socks.
One of Natalie’s main struggles that I found deeply relatable revolves around the theme of identity and what it means to be Brazilian. Throughout the story, Natalie questions her heritage and feels alienated from her Brazilian family. She chooses to assimilate to American culture, but she knows deep inside that something is missing. I loved the journey that Natalie goes through to find herself, and it’s something I can understand growing up Cuban-American in an extremely Americanized family.
This book is needed in Latinx publishing because it is one of the few rom-coms written by a Brazilian author, with a Brazilian main character, with queer representation, and features all the rom-com tropes we all know and love! Like a Love Song is the kind of story that reminds us to be ourselves instead of trying to meet other people’s expectations. When you are yourself, the people who accept you are the people who will be around you for life.
TEACHING TIPS: Gabriela Martin’s book could be used in a life skills class, where students could discuss the pressures of representing certain parts of yourself on social media and how to deal with online bullying.
There is a great activity where you can divide students into groups of four. You can have them create a social media campaign poster, skit, video, Instagram post, or short story related to online bullying, challenging the pressures of social media and learning how to protect yourself from cyberbullying. The activity includes many graphic organizers and templates students can use to organize their ideas.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR (from her website https://www.gabrielawrites.com/):GABRIELA MARTINS is a Brazilian kidlit author and linguist. Her stories feature Brazilian characters finding themselves and love. She was a high school teacher and has also worked as a TED Ed-Club facilitator, where she helped teens develop their own talks in TED format to present. She edited and self-published a pro-bono LGBTQ+ anthology (KEEP FAITH) with all funds going to queer people in need. When she’s not writing, she can be found cuddling with her two cats, or singing loudly and off-key.
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ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Alexandra Someillan is a freelance book reviewer and teacher who lives in Miami, FL. She has written for Frolic Media, where she has raved about her favorite Latinx romances. Currently, she has been accepted in the Las Musas mentorship and is working on her Latinx contemporary novel with Nina Moreno. Usually, you can find Alexandra obsessing over nineties pop culture and eating too many pastelitos.
We are an affiliate with Indiebound and Bookshop. If If you make a purchase through these links, at no additional cost to you, we will earn a small commission.
The Pura Belpré Award is named after Pura Belpré, the first Latina librarian at the New York Public Library. The Pura Belpré Award, established in 1996, is presented annually to a Latinx writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth.
We have been marking the award’s 25th anniversary in different ways on the blog. Today, Dr. Sonia Rodriguez and Emily R. Aguiló-Pérez talk about Esquivel!: Space-Age Sound Artist by Susan Wood, illustrated by Duncan Tonatiuh. The book won the 2017 Pura Belpré Illustration Honor Award.
ABOUT THE BOOK: Gorgeously illustrated by Duncan Tonatiuh, this lively biography follows Juan Garcia Esquivel from Mexico to New York City. Juan grew up to the sounds of mariachi bands; he loved music and became a musical explorer. Defying convention, he created music that made people laugh and planted images in their minds. His musical dreams brought him from Mexico to America and gained him worldwide renown. Juan’s space-age lounge music—popular in the fifties and sixties—has found a new generation of listeners. This account honors Esquivel as one of the great composers of the 20th century.
Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez, PhD is an Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College (CUNY) where she teaches composition, literature, and creative writing. Her academic research focuses on decolonial healing in Latinx children’s and young adult literature. Sonia is a Mellon Emerging Faculty Leader.
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Emily R. Aguiló-Pérez is an Assistant Professor of English (Children’s Literature) at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. Her teaching and research are in the areas of children’s literature (particularly Latinx literature), girlhood studies, and children’s cultures. Her published work has focused on girlhood as represented in literature and Puerto Rican girls’ identity formation with Barbie dolls. She has presented research on Latinx children’s books at various conferences and has served on children’s book award committees such as the 2017 Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award and the 2018 Pura Belpré Award. Currently, she is part of the Pennsylvania Center for the Book’s “A Baker’s Dozen” committee.
We are an affiliate with Indiebound and Bookshop. If If you make a purchase through these links, at no additional cost to you, we will earn a small commission.
Reviewed by María Dolores Águila
DESCRIPTION OF THE BOOK: Mateo Garcia and his younger sister, Sophie, have been taught to fear one word for as long as they can remember: deportation. Over the past few years, however, the fear that their undocumented immigrant parents could be sent back to Mexico started to fade. Ma and Pa have been in the United States for so long, they have American-born children, and they’re hard workers and good neighbors. When Mateo returns from school one day to find that his parents have been taken by ICE, he realizes that his family’s worst nightmare has become a reality. With his parents’ fate and his own future hanging in the balance, Mateo must figure out who he is and what he is capable of, even as he’s forced to question what it means to be an American.
Daniel Aleman’s Indivisibleis a remarkable story — both powerful in its explorations of immigration in America and deeply intimate in its portrait of a teen boy driven by his fierce, protective love for his parents and his sister.
MY TWO CENTS: I read this book in one sitting. I couldn’t put it down because I had to find out what was going to happen to Mateo and Sophie. Daniel Aleman does an amazing job of pulling the reader deeper and deeper into Mateo’s world with every turn of the page.
“Ma is always telling me how I feel too much.”
This is the opening line of the novel, and it does an excellent job of encapsulating who Mateo is and helps the reader understand Mateo’s point of view. When things are heavy, they drag him down. When things are good, he’s floating on air.
Within the first ten pages, the stakes of the story become apparent. Mateo’s working at his parent’s bodega, Adela’s Corner Store, stacking tortillas, when an ICE Agent comes and asks about his father. As the cashier informs the ICE Agent that Mateo’s father is not there, Mateo watches in horror, cycling through emotions – shock, fear, and ultimately numbness.
For a few days, the Garcia family is in limbo, constantly looking over their shoulder, while they wait to see what’s going to happen. When will they come back? And why is ICE looking for Mateo’s father anyway? Enough time passes and the family writes the incident off as a fluke, and Mateo goes back to focusing on his SAT and GPA so he can go to NYU and pursue his Broadway dreams.
The next day, he’s hit with the worst news possible: his parents were arrested by ICE while he was at school.
Mateo’s world is flipped upside down, and as a reader, I was devastated when he had to tell Sophie the news. Mateo finds himself as the head of household, having to take care of his parent’s bodega, their apartment, and his little sister. He turns inward, and keeps what happened to himself, not even telling his best friends Adam and Kimmie what has transpired.
It’s heart wrenching to read about the impacts on a family ripped apart by ICE, and readers will empathize with Mateo’s struggle to keep his emotions contained and act like nothing happened. When things can’t get any worse, we learn that CPS is looking for Mateo and Sophie. In a desperate bid to keep his sister with him, Mateo contacts his Uncle Jorge, who’s really a family friend, and asks to stay with him until his parents have their court hearing.
While Uncle Jorge is happy to have Mateo and Sophie stay at his apartment, his wife Amy, who just had a baby, is not thrilled. Pressure builds as they struggle to cohabitate and learn that his parents’ court hearing did not go in their favor. They have been deported and find themselves back in Mexico after building a life in the United States for the last twenty years.
It’s another blow. Mateo had been hoping against hope that things would go back to normal, but it’s clear now that things will never be the same. Sophie takes the news worse than Mateo does. She is crushed by the turn of events and falls into a deep depression.
Meanwhile, Mateo’s parents struggle to find jobs, housing, and a way to support themselves. They want the kids to stay in the United States and finish their schooling, but Sophie is desperate to be reunited with their parents. Mateo doesn’t know how he is supposed to continue to take care of the bodega, their apartment, and Sophie while pursuing his dreams now that he knows his parents are not coming back anytime soon.
This further complicates the situation with Uncle Jorge, where a temporary stay has turned indefinite, escalating the tension in the household and things begin to unravel.
Daniel slowly realizes that he cannot do it by himself, and he reluctantly opens up to his friends about what’s happened. To his surprise, they rally around him, supporting him in ways he never expected.
Mateo’s story ends on an unexpected, yet bittersweet note, tinged with sadness, but still full of hope.
“And no matter how hard they tried to separate us, how much the distance hurt, or how it nearly broke us, we are really, truly indivisible.”
Daniel Aleman’s Indivisible masterfully weaves a raw and heartfelt story that dares the reader to look away from the aftermath of what happens when ICE tears apart a family. Aleman challenges readers to examine their own biases when it comes to immigration and the myth of the “good immigrant”. At the core of this story, we discover how love allows perseverance in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds and propels us through it. In between these moments of deep despair, there is also levity, in the form of a sweet queer romance with someone who Mateo never expected and other tiny bits of joy with his best friends, that give the reader reprieve. The themes of this text — immigration, mixed status families, citizenship, family, love, hope, and friends — easily lead to complex discussions for book clubs and classrooms. Fans of We Are Not From Hereby Jenny Torres Sánchez, I’m Not You’re Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika Sánchez, and Furiaby Yamile Saied Méndez will enjoy reading this book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (from his website): Daniel Aleman was born and raised in Mexico City. A graduate of McGill University, he is passionate about books, coffee, and dogs. After spending time in Montreal and the New York City area, he now lives in Toronto, where he is on a never-ending search for the best tacos in the city. He is the debut author of Indivisible, a young adult novel available now from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.
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ABOUT THE REVIEWER: María Dolores Águila is a Chicana writer based in San Diego, California. She writes picture books, middle grade and young adult novels celebrating and exploring the nuances of Chicanx culture and identity. She’s also a moderator of Kidlit Latinx, a writing group dedicated to supporting and amplifying Latinx voices in Children’s Literature. She has a forthcoming picture book coming in 2023. She is represented by Lindsay Auld of Writers House Literary Agency. Connect with her on Instagram and Twitter.
Beto won’t wear a guayabera to the wedding. Nope! Nunca! Not going to happen! Beto tries his best to rid himself of the traditional Mexican wedding shirt his Mami gave him. He even gets help from his dog Lupe, but the shirt ends up back on his bed each time with notes from Mami, who becomes increasingly frustrated with Beto. Mami insists that Beto attend the wedding, and wear the shirt, because—after all—it’s her wedding! Beto has to accept the fact that Mami is getting remarried and that she wants him to wear the shirt, which is part of his heritage.
Three Pockets Full by Cindy L. Rodriguez carries key concepts of family, love, and tradition and explores change and new experiences. This book comes with a Reader’s Guide for children, a free download from the publisher website. Lesson plans, activities, and discussion questions allow parents, teachers, and caregivers to explore the topics further and deepen comprehension.
Begoña Fernández Corbalán was born and raised in a small town in Spain. As a child she loved to draw, so when she grew up she knew that she wanted to get a degree in Fine Arts. After finishing her degree, she specialized in illustration, and since then has dedicated herself to it. In her free time she likes to sit in the sun in the garden and observe how the light changes at different times of the day, something that she tries to reflect in her work. She has worked with techniques such as watercolor, gouache and colored pencil, but she sticks to digital illustration because of the great advantages it offers when working.
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And, here are some comments from the author about the seeing the artwork:
I’m in love with the cover that Begoña created! I especially love that the reader can see a wedding ring in each of the pockets and the picture in the third. These important items play a role in the story, so–here goes my teacher brain kicking in–educators and parents can ask young readers to look at these details on the cover and make predictions about what the story will be about. I also love the dog, Lupe, who takes part in the action of story. Quite honestly, Lupe kind of steals the show in Begoña’s interior illustrations, and, as a dog lover, I am entirely fine with that!
Today, we have the creators of Alejandria Fights Back! / ¡La Lucha de Alejandria!, a picture book released earlier this year as part of the Rise-Home Stories Project by The Feminist Press. The Rise-Home Stories Project is an innovative collaboration between multimedia storytellers and social justice advocates from several grassroots organizations who work at the nexus of housing, land, and racial justice in the US. The creators, in conversation through the link below, are Leticia Hernández-Linares and Robert LiuTrujillo.
LETICIA HERNÁNDEZ-LINARES is a bilingual, interdisciplinary writer, artist, and racial justice educator. The first-generation US-born daughter of Salvadoran immigrants, she is the author of Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl (Tía Chucha Press).
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ROBERT LIU-TRUJILLO is a life long Bay Area resident. Born in Oakland California, he’s the child of student activists who watched lots of science fiction and took him to many demonstrations. Always drawing, Rob grew up to be an artist falling in love with graffiti, fine art, illustration, murals, and children’s books. In that order, sort of. Through storytelling he’s been able to scratch the surface of so many untold stories. Rob is the author and illustrator of Furqan’s First Flat Top. He’s a dad of a teenage boy and a brand new baby girl. He loves ice cream and his wife who laughs big and corrects his grammar every chance she gets. Down with the system and soggy french fries!
Before we get to the conversation between the creators, here is the book’s description:
For nine-year-old Alejandria, home isn’t just the apartment she shares with Mami and her abuela, Tita, but rather the whole neighborhood. Home is the bakery where Ms. Beatrice makes yummy picos; the sidewalk where Ms. Alicia sells flowers with her little dog, Duende; and the corner store with friendly Mr. Amir. But lately the city has been changing, and rent prices are going up. Many people in el barrio are leaving because they can no longer afford their homes, and For Sale signs are popping up everywhere. Then the worst thing happens: Mami receives a letter saying they’ll have to move out too. Alejandria knows it isn’t fair, but she’s not about to give up and leave. Join Alejandria as she brings her community together to fight and save their neighborhood from gentrification!
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Now, check out the the book trailer:
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Finally, click on the play button below to listen to the creators discuss their book, Latinx representation in children’s literature, bilingual books, and youth activism.
Latinxs in Kid Lit 