Review and Author Q&A: Churro Stand by Karina N. González and Illustrated by Krystal Quiles

One summer day, the scent of buttery vanilla fills Lucía’s family kitchen. Her fingers become coated in cinnamon sugar. Before her are trays of churros.

“Mamá’s work begins before the sun is up,” the girl narrates. “Each churro is made with love and destined for a hungry belly.”

Lucía’s mother stands in front of the stove, cradling a large pot of the pastry dough. A half-dozen churros sizzle in a pan.

Soon, it’s time to head out into the streets of New York City. Lucía, her brother Santiago, and Mamá are hoping to sell churros today. 

From award-winning author-illustrator duo Karina N. González and Krystal Quiles comes Churro Stand, a heartwarming picture book that celebrates working-class families, community, and love. Out on April 16 from Cameron Kids, the book follows Lucía as she helps her mother try to support their family. There’s a gentle reminder here, too, about the role children of working-class parents sometimes have to play in order to push ahead. El Carrito de Churros – a Spanish version of the book – will be published simultaneously.

González – a bilingual speech-language pathologist in Brooklyn – was partly inspired to write Churro Stand after seeing a mother selling the sugar-coated fried dough inside a subway station. The woman had her daughter with her. “That reminded me of my mom and me, and how I would always accompany my mother to work. And how I’d complain or try to rush her,” González told Latinx in Publishing. “As children, we don’t understand all the sacrifices that our parents make for us.”

Lucía’s admiration for her mother shines in Churro Stand – thanks to González’s text full of childlike wonder. And Quiles brings forth a visual snack for readers, layering painted textures and multiple drawing mediums to capture the spirit of summertime fun and the beauty of community.

Churro Stand is the second book González and Quiles will publish together. Their first, The Coquíes Still Sing, was published by Roaring Brook Press in August 2023 and received a Pura Belpré Youth Author and Illustrator Honor.

Ahead of the release of Churro Stand, González spoke with me about depicting a street vendor in a children’s book, working with Quiles again, and more.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Amaris Castillo (AC): Congratulations on Churro Stand. What inspired this story?

Karina N. González (KNG): I love getting asked this question about this book because I feel like ultimately everything I write has an underlying social message and a political message, even. In a mayor’s race in New York City several years ago, there was a certain mayoral candidate who went on a tirade against street vendors – particularly food vendors – and how they were taking away business from brick-and-mortar shops. They even specifically mentioned the women who sell churros in the subway stations in New York City, or on the sidewalks. At that time, I’d been seeing videos of NYPD confiscating street vendors’ food, taking away their carts, or giving them fines. I felt like this was really blown out of proportion, and unfair to these people who come here looking to just make some money. Oftentimes they’re women and they have children. They might be single mothers. And so this whole political climate that was going on in New York City that summer inspired me to think about: Could I possibly write a picture book about this? 

In the author’s note, I reference a particular scene when I was coming home from work. I remember seeing a mother selling churros at the Broadway Junction subway station, and she had her daughter next to her. That reminded me of my mom and me, and how I would always accompany my mother to work. And how I’d complain or try to rush her. As children, we don’t understand all the sacrifices that our parents make for us. So all of these different experiences, what I was seeing in the news cycle and with my own eyes, compounded my whole vision and inspired me to write this story.

AC: In your book, Lucía and her brother join their mom as she heads to Manhattan to sell churros. Lucía is a keen observer of her mom’s churro-making and the way she navigates her work. What was it like to write about a street vendor through a child’s eyes?

KNG: I found it really fun, actually, because I work with children. I’m a bilingual speech-language pathologist at an elementary and middle school in Brooklyn, New York. I have students who have parents who work in hospitality, or who deliver food, or who are food vendors or street vendors. And so I often hear their stories, and their stories inspire mine. Writing this story from Lucía’s perspective also felt very personal for me. As children of working-class parents, we often get roped into our parents’ jobs without really realizing it. I wanted to show the reality that a lot of children experience throughout this nation, and even throughout the world. She comes along with mom on her workday, and she’s actively engaging to help Mami’s business succeed, and thereby helping the family as a whole and helping their community. I felt that very much when I was growing up. I’d help my mom all the time at work.

That feeling of children helping their parents, and all the wonder that they have in their eyes for their parents and all the sacrifices they make, you can kind of see that in Lucía when she interacts with her mom and how she views simple tasks that her mom does. Like how her mom waving the ladle while making the churros reminds Lucía of a magic wand.

“The heart of the story is the message of the working-class people and the magical heroism of working parents, grandparents, and guardians. I just want to make sure that we acknowledge all the sacrifices that working-class parents go through, and I think this book gave me the opportunity to delve into that topic.

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AC: That was a beautiful line. And I don’t want to spoil anything, but something happens in the book that threatens to jeopardize Lucía’s mom’s earnings. Relatably, in your author’s note you write that many street vendors work in unsavory conditions. What kind of research did you do for this book, and what did you learn about what it’s like to be a street vendor today?

KNG: I definitely did a lot of research. Even if I hadn’t written this book, it’s a topic that I’m very interested in. Like I said, I have my own anecdotal experiences just living in New York City and seeing the harassment that street vendors and food vendors experience. But there’s a lot of media around the harassment that street vendors experience in New York City, and many other cities across the nation. One particular organization that I follow closely is called the Street Vendor Project. They often document the harassment that they (vendors) experience at the hands of local police, or even citizens who come and harass them while they’re just simply selling food.

It was quite a task to go through the research. Although this is a pretty straightforward book and I’m not going into depth about the harassment that they face, it’s kind of implicit in the story. It was part of my intention, although I don’t explicitly state it. The heart of the story is the message of the working-class people and the magical heroism of working parents, grandparents, and guardians. I just want to make sure that we acknowledge all the sacrifices that working-class parents go through, and I think this book gave me the opportunity to delve into that topic.

AC: For Churro Stand you teamed up again with illustrator Krystal Quiles. What was it like to work with her again?

KNG: It’s a blast. Krystal is so talented. When The Coquíes Still Sing came out and we wrapped it up, we had our first book signing at Books of Wonder near Union Square. After we signed our books, we walked around the corner and found a local tapas bar. We noticed that they sold churros. And we thought, Wow, this is so serendipitous. So later that day and several months later, we would take trips to Union Square and she would sketch. I would accompany her and just watch her sketch and admire her. She was looking for inspiration and getting ideas. We would talk about the book. 

All I told Krystal was that I was thinking of a pastel palette. The Coquíes Still Sing was very vibrant, very lush, because Puerto Rico is tropical. We both had an idea of the palette, but all I said to her was that I was thinking of pastel colors. She said that she agreed, and she was thinking exactly the same thing. And voilà! This book is a dessert dreamland – colors that remind you of summertime, of desserts. And so it was a blast working with her again and seeing her work her magic.

AC: What are you hoping readers take away from Churro Stand?

KNG: The core of this story is about working-class families. In children’s literature I want to make sure that there are honest depictions of families that exist in this country. That it’s not a one-dimensional depiction of families. That we are honest in that there are children who have parents who work as street vendors, as people who deliver food, and that we make sure that those folks are depicted in a way that shows the dignity of their existence. 

Although Lucía is kind of like the main character driving the story, for me I feel like the mom is the main character. She’s the heart of the story. We don’t see too many picture books where the parent is at the core of the story, and I really wanted to make sure that that was part of the book. This sense that mom is this magical heroine in this story, and why is mami the magical heroine? And all the things that mami does to make sure that they’re OK, and that they’re well fed, and that they’re enjoying themselves and that she’s providing for them. All of that was part of the story-making process. I’d like, at the end of the day, for people to really focus on that, and also enjoy Krystal’s amazing illustrations. I’ve read the book so many times, but I’ll find myself at home just flipping through the book. I live in New York City and it’s easy to hate on this city sometimes. But this story, when I look through the images and I think about all the amazing food and amazing cultures of the city, it makes me realize, Wow, this city is really special. I hope that people walk away with the feeling that our cities are really beautiful, and we should appreciate all of the cultures and communities that exist within.

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Karina N. González is a bilingual speech-language pathologist at an elementary school in Brooklyn, where she uses storytelling as a tool for language development with her students. She is also the author of The Coquies Still Sing, for which she received a Pura Belpré Author Honor.

Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Aster(ix) Journal, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms Be Like… (part of the Dominican Writers Association’s #DWACuenticos chapbook series), and most recently Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, “El Don,” was a prize finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. She is a proud member of Latinx in Publishing’s Writers Mentorship Class of 2023 and lives in Florida with her family and dog.

Interview: ‘Mani Semilla Finds Her Quetzal Voice’ by Anna Lapera

Life sucks when you’re twelve. That’s according to Manuela “Mani” Semilla, the main protagonist of Anna Lapera’s debut middle grade novel, Mani Semilla Finds Her Quetzal Voice.

“And what sucks even more than being a half-Chinese-Filipino-American half-Guatemalan who can’t speak any ancestral language well?” Mani asks. “When almost every other girl in school has already gotten her period except for you and your two besties, Kai and Connie. And everybody’s looking at you like you’re still some little girl with no real-life knowledge to go with those big, stupid, purple-framed glasses.”

Right now Mani is laser-focused on two things: getting her period, and trying to foil her mom’s plan of bringing her to Guatemala on her thirteenth birthday. But first periods don’t arrive when you want them to. And at home and at school, Mani struggles with finding what her grandmother calls her quetzal voice. Abuelita always likens Mani to the Guatemalan quetzal bird – “rare and powerful.”

Then one day in her family’s attic, Mani stumbles upon secret letters between her mom and her aunt, Beatriz. Mani always heard that her Tía Beatriz died in a bus crash. But these letters point to other truths, and even more stories about violence against women – thrusting Mani on a journey to learn about not just her family, but herself. She begins to make certain connections to a culture of sexual harassment in her school. Can Mani build the courage and learn to stand up against it?

Out on March 5 from Levine Querido, Mani Semilla Finds Her Quetzal Voice is a kaleidoscopic story about feminism, female empowerment, activism, and so much more. This novel is at times hilarious, at times heartbreaking, and at times infuriating as readers are brought into the many trials of middle schoolers.

I loved this novel in part because I related to Mani in some ways. She’s trying to figure out who she is, what her relationship is to her mom’s native country – and in what shape her activism can take. Lapera brings a sharp eye toward injustices against girls and women with heart and the right dose of humor.

Latinx in Publishing spoke with Lapera about the inspiration behind Mani Semilla Finds Her Quetzal Voice, what it was like to thread in themes like activism, and more.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Amaris Castillo (AC): Congratulations on Mani Semilla Finds Her Quetzal Voice. What inspired you to write this story?

Anna Lapera (AL): This started as a short story. After years of not writing, I took this year-long short story workshop for adult writing. For the very first story, it was like two days before I had to turn something in. I hadn’t written in so long that I really felt stuck. And then someone asked me, ‘Do you remember the first time you got your period?’ And all these memories came back. And I was like, I want to write a period story. There’s a whole list of books about period stories, but not a ton. I think that first time you get your period is worthy of a story, so I want to write that. It started as this super messy 10-page short story about a girl obsessed with getting her period. That’s it. But I had a lot of fun writing it. 

In the course of a couple of years, I was lucky enough to do the Musas Mentorship Program as a mentee. I developed this short story into a full-length novel, which was the suggestion from my short story instructor, Ivelisse Rodriguez. She was like, ‘You know, you really write YA. And this should be a novel.’ I hadn’t even considered it. But then it all made sense. And as I wrote the novel, I realized that it was about so much more. Not that just writing about periods isn’t enough. I think there’s so much richness in that. But it did become about more. The period is the way in which the character ends up connecting her family story with the central question to the book, which is: What does it mean to be a feminist? And what that means for the protagonist in her American setting. But then also what it meant to the other women in her life. It ended up being about more than that. But that was the inspiration. That was the original seed.

AC: Your main character, Manuela Semilla, is smart, funny and astute. She has such a keen awareness of her family dynamics and surroundings, yet there are still a lot of things she doesn’t know – among them is her family history as it relates to her Tía Beatriz. What was it like for you to craft this compelling character who stumbles on a piece of her hidden history? 

AL: It was really interesting because, at first, Tía Beatriz was a side character. I had thrown it in because what I really wanted to capture was that feeling that I think a lot of kids can relate with: you know you have this big family history that takes place somewhere outside of where you currently are. I just wanted to capture that ambiguity – how sometimes you’re interested in it. Sometimes you’re not. Sometimes you want to know nothing about it. I was like, What can I do to showcase that? Let me just throw in these letters. I loved the idea of her stumbling upon something secret. I had a couple of letters in there, and everyone who read the story or different chapters were like, ‘These letters are great. Can we see more of them?’ So I was like, ‘Fine, I’ll throw in another letter here and there.’ 

And then as I did that, I started to realize that that was such a huge part of the story. It’s through those letters that Mani learns about Guatemalan history – the good and the bad. The bad as in what was happening to activists, especially women, and the issue of femicide. But I also wanted to make sure that, through the letters, she also sees a side of Guatemala that’s really beautiful. A side of Guatemala that people in her family loved. I tried to do a mix of that because I also wanted to be careful. I would say that, especially in US schools, Central American history isn’t really taught. I would say the average person does not know a lot about Guatemala. And so I wanted to be careful with how I portrayed it while also being very authentic with how Mani experiences it. At first she’s like, Why would I want to go there? This was happening? And then later, it starts to pique her interest and she sees, like any place, the beautiful and the ugly really going together. 

I’m not a journalist. I don’t have a journalism background, but I love writing about journalists and I love journalists. In everything I write there’s always a journalist. It’s really funny. But I did think, How can I best convey what it is I wanted to write about? Which was violence against women in an extreme form, and then also in a seemingly not extreme form. Because that’s where she starts to make the connection. She reads these letters and she’s like, Wait, is this all that different from what I see going on? And of course, it’s different – but at one point, Mani poses that question: Is it all part of the same thread? Is it all the same culture of harassment that will eventually support something like that?

“It was also important for me as a teacher who has seen, especially since COVID, an uptick in violence in schools and just not wanting for that to be normalized. It matters a lot to me that kids feel physically safe in school, and so I wanted to shed light on a group of kids who think that is a worthy cause to fight for: the right to feel physically safe in schools. That their bodies are safe.
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AC: Your book touches on many themes – among them activism, feminism, coming–of-age. Why was it important for you to focus on these for this particular story?

AL: I love coming-of-age stories. I love reading them. They’re literally my favorite kind of story. It was important for me to mix that with feminism and activism because I wanted to showcase a girl that’s really learning how to step into her activism, and how it’s super messy. She doesn’t always get it right. I definitely didn’t write it in a way so that everyone could be cheering her every move. She definitely messes up along the way. But eventually she ends up finding what her most authentic form of activism is. And of course, largely inspired by her Tía Beatriz.

It was also important for me as a teacher who has seen, especially since COVID, an uptick in violence in schools and just not wanting for that to be normalized. It matters a lot to me that kids feel physically safe in school, and so I wanted to shed light on a group of kids who think that is a worthy cause to fight for: the right to feel physically safe in schools. That their bodies are safe. And so it was important to me on a personal level, but then I also thought it fit Mani’s arc and her journey and her own coming-into-activism story.

AC: You do a tremendous job of weaving in pieces of Guatemalan history, particularly women’s movements in Latin America. Tell us about your research. Did you learn anything new or surprising while conducting research for Mani?

AL: It wasn’t a lot of heavy research. A lot of it was things that I knew just from having been born in Guatemala, and of course, all the stories you hear. I had also studied Latin American studies and always focused on that in every class. I did a really amazing study abroad in Argentina and Uruguay that focused on women’s movements. Even though those are different countries, it made me read up on women’s movements in all of Latin America, especially Guatemala. But I had always focused on the ‘70s and ‘80s. And so I didn’t know a lot about the ‘90s. 

Just in my research, I came upon this singer, Rebeca Lane. Mani is obsessed with this Mexican-Costa Rican singer, Chavela Vargas. It’s her cousin C.C. who introduces her to a contemporary singer, Rebeca Lane. I ended up making a playlist and I was listening a lot to her. And so then Mani starts to reference her in the book. It was really cool for me to hear and read about women today in these last few years, who are singing and are women’s rights activists – and also still actively working to stop violence against women.

AC: What are you hoping readers take away from Mani Semilla Finds Her Quetzal Voice?

AL: A lot of things. One: I hope it inspires people to write more period stories, even though that’s one thread of the book. I also hope it inspires kids to see that there are so many ways to be an activist, and you just have to choose the one that’s right for you. It doesn’t mean you have to be the loudest. It doesn’t mean you have to be the face of whatever movement you’re doing. There’s growing pains associated with that. It’s a process. Everyone that wants to be an activist has their own journey and an arc of getting there.

But also that everyone’s body deserves to be respected in schools. That whole idea of, ‘Oh, that’s not a big deal’... as teachers we hear that a lot: ‘Oh, no I’m not going to report that. It’s not a big deal. It’s just whatever. That happens all the time.’ That shouldn’t be normalized. So I definitely want readers to walk away feeling like the things that you feel like no one will hear you on are worth speaking up about. And also, I want more people to look up Guatemala.

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Anna Lapera teaches middle school by day and writes stories about girls stepping into their power in the early hours of the morning. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Tin House and Macondo Writer’s Workshop alum, a member of Las Musas and a past Kweli Journal mentee. When she’s not writing, you can find her visiting trails, independent bookstores and coffee shops in Silver Spring, Maryland where she lives with her family.

Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Aster(ix) Journal, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms Be Like… (part of the Dominican Writers Association’s #DWACuenticos chapbook series), and most recently Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, “El Don,” was a prize finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. She is a proud member of Latinx in Publishing’s Writers Mentorship Class of 2023 and lives in Florida with her family and dog.

Interview: Shut Up, This Is Serious by Carolina Ixta

A dark cloud hangs over Belén Dolores Itzel Del Toro’s world in East Oakland. Her father abandoned her family. Her mother – a teacher – has begun to disappear after work, so Belén comes home to an empty house most days. And her older sister, Ava, constantly lectures her about not ending up like their dad.

“I don’t really know what I want to be. It isn’t my fault,” Belén narrates. “After my pa left, I’d cut class, collect my Wendy’s money, and go home to lie in bed. I laid there because I felt like I couldn’t move, like my body was tethered to the mattress.”

At school, Belén cuts class often. She’s now at risk of not graduating high school. There’s also her best friend, Leti, who is expecting a baby with her boyfriend and hasn’t broken the news yet to her parents because he’s Black and they’re racist.

Shut Up, This Is Serious (out now from Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins) is debut author Carolina Ixta’s unforgettable YA novel about a Latina teen’s circuitous path towards healing, and life’s complexities along the way. I found this to be such a richly rendered story with great nuance, care, and an unflinching eye on Ixta’s behalf towards issues like anti-Black racism and inequities in education. Shut Up, This Is Serious is at times heartbreaking, maddening, and hopeful. I didn’t want the novel to end, but was anxious to see where Belén and Leti would end up.

Ixta – herself a Mexican-American from Oakland – spoke with Latinx in Publishing about the inspiration behind Shut Up, This Is Serious, why she chose to address certain real-life issues in her book, and more.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Amaris Castillo (AC): Congratulations on Shut Up, This Is Serious! I read that the inspiration behind your novel was driven, in part, by some resentment you felt growing up in the YA market. Can you elaborate?

Carolina Ixta (CI): The YA market when I was growing up was not at all what it’s like today. And I will say I think we have a long way to go, still, in YA. But when I was growing up, the big names were John Green and Sarah Dessen. The Hunger Games became very popular. Twilight was still very popular. But there just weren’t any Latinos apart from a handful. I remember the book that everyone talked about was The House on Mango Street, which was published in the 80s. There were a couple others, but they were very few and far between. 

When I was younger, I was writing competitively with the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and I was doing their novel writing category. I would do it every year. When I got to college, I took this class on Latino literature… It was the first time that I was reading work by other Latino writers. This was in the literary fiction world, so it was not YA. I was really stunned by the repertoire that the lit fic community had to choose from. I know there’s diversity issues there, as well, but they seem to have so much more. 

I look back at my old work that I’d written when I was in high school or before, and I realize that every character I had written was white. And I had no idea. I just wasn’t cognizant enough of their identity, of my own identity, and I chalked it up a lot to reproducing what I was consuming… I was reading a bunch of books about white people and, somehow in my subconscious, thinking those were my own experiences when they really weren’t. And then reproducing them – writing these characters that were white that weren’t dealing with any of the real issues that I was dealing with in my life. So I felt very resentful. I finished school and went to Berkeley for graduate school. And I started writing a book and reading a lot of middle grade because I was a fifth-grade teacher. In my time away from YA, I realized that there had been this beginning of a renaissance, I’ll say, where I was able to go into the middle grade and YA sections and suddenly there were these big names like Elizabeth Acevedo, Erika L. Sánchez and Jason Reynolds. 

Again, I want to emphasize (that) I feel like we still have lots and lots and lots of work to do. But I didn’t want to feel like I was the first in a conversation. I wanted to feel like I was in conversation with other people. And it was the first time I was able to feel that way. So that’s what really led me to write the book.

AC: Your book largely centers on Belén, a teen from East Oakland who is struggling after her father abandoned the family. She is also at risk of not graduating. She is an incredibly compelling character who doesn’t always make the best choices. What was it like to form this character?

CI: Belén was a really challenging character for me to form because I related to her, but I really didn’t at the same time. I related a lot to her family structure; I was also raised by a single parent. But in terms of her academic performance in high school, I was not that. I was very much an AP student. I did all of my homework. I was a good student growing up. But because I studied to be a teacher, I found that most of the time when students are “underperforming” or truant or missing class, it’s because there’s usually issues at home. If not, they’re responding to systemic obstacles placed in front of them that are working. 

One of the reviews I read of this book was like, ‘Belén hates school.’ I was like, ‘No, no, no. Actually, I think school hates Belén.’ She’s not on the right track. She has teachers who really couldn’t care less what she’s doing. So when I wrote her, I very much wanted her to be opposite to me in my experiences as a student. I wanted her to be opposite to Leti. She’s (Belén) underperforming. She’s cutting class all the time. And I very much wanted her to follow an anti-hero arc; every solution that would seem so clear from the vantage point of a reader or even an adult, she’s not going to take. Because she’s young, right? She’s making a lot of mistakes. I think what made her such an interesting character to write is that she’s making so many mistakes and that the path out of her issues seems very clear, but to her as a 17-year-old girl, it really isn’t. 

In earlier drafts of the book, she’s not making that many mistakes. She’s a little bit too mature. So as I worked with her character, I wanted her to make mistakes and be almost empowered by the mistakes that she is making – specifically in this romantic relationship that she gets into. She’s privy to some information that I think any other cognitive person would be like, ‘Ooh, you should probably stop doing that.’ But given the nature of the situation that she’s in, she’s very much like, ‘This is all I have left.’ I really wanted her character to be a character where the answer seems so clear: ‘Go to class. Do your homework. Don’t go out with this guy.’ But at the same time, I wanted to give her so much of an introspective monologue, where readers then can walk away saying something like, ‘Well, it would make sense why she would do that. She’s in a very, very challenging position.’

For her character, it was really important for me to make sure she was making mistakes that were relevant to a 17-year-old’s experience, but also relevant to someone who’s going through a profoundly challenging time that even some adults haven’t gone through. So for Belén specifically, it was very much walking the line of making her empowered but also still making her immature and making her a child, and behave very much like a child.

AC: You touch on some real-life issues within our community: anti-Blackness, colorism in the Latinx community, inequity in education, differences in class. You’re also an elementary school teacher. What drove you to address these themes in your novel?

CI: Very much my experiences growing up, and then the experience of being a teacher. I am a white-presenting Latina. My sister is not. She’s a Black-presenting Latina, even though nobody in our family is Black. It’s interesting how that can happen. I had a very easy childhood growing up. My nickname meant ‘pretty.’ I was favored by my grandparents because I was so pale and white, and I had green eyes. As I got older and became cognizant of issues around race generally, I then became very cognizant of issues about race in the Latino community. So the caste system, the effects of colonization, all of that. I was taking a lot of classes on ethnic studies and critical race theory in my undergrad, and then in my graduate school experience. And I was learning a lot. I literally felt my brain growing some days.

“When I thought about the book, I was like, well, I want readers to walk away with knowledge that maybe they didn’t have before. But I can’t just sit there and give these dictionary definitions. It’s too boring. It’s too dry. So I have to make sure they’re embedded into the story. ”

I became a fifth-grade teacher, and my students were going through exactly everything I had gone through as a child. They were repeating these words and this really aggressive language, specifically to their Black peers. And when I would call for parent-teacher conferences, their parents would be like, ‘Well, what is the problem?’ It reminded me a lot of my upbringing; my parents and my family members would similarly make these very racist backhanded comments. I didn’t realize they were a problem until I was in university, or somewhat high school age. I didn’t know it was a huge problem, and a problem I had language for where I can point to mestizaje, colorism, caste system, and blanqueamiento. I didn’t have that language until I was in college. And I was looking at my students and really thinking like, Man, if I don’t teach you what these words mean, you may never learn them. And not because I don’t think they’re not going to go to college. I really want them to. But because there are so many obstacles in their path to get there, the largest of them being finance. And many of them would be first-gen students. So it was like, ‘I can’t guarantee all of you are going to have the same path that I had. So I have to teach you about this stuff’....

When I thought about the book, I was like, well, I want readers to walk away with knowledge that maybe they didn’t have before. But I can’t just sit there and give these dictionary definitions. It’s too boring. It’s too dry. So I have to make sure they’re embedded into the story. A lot of that came with attempting not to underestimate my readers, and just throwing it in there in a subtle way and letting them make their own connections.

AC: Let’s talk about the stereotype of teen pregnancy among Latinas. It is something Belén seems keenly aware of as it relates to her best friend, Leti. Can you talk about how you chose to address this stereotype and turn it on its head?

CI: It’s so funny to me because I never thought I would write about teen pregnancy. It was never something that was super pressing in my mind. I wanted to write more about sex, and sex for Latinas and sex for young women – and our perceived notions about Latinas and young women who are sexually active. And I think the only way I could do that was if I did make Leti’s character pregnant. Leti is obviously a character who you wouldn’t imagine would get pregnant, right? She’s like a very nerdy AP student. She’s very, very devoutly Catholic. But when I was younger, I remember having pregnant classmates. As early as seventh grade, I remember having a classmate who was pregnant, who was Latina. And I remember the way that the teachers treated her. They treated her like she was some kind of zoo animal and as if she was lesser than. I didn’t have the language then. I just was observant.

I went to a very big public high school. We would have pregnant girls, and it was just kind of par for the course. There were just too many of us to really care too much. But as I got older, when I went to university, again, I was taking all of these classes and learning a lot about the tropes of the Latina pregnant girl and of the promiscuous, sexy, hot Latina – and where these things come from. 

Specifically in regards to teen pregnancy, I was learning that statistically it’s not that Latina girls are engaging in sex more than white girls, for example. It’s that most of us are brought up Catholic. So if we’re really pointing fingers, it’s not toward promiscuity. We’re truly pointing fingers at colonization. That goes centuries back. Mexico was colonized by the Spanish and we’re taught to believe certain aspects of the Bible. One of them is that you don’t have sex until you’re married, and you only have sex with your husband and then you don’t use birth control. All seems good and well until you realize that kids are human. Leti, for me, served to exemplify that it’s not because she’s stupid. She’s perhaps one of the smartest characters in the book. It’s not because she’s promiscuous. She’s really not having sex that often. It’s because she was just never taught that this is what happens when you have sex. Or this is what could happen, because in her household, her parents are what I would say almost oppressively Catholic… I wanted Leti’s character and her arc to really show that the archetype and the stereotype of the pregnant Latina is usually posited to readers and to media consumers without much context. If you know the history of colonization, if you know the Catholic Church, and if you know young teenagers, teen pregnancies specifically for Latinos makes lots of sense. Because we can preach all we want about not having premarital sex and abstinence being the best way, but kids are kids, right? They need to experiment and do what they’re gonna do. They’re human beings… 

And I wanted readers to understand that a pregnancy is not the end of a life. It truly, biologically, is the beginning of another one, but also just a different path for someone to take. And to also address some of the stigmas around premarital sex and teen pregnancy.

AC: What are you hoping readers take away from Shut Up, This Is Serious?

CI: I wrote this book with Latino readers in mind first, and I’m hopeful that everyone else takes something away from it as well. But for the Latino readers: I really want folks to really think deeply and critically about our racial identity, and to not shy away from thinking about race. We talk all the time about how people are discriminatory toward Latinos, which is very true. We talk less about how we are discriminatory toward each other, and then how we are discriminatory toward other racial groups. So I want that to be the first thing that folks walk away from. 

I also wrote this book for Latina women. I want them to walk away understanding that they’re seen and they’re valued. I think Belén’s story, despite her being a Latina girl, is pretty ubiquitous in theme of asking for help when you need it and understanding that abandonment is not the end of life. It really truly is just the beginning of a different one. And to think of absence as presence after a lot of grief and healing. That’s really what I wanted folks to walk away from.

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Carolina Ixta is a writer from Oakland, California. A daughter of Mexican immigrants, she received her BA in creative writing and Spanish language and literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and obtained her master’s degree in education at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently an elementary school teacher whose pedagogy centers critical race theory at the primary education level. Shut Up, This Is Serious is her debut novel.

Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Aster(ix) Journal, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms Be Like… (part of the Dominican Writers Association’s #DWACuenticos chapbook series), and most recently Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, “El Don,” was a prize finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. She is a proud member of Latinx in Publishing’s Writers Mentorship Class of 2023 and lives in Florida with her family and dog.

Author Q&A: Paloma’s Song for Puerto Rico by Adriana Erin Rivera

Paloma Santos is excited about her new diary. In her first diary entry dated July 16, 1898, she shares how her friend, Rosa, had brought her this leather journal from a market in Ponce.

Paloma is a 12-year-old girl who lives in Puerto Rico, on a large coffee farm with her mami, papi, and baby brother, Jorge. She has brown eyes and wavy brown hair. She loves to sing.

“Papi heard that 1898 would be an important year for us to remember,” Paloma writes in the diary. “He says we are in a war. It is between the United States and Spain. They are fighting over the island, our isla, we call home. We are a Spanish colony, but we are also Puerto Ricans.”

Out now from Capstone Publishing, Paloma’s Song for Puerto Rico: A Diary from 1898 by Adriana Erin Rivera is a historical fiction middle grade novel about one Puerto Rican girl during the Spanish-American War—during which the United States invaded the island. The book illustrated by Eugenia Nobati is part of Nuestras Voces, a new series in partnership with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino.

Paloma’s Song for Puerto Rico is told in diary format, which helps make the fears and anxieties around war more accessible to a young audience. Rivera—an author and singer/songwriter of Puerto Rican descent—said that she conducted a lot of research to tell this story properly.

“I was so inspired by this story—by this idea of Paloma and who she could be, and what she was looking forward to, this optimism, this hope she has,” Rivera said. “What would she be interested in as a child?”

The result is a taut and memorable story about one young girl and the lifelong impact of war on her and her family. And it’s also about a critical time in Puerto Rico’s history that would forever shape it.

Rivera spoke with Latinx in Publishing about crafting Paloma’s story, the research it entailed, and more.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Amaris Castillo (AC): Congratulations on Paloma’s Song for Puerto Rico! I understand this book was a collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum for the American Latino. How did you land the opportunity to write this story?

Adriana Erin Rivera (AER): This story came to me in a really surprising way. The publisher actually reached out to me and asked me if I would be interested in writing this book. They gave me some parameters of what they were looking for in a story like this, because it is part of a series. . . They had that it would be a Puerto Rican girl, 12 years old in 1898. And it’s all they gave me. They were like, ‘OK, go.’ Immediately I was inspired, and I built a story around these three details.

I was so inspired by this story—by this idea of Paloma and who she could be, and what she was looking forward to, this optimism, this hope she has. What would she be interested in as a child? I was also really inspired by my childhood visiting Puerto Rico. My abuelo had a farm in Aguadilla. So I pulled a lot of my own feelings of, what did Puerto Rico look like to me as a child? I pulled those ideas of Puerto Rico through a child’s eyes, and I built that into the story. And I think that’s really what came out in the book.

AC: Your main character, Paloma—lives on a finca with her parents and baby brother, Jorge. She’s very much a girl from el campo, as they say. She helps her mother in the house and also outside by helping to tend to the chickens and fruit trees. What was it like crafting this character from a time that is well over a century ago?

AER: I did a lot of research [Laughs]. Initially, I didn’t know so much about the Spanish-American War. It wasn’t really taught in the context of Puerto Rico in school for me, so I had to learn a lot to really tell the story properly and authentically. I didn’t want to mince words or talk down to readers, or shy away from things that were very real to the time, and very real to Puerto Rican people. It’s very important that we don’t lose track of what really did happen in our history. So it was very important to me to really keep that in mind as I was writing it.

AC: Your book is so lively with details about Paloma’s life, and snippets of information about the Spanish-American War? Tell us more about the research or resources you tapped into to get all those details for the story.

AER: I initially was overwhelmed by the fact that I didn’t know so much about the topic, but then I immediately thought, Where can I get the most information in the quickest amount of time? It was like a crash course in the Spanish-American War for me. I went to libraries and I reached out to the Newark, New Jersey Public Library, and they were able to give me all sorts of resource articles and the really in-depth things that you need to know without having to go over the top. I also got information from the Library of Congress. They have a whole timeline on their website, which is great because this (the book) is in diary form. So knowing what happened on each single day was super important, so I could really keep track of what was happening in Paloma’s life each day as the story goes on.

AC: What surprised you about Puerto Rico’s history while doing your research?

AER: It was really eye-opening for me. I learned about El Grito De Lares, which was a really important time for Puerto Ricans’ revolution against Spain. I learned a lot about how people in el campo really lived back then. There were a lot of resources at the Smithsonian that they wanted to include in the story, and they worked seamlessly into the story—like the tiple, the cuatro, the coconut bowls, and things that were really critical for people living there at that time. Just everyday things that were really important to how they lived back then. And knowing what those looked like and what those items were was really important to weave into the story.

AC: There’s a thread throughout the book about music, and its importance to not just Paloma and her father. And I know you’re a singer/songwriter, too. Why did you want to include music in this way in this story?

AER: Music is so important to Puerto Rican culture. It’s important to a lot of Latin American cultures—I think all of them. And it’s important to a lot of cultures in general. Music is how we tell our stories, right? I thought that music as a creative outlet for Paloma would be really important as a character, just in the sense that it was not just about the farm for her. What does she do? What is she interested in? Whether it was art, whether it was dancing, whether it was music, I wanted to find something that was in her heart besides just the farm. And I found that music would be the best way to showcase that, and weave it into the culture as well. The cultural aspect of that was going to be really critical, in terms of telling the story. And like I said, music is part of how we tell our stories through history. Her song really does resonate through that.

AC: What are you hoping readers take away from Paloma’s Song for Puerto Rico?

AER: When I set out to write this story, I wanted to make sure that Latinos see themselves as the stars of their own story. And I think that’s really what the Smithsonian is doing with this series, which I love. I wanted readers to see themselves as the stars of their own story. I wanted them to see themselves in the cover. I wanted them to see themselves as important. Our stories are important, so I wanted to make sure that was shining through. 

And then I also thought that within the story was really important because any reader’s culture can be showcased, and I wanted readers to see the book and think, ‘Well, I wonder where my family is from. And I wonder if there’s information about where my culture is from.’ Wherever their cultural origin is. . . I thought it would be important for them to see themselves and want to learn more about themselves.

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Adriana Erin Rivera is a New Jersey-raised author of Puerto Rican descent. Her writing has been published in Barzakh Magazine, Metro New York, Latina Magazine, and Footwear News. She is also a singer and songwriter, and has written theatrical pieces that have been performed on New York City stages. A magna cum laude graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology, she holds a bachelor’s degree in Advertising and Marketing Communications. Her latest middle grade historical fiction book, PALOMA’S SONG FOR PUERTO RICO: A DIARY FROM 1898, is a collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum for the American Latino. Currently based in Westchester County, NY, Adriana is a Marketing Manager at a higher-education institution in New York.

Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Aster(ix) Journal, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms Be Like… (part of the Dominican Writers Association’s #DWACuenticos chapbook series), and most recently Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, “El Don,” was a prize finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. She is a proud member of Latinx in Publishing’s Writers Mentorship Class of 2023 and lives in Florida with her family and dog, Brooklyn.

Margarita Engle and Olivia Sua On Bringing Water Day To Readers

Water days are special days for a young girl in Trinidad—a town in central Cuba. They hold great significance for her whole village, actually.

On this particular water day, the girl joins her mami on a mission to mend their family’s leaky hose.

By the time the water man
finally arrives, we’ll be ready to fill
the blue tank on our flat red roof
with clear water
that flows
like hope
for my whole
thirsty familia.

Newbery Honor Award-winning author Margarita Engle brings readers Water Day—a celebratory picture book about the arrival of the water man to a small village. The book (out now from Atheneum Books for Young Readers) was illustrated by Olivia Sua.

The village in Water Day no longer has its own water supply. So residents rely on the water man, who visits weekly to distribute water to them. This time, he arrives in a wagon pulled by a horse that strains against the weight of a metal tank. Through the eyes of the book’s young narrator, readers are pulled into the anticipation of this day and, most importantly, what it means to have access to water.

“This story is really the contrast between how easy it is to get a drink of water in so many places, and how difficult it is in so many other places,” Engle told Latinx in Publishing. “And I’m not going to say that it’s just the U.S. against developing countries, because I live in a part of California where a lot of my neighbors’ wells have gone dry. And we don’t have access to city water because we’re in a rural residential zone. So if our wells go dry, that’s it. We have to do exactly what’s shown in this book, which is [to] bring water in a tanker truck.”

Engle was born in Los Angeles but spent many childhood summers with family in her mother’s hometown of Trinidad de Cuba. The author said she featured a horse and wagon for water transport in her book because, in Cuba, there’s a fuel shortage which causes horses to be used in some areas to bring water to people.

The joyous tone of Water Day is not only a credit to Engle’s lyrical style of writing, but also to Sua’s gorgeous illustrations. Sua’s art form of mostly painted cut paper breathes life into the book—bringing readers closer to Cuba and its people. There are also colorful houses with intricate iron window bars. There is a kitchen with hanging pots. A mango tree. There are mountain landscapes behind homes and churches. And even tinajones—big clay jars that the narrator’s great-grandmother says used to be filled with daily afternoon rains.

“This is probably one of the most research-intensive books I’ve ever done because I was trying to capture Trinidad,” Sua said. “I wanted to get the essence right.”

Though Water Day doesn’t explicitly say the story is set in Cuba, Engle confirmed it is.

Sua said she conducted a lot of research on Cuba through Google Maps and through photos of the country online. She also received input from Engle.

The illustrator said the story’s themes of environmentalism and the climate crisis first drew her to Engle’s manuscript. They are topics she cares deeply about.

Readers of Water Day may feel a jolt of realization as to just how important water is in their everyday lives. This is succinctly described in the below lines from the book:

Five days have passed 
since the water man’s last visit.

We need to bathe,
wash clothes, 
cook rice…

Engle didn’t hesitate when asked if that was intentional on her part.

“Yes, absolutely,” the author said. “We take water for granted. . . There’s a lot of injustice all over the world. It’s not just Cuba. It’s not just certain societies. There’s just this injustice in terms of access to water, and it’s so basic. This is something that everybody needs, but we don’t have equal access.”

Sua said Water Day is an important story. “Some of us are experiencing flooding,” the illustrator said, “and some of us are experiencing water scarcity.”

Engle has written many verse novels, memoirs, and picture books throughout her publishing career. For this book, she wanted to tell the story from the point of view of a child without scaring readers or making them sad.

“I actually wanted to focus on the joy of the arrival of the water, rather than on those days in between when you don’t have it being delivered,” the award-winning poet said. “I wanted to focus on the excitement of just what it means to finally have water.”

In her author’s note, Engle wrote about her mother’s hometown of Trinidad and how water access has become a lot more complicated due to factors such as climate change, polluted groundwater, and crumbling pipes for delivery. She told Latinx in Publishing that, when searching online for photos of the rooftops in Trinidad, you’ll see the blue tanks of water. You would not have seen that a few years ago, Engle added, “because everybody was able to get enough water from wells and so forth.”

She wants children to think about how privileged they are when they do have running water.

“I want to say we’re wealthy if we have that, but it’s a different kind of wealth because there are areas where middle-class people in the U.S. don’t have access to clean water,” Engle said. “So it’s just something to not take for granted. We need to treasure our natural resources.”

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Margarita Engle is the Cuban American author of many books including the verse novels Rima’s Rebellion; Your Heart, My Sky; With a Star in My Hand; The Surrender Tree, a Newbery Honor winner; and The Lightning Dreamer. Her verse memoirs include Soaring Earth and Enchanted Air, which received the Pura Belpré Award, a Walter Dean Myers Award Honor, and was a finalist for the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction, among others. Her picture books include Drum Dream Girl, Dancing Hands, and The Flying Girl. Visit her at MargaritaEngle.com.

Olivia Sua is an artist who creates elaborate works of painted cut paper. She is from Washington State and resides in her hometown of North Bend. In 2020, Olivia graduated from Pacific Northwest College of Art with a BFA in illustration. When she’s not illustrating, Olivia likes to go backpacking, quilt, and collect seeds for her garden. Visit her at oliviasua.com.

Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Aster(ix) Journal, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms Be Like… (part of the Dominican Writers Association’s #DWACuenticos chapbook series), and most recently Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, “El Don,” was a prize finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. She is a proud member of Latinx in Publishing’s Writers Mentorship Class of 2023 and lives in Florida with her family and dog, Brooklyn.

Author Q & A: Mari and the Curse of El Cocodrilo by Adrianna Cuevas

When 12-year-old Maricela Yanet Feijoo isn’t at school or with her best friends, Keisha and Juan Carlos, she can sometimes be found wincing at what she calls her family’s “Peak Cubanity.” She also worries that her next-door neighbor and classmate—who she calls “Mocosa” Mykenzye—will judge.

“Peak Cubanity” is what Mari calls her family’s behavior when she feels they’re being over-the-top. And she’s got many examples from which to draw from on New Year’s Eve because that’s when she says they reach Peak Cubanity. It’s the day Abuelita lugs a suitcase around the block because she wants to travel the upcoming year. And Mami sweeps and mops the whole house, leaving a bucket of dirty water by the front door, so that she can throw it out at midnight.

“At least we won’t be eating twelve grapes at midnight as fast as we can,” Mari narrates. “When I almost choked last year, Papi had to do the Heimlich maneuver on me and everything. I shot a green grape straight out of my throat and into the eye of my sister, Liset. Maybe something that’s supposed to bring you good luck shouldn’t also try to kill you. Just a thought.”

“Cuevas brings readers another memorable story that will both make you chuckle and feel deeply for a young girl finding her place on her family tree.”

Which is why at the start of Adrianna Cuevas’ new middle grade novel, Mari and the Curse of El Cocodrilo, the titular character declines to participate in her family’s biggest New Year’s Eve traditions: burning an effigy to rid themselves of the past year’s bad luck. But after Mari fails to throw hers into the fire, strange things begin happening. Bad luck falls upon her, then spreads to her friend, Keisha.

Out now from HarperCollins, Mari and the Curse of El Cocodrilo is a heartfelt and humorous story about one girl’s journey toward self-acceptance and learning how important it is to know your family’s history. Spooky vibes and silliness also permeate the book, as readers witness all kinds of things happening to Mari. Among them are uncooperative pencils during a quiz, a possessed violin and, in Keisha’s case, shoes that glue to the mat when she’s at fencing practice.

Once Mari discovers she has a unique ability to call upon her Cuban ancestors, she and her friends embark on a quest to work with the ghosts to try to defeat El Cocodrilo. Can they do it?

In Mari and the Curse of El Cocodrilo Cuevas brings readers another memorable story that will both make you chuckle and feel deeply for a young girl finding her place on her family tree. The Pura Belpré Honor-winning author spoke with Latinx in Publishing about crafting Mari’s story, preserving your family’s history, and more.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Amaris Castillo (AC): Congratulations on Mari and the Curse of El Cocodrilo! What inspired this story?

Adrianna Cuevas (AC): This story really came from a couple of avenues. First, I’m a horror fan. I’ve always loved horror. My dad took me to see Alien 3 when I was a kid in the theater, probably way younger than a child should have been seeing Alien 3 in the theater. That is a core memory for me. Part of it was this is my fourth published book now, and I’ve been writing mostly adventure. I was a little bit spookier with The Ghosts of Rancho Espanto, but I really wanted to dip my toe more into spookier stories for middle grade kids.

The emotional inspiration really comes from my own experiences, and different students that I’ve interacted with; those second and third generation kids who are trying to figure out how their parents’ culture and their grandparents’ culture still fits into their lives. Because I think sometimes you can feel a little bit more disconnected from it.

For me, growing up I didn’t hear about a lot of the experiences of my family when they were in Cuba. They didn’t talk about them. One of the reasons I wrote Cuba in My Pocket was because I wanted to hear those stories. A lot of times there’s kind of a disconnect, where you don’t have all the family history that a lot of other families do. My husband’s family is from rural Oklahoma and when his grandfather passed away, they had this shed full of all this stuff from generations and generations past that was connected to their family history. Everything had a story. And I thought, I don’t have anything like that. I have things from my dad, but they’re all from things once he moved to the U.S. I have one small jewelry box that my grandmother actually wrote on the inside, “I brought this from Cuba.” That is literally the only thing.

So that’s a long-winded answer to say I was drawing from my own experience of kids that feel like they’re wanting that connection, perhaps—or maybe they don’t—with their family’s culture. But they’re not quite sure how that works. Then, of course, I wanted to throw in some horror just to make it fun—because I can never help that.

AC: Your main character, Maricela—or Mari—cringes at how extra her Cuban family can be. She even has a term for it: Peak Cubanity. It reminded me of how some first generation Americans struggle at times to straddle two cultures—that of the United States and of the country their parents hail from. What was it like crafting this character who, from the first page, seems to shun her family’s culture at first?

AC: A lot of it was not entirely based on my own experiences, but drawn from them. I grew up in Miami, Florida. Growing up Cuban in Miami, Florida, is a super privileged thing to do in all honesty, because your culture is everywhere. Our music is on the radio. You have your choice of Cuban restaurants to visit. You would go out and do all your errands for the day, and never have to speak English once.

I did not feel that sense of ‘other’ until I went to college in Missouri, because that was my first time being away from an area where, in all honesty, my culture was the majority. And so I got that sense that Mari does, of ‘Well, who am I and how do I fit in? And everyone here assumes that I’m Mexican because I speak Spanish.’ That happened to me a ton. It especially happens to me here in Texas. And so I wanted to honor those kids who feel the same way. I mean, Mari loves her family. But what child of any cultural background is not embarrassed by their family ever so often?

I wanted Mari to experience the joy that you can get from learning your family’s history, but at the same time understanding maybe why you didn’t know all about it to begin with. Because a lot of it can be painful. That happened when I was researching Cuba in My Pocket. I’m asking my dad and my cousins, as well, of their experiences in Cuba and coming over to the U.S. And not all the stories are great. You can see why maybe kids don’t hear everything, and adults are reluctant to talk about it. A lot of it was drawn from my personal experiences. But if you’ve ever met Cubans, the “Peak Cubanity” fits because we are not a subtle people. And so I had a lot of fun just writing the joy and the extra that Mari’s family is.

AC: Your book is so lively with all the bad luck shenanigans that happen to Mari and, later, her friend, Kiesha. How did you come up with all the bad luck instances that happen? That was so fun to read.

AC: I will say that coming up with nonsense or just off-the-wall things is not hard for me when I am living with a now 16-year-old. Neither he—as my son—nor I have any filters. We tend to bounce really silly ideas off of each other all the time. I think as a creative person, it is really important to have someone like that in your life who doesn’t edit your creativity. They encourage you.

In all honesty, I’ve gotten into the habit where, if an idea pops into my head—even if it’s really off-the-wall—I’m not self-editing right away. I think that happens to a lot of authors, where you come up with an idea and the very next spot is, ‘Oh, no, that’s dumb. Nobody’s gonna want to read that.’ Because I have people in my life—my husband, my son—who are always encouraging my ideas and helping me brainstorm even the most nonsensical thing, I really value that as somebody in a creative profession.

It’s not hard to think of off-the-wall things when you’re just kind of letting your brain go. I always joke that as a Cuban, it’s very easy to write horror. It’s very easy to write a character that’s been cursed with bad luck. By and large, because of our political history, Cubans tend to be pessimists in all honesty. They’re gonna look at a situation and pretty much assume the worst is going to happen. That’s the whole function of horror, is asking, ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ And so I feel like I was at a cultural advantage, thinking: ‘Well, what’s the worst that can happen to Mari in this situation?’

AC: You’re like, ‘I got this. I’m Cuban.’

AC: Exactly. Like, I was already being a pessimist about this situation. I knew what was going to happen.

AC: There’s another storyline here about the importance of documenting the stories and memories of family members who are deceased. What message were you hoping to send by highlighting this?

AC: I realize that for each of my books, it’s really my way of hanging on to something that I think is important, and that I think needs to be remembered. . . In Mari’s story, it’s my way of showing that, ‘This is why that’s important. We’re not going to have all these people around forever.’ You know, Mari only gets a lot of the stories from ghosts. We can’t let that be our option, where we’ve waited too long to preserve our family’s history.

One of the things that I am passionate about is the ability to tell our own stories, before someone else tells them for us. We need to remember and commemorate what’s happened to us before somebody else decides to tell our own history. And so I think that’s something I’m pretty passionate about because it’s now come up in pretty much every single manuscript I’ve written. I always have the adventure plot, the horror, the silliness, whatever—but the emotional core of all my stories is always going to come from something that I feel is important to remember. I think that’s why I addressed the story the way I did.

AC: What are you hoping readers take away from Mari and the Curse of El Cocodrilo?

AC: I never go into writing any of my books with a lesson in mind. Because, for me, I want young readers to dive into one of my books. I want them to lose track of time. I want them to forget where they are, and I want them to just enjoy a story. That’s my primary goal with every single one of my books.

With Mari though, it would make me pretty happy if it made a young reader curious about their own family’s histories, start asking their elders some questions, or asking to be told stories. But by and large, I’m always just wanting my readers to have fun with my books.

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Adrianna Cuevas is the author of the Pura Belpre honor book The Total Eclipse of Nestor Lopez, Cuba in My Pocket, The Ghosts of Rancho Espanto, Mari and the Curse of El Cocodrilo, and Monster High: A Fright to Remember. She is a first-generation Cuban-American originally from Miami, Florida. A former Spanish and ESOL teacher, Adrianna currently resides outside of Austin, Texas with her husband and son. When not working with TOEFL students, wrangling multiple pets including an axolotl, and practicing fencing with her son, she is writing her next middle grade novel.

Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Aster(ix) Journal, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms Be Like… (part of the Dominican Writers Association’s #DWACuenticos chapbook series), and most recently Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, “El Don,” was a prize finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. She is a proud member of Latinx in Publishing’s Writers Mentorship Class of 2023 and lives in Florida with her family and dog, Brooklyn.

Andrea Beatriz Arango on Found Family in Something Like Home

Something Like Home opens to a dreaded ride. Laura Rodríguez Colón is in the backseat of her caseworker Janet’s car. They’re headed to Laura’s new (temporary) home. When they reach Titi Silvia’s apartment, Laura stares at a woman she doesn’t recognize nor has ever had a relationship with.

The sixth-grader doesn’t understand why she has a caseworker, or what a caseworker even does. Still, Laura floods Janet with questions. Below are a few:

How long will I be with my aunt?
What will happen to our trailer?
What will happen to the things I don’t pack?
When can I talk to Mom?
When can I talk to Dad?
What does kinship care mean?

Laura wonders if the 911 call she made is what caused her to be separated from her parents. She wonders if this is all her fault.

Another day, while on a walk, Laura finds a dog. The big brown puppy looks sickly, and so she carries the dog all the way to Titi Silvia’s house. She names him Sparrow.

Andrea Beatriz Arango, the Newbery Honor Award-winning author of Iveliz Explains It All, has brought forth a moving middle grade novel-in-verse about a young girl on a journey to understand what home means, and what makes up a family. Readers witness Laura navigate a strange reality—a new place to rest her head at night, a new school, and a budding new friendship—all without her parents.

After taking in Sparrow, Laura also finds a newfound purpose. She believes that if she trains him to become a therapy dog, then perhaps she’ll be allowed to visit her mom and dad. Perhaps, then, she could move back in with them and their family would be made whole again.

But, of course, it is not that easy.

“I’m a firm believer in that community can look like a lot of different things,” Arango told Latinx in Publishing. “Family can look like a lot of different things.”

Something Like Home was inspired by the author’s time as a foster mom in both her native Puerto Rico and in Virginia, where she most recently lived. Arango said that a lot of children—even those who aren’t in foster care but come from big families—are asked to choose one family member over another, or to take sides in an argument.

“I think it’s really hard as a kid to feel like you have to choose, and you can’t have more than one thing,” Arango said. “I really wanted to explore that in this particular scenario, in a non-traditional home situation, or just in general that idea that you can have more than one home, and you can have more than one family. And loving one of them does not cancel out the other. You don’t have to pledge your loyalty to only one person, or one home.”

It’s something Laura struggles with at first.

“She feels that it’s a betrayal of her parents if she starts growing her bond with her aunt or that, by loving her aunt, she’s loving her parents less,” Arango said. “And that’s definitely not the case.”

Because Laura is 11, her voice feels a bit younger than what readers are used to in the middle grade genre. She struggles through feelings of guilt and a deep longing for her parents—through verse and in letters she writes to her parents. Arango impresses in her crafting of Laura’s letters. They contain hope, desperation, and optimism. They are heart-rendering.

“With Laura, you have someone who doubts herself all the time, and who thinks things are the way they are because she’s making bad choices. And that she doesn’t have the capacity to be in control of her own life and to make correct choices,” Arango said. “I think a lot of kids do feel that way. And part of the reason behind that is because we—as adults and caregivers and teachers—sometimes unintentionally reinforce that belief in kids over and over.”

The presence and memories associated with Laura’s parents looms over the entire book, heightening the stakes for a daughter in yearning. Readers will find themselves wishing they would write her back soon.

Arango covers several themes in her sophomore book with ample tenderness: identity, addiction, the nuances of kinship care, and even the self-blame children exercise when in pain. The author’s writing is both intimate and accessible, as readers are taking on an emotional rollercoaster with Laura as she both learns and unlearns different aspects of the very nature of family.

The author recalled having foster children as students in her classroom when she was a teacher, and the scarcity of what she described as nuanced foster care books. The majority of the books she found painted the parents as evil, and as social services as a rescuer of the child from a horrifying situation.

“Obviously that is the case for some children. We do have abusers in society who did terrible things to their kids,” Arango said. “But the majority of foster care cases in the U.S. are not abuse cases.”

“The author’s writing is both intimate and accessible, as readers are taking on an emotional rollercoaster with Laura as she both learns and unlearns different aspects of the very nature of family.”

Most of the cases, said Arango, are classified as neglect. Reasons that can lead to a child being removed from the home include a family’s financial or housing situation, or parents losing their jobs or having an addiction.

“I wanted to write a book that looked at it in a more nuanced way. Laura loves her parents. Her parents love her,” Arango said. “They’re not bad people. They—just like a lot of people in the U.S.—became addicted to a substance. . . That happens a lot.”

Of note in Something Like Home is Sparrow and how important his role is in Laura’s new life. Arango is a self-described “dog person,” and shared that one of her dogs was the inspiration for the fictional dog. The author said she’s interacted with therapy dogs in different scenarios and wanted to highlight them in part to raise more awareness about them for young readers. The author added that she also wanted her main character to have a project she could focus on.

“During the book, she (Laura) definitely is feeling very lost. And one of the things that makes her feel like she is doing something to help herself and her family is this training-Sparrow-kind-of-project,” Arango said. “It gives her something to work towards and it helps her not feel as helpless because she now has a plan to reunite with her family.”

At the core of Something Like Home is a lesson on found family. Arango said she hopes young readers come away with a greater awareness of foster families and kinship families.

“It’s guaranteed in most schools, there will be at least one kid per classroom who is either in foster care or kinship care, has been at some point, or has a relative who has,” the author said.

This is really common, she added.

“I wanted both for kids who are going through a situation similar to that, to feel understood and listened to and represented,” Arango said. “But also for all the kids who have never encountered it in their lives, to have a little bit more empathy moving forward in the future.”

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Andrea Beatriz Arango is the Newbery Honor Award-winning author of Iveliz Explains It All. She was born and raised in Puerto Rico, and is a former public school teacher with almost a decade of teaching experience. Andrea now writes the types of children’s books she wishes students had more access to. She balances her life in Virginia with trips home to see her family and eat lots of tostones de pana. When she’s not busy writing, you can find her enjoying nature in the nearest forest or body of water.

Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Aster(ix) Journal, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms Be Like… (part of the Dominican Writers Association’s #DWACuenticos chapbook series), and most recently Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, “El Don,” was a prize finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. She is a proud member of Latinx in Publishing’s Writers Mentorship Class of 2023 and lives in Florida with her family and dog, Brooklyn.

Author Q & A: The Cursed Moon by Angela Cervantes

For Rafael Fuentes there appears to be no break. The eleven-year-old has failing grades, which means he’s going to have to attend summer school. And he’s been fretting about his incarcerated mother, Nikki, who is set to be released early. Rafa hasn’t forgiven her for the instability and neglect she put him and his younger sister, Brianna, through. He’s refused every invitation to visit her in the women’s prison, and he’s ignored every one of her letters.

But there’s one thing that always lifts Rafa’s spirits, and that’s telling scary stories. Ever since he and Brianna were placed with their grandparents, he’s become known by other kids as the ghost storyteller. He and his sister even host scary story nights on their porch in the summer months.

One afternoon, Rafa and Brianna come across their eccentric neighbor, Ms. Martin, who warns them against telling any scary stories under the blood moon. “I know all about your scary story nights,” she tells them.

Later that night, Rafa wants to take his mind off his mother’s return from prison and ends up meeting his friend, Jayden. In Jayden’s treehouse—and under the blood moon—Rafa ends up weaving a scary story about a ghost called The Caretaker.

Almost immediately after, strange things start happening around Rafa. Has his story come true, and is The Caretaker real? With the help of friends and a magical jaguar, Rafa embarks on a quest to fight an evil spirit threatening to harm children.

Out now from Scholastic Press, The Cursed Moon by children’s author Angela Cervantes is a ghost story filled with spooky moments and plenty of heart. Cervantes has woven a story that draws you completely in as Rafa digs for answers about an apparent curse in town. At the core of this book is an important message about the power of words, and of one’s ability to find a happy ending. There is always hope.

On behalf of Latinx in Publishing, I spoke with Cervantes about writing this middle grade horror story, her main character’s internal struggle, and more.

“At the core of this book is an important message about the power of words, and of one’s ability to find a happy ending. There is always hope.”

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Amaris Castillo (AC): Congratulations on The Cursed Moon! What inspired this story?

Angela Cervantes (AC): It’s so funny that we’re talking today because I was just putting up Halloween decorations in front of my house. One of my best friends from childhood is in town, and she was helping me. Her name is Elena Cordero. A couple years back we had dinner in San Antonio and she reminded me that I used to tell scary stories in the summertime to all my friends, and that she really loved it. She said she used to come back for more. It sort of sparked this interest in me again, like Oh, yeah, I forgot that about myself. I used to love to scare my friends. I loved it when they were so afraid, they didn’t want to walk home alone. They would call their mom or dad and be like, “Can you come pick me up?” Or they would go in a pack and walk home together. I loved it when they would come back the next day and be like, “I have to know. What happens to the jaguar? What happens to the kid?”

I had forgotten that part of myself—that I used to love to tell scary stories. Right after COVID when I started resuming school visits again, I would ask the students: “What kind of book would you like to read next?” And they would all say “Scary story!” And I would look over at the librarians and the teachers and they’d all be nodding their heads. Then they would tell me there’s just not enough good scary stories for the kids. They love them. They want them. And I said, “You know what? I’m going to try.”

The spark from my childhood best friend, Elena, reminding me that that’s who I used to be. . . and then the kids telling me themselves that they wanted scary stories made me say, “I want to try. And I’m just gonna give it my best shot.” And so that’s what inspired The Cursed Moon.

AC: Your main character, Rafa, is known for his ghost stories. And then one day, a neighbor warns him not to tell any scary stories under the blood moon. He dismisses her advice and tells a story anyway—about a ghost known as The Caretaker. Without spoiling too much, can you share what it was like to craft the story of this figure and impact on the community?

AC: Rafael Fuentes and I are a lot alike; we both use writing and storytelling to deal with the world around us. I’ve always been that way since I was a kid. For Rafa, the scary stories are a coping mechanism for what is going on in his very real life with his mom, his family, friends, and his new school life. And he creates these scary stories to deal with all of that. That is very much me. I write because I’m expressing what’s inside me and what I’m going through, and because I remember being that 9-year-old Mexicana in school in Topeka, Kansas, and trying to find ways for my peers to see me as something else than this girl. But I’m also a scary storyteller. I also write. I’m a poet. . . wanting to have that identity as something special about me.

I think Rafa is very much like that. And I think a lot of kids are like that. As adults, we see children, but I don’t know if we really see children and what’s going on in their lives, and what they’re going through.

The Caretaker [character] should sound like a very positive thing; someone who is caring for you, but it’s kind of a “care-taker.” It’s kind of taking care, rather than a caregiver. I just played around with that name, and I liked it. When I was a child, I wrote a scary story about a little girl and her caretaker father in a park. He wouldn’t let her read books. And one day she finds a book. It’s a whole scary story that I now have on my website as a bonus scary story for the kids if they want to find it. But The Caretaker came from that story that I told and wrote as a child. I probably was like 10 or 11 years old—about the same age as Rafa. I fleshed it out for this book because I needed a villain, and I wanted it to be a really sinister ghost. I wanted it to be something that you would think would help children, would be nice, but really isn’t.

Without really purposely intending to do it, it’s kind of how Rafa sees his mom. Your mom is supposed to help you. I think he even states that in the book—“A mom is supposed to take care of you and protect you.” But she doesn’t in his life. Not yet, anyway. There’s hope. The Caretaker is the same way. It sounds like it should be someone who is caring for you and taking care of you. But in this case, he’s actually quite a sinister ghost that wants to hurt the children.

AC: The Cursed Moon, to me, challenges the notion that stories are harmless fun. What were you hoping to say about storytelling itself?

AC: Yes, I know that kind of opened up that whole theme. At one point, Rafa is being judged so harshly by the children around him, by the adults around him, because of his mom being sick and addicted. And I know exactly how that feels—to be judged even at such a young age, when you don’t even know yourself yet. It wasn’t like I set out to do it but, in my own little way, I wanted to remind people to let children write their own stories. Let Rafa narrate his own story. Only he can decide his ending. Only he can decide what path he’ll take. But if you’re going to judge him all the time and make him feel bad for the choices of his mom or his parents, you’re not really opening him up for a path away from that.

It was just my reminder—whether it was gentle or not, whether I failed or succeeded in that regard—that words have power. Stories have power. So many times, people made up stories about me because I was a Chicana growing up in Topeka, Kansas, and judged me for it. And you don’t have the right to tell my story. Only I have the right to tell my story. Only Rafa has the right to tell his story. And that’s the story that matters.

AC: Throughout the book Rafa has an internal struggle due to his feelings towards his mother, Nikki, who is about to be released from prison. He has resentment towards her for the unstable life she gave him and his sister, Brianna. What message were you hoping to send by highlighting this tension between a child and his parent?

AC: I was really just trying to give a voice to children in those same situations. That part of the story is very personal for me. My own family has faced similar issues, and I didn’t see books that gave a voice to those children who are living with the grandparents because somehow their parents have failed them. . . I didn’t see books that also dealt with the fact that there’s a parent that’s incarcerated, yet I’ve seen that in my own family and what it does to the children. And what it does to the whole family. Everyone struggles. Everyone is affected.

I just felt like I had to give a voice and a story for these children to have, to reflect on. Hopefully, also, children who are not in that situation [will] maybe understand their classmate a little better, maybe understand the kid down the street from them a little better, and maybe show a little bit more compassion—to not judge the child by the parents’ mistake. And hopefully give children who are in that situation a little bit of hope that I see you, I hear you, and here’s a story for you.

AC: One thing I loved about your book is how much Rafa and his sister, Brianna, love each other. Rafa feels he needs to protect her at all times. Can you talk about your decision to anchor your book in this close bond?

AC: That was very purposeful. Going back to my own, similar family issue, I’ve seen the older kids want to become the parent and take on super big responsibilities. They have now taken on the role to protect and raise their younger siblings. No choice of theirs. It’s just the situation they’ve been handed. I wanted that to be reflected, and I wanted to make sure I also showed some growth in Rafa and Brianna’s relationship. Without giving too much away, to show that Brianna can now see his point of view, where he’s coming from: that need to always protect. He shouldn’t have to take all that on himself. And him to say, “I want to be a kid again, and I want to have my mom back in my life, eventually”—when he feels it’s right for him and Brianna, so that he can be the kid and just enjoy life.

I myself grew up with very close siblings. My parents divorced when I was nine years old, and that made my four siblings and I very close. We felt like we had each other to fall back on, to protect each other when our parents were going through a rough divorce. . . I really used my own experiences with my big brothers for Rafa and my experience with Brianna —always loving words, always loving stories, always admiring everything her big brother did. That is my lived experience as well.

AC: What are you hoping readers take away from The Cursed Moon?

AC: One, I always hope my novels will just spark interest in reading in all children. I just want them to be lifelong readers. I want them to know that they can go to books for information. They can go to books for an escape. They can go to books for friends. They can go to books when they need to be alone with themselves and figure things out. I hope they walk away from this book wanting to read more books, and understanding that books can be their friends.

Secondly, I just hope that they go away with a little bit more compassion for their classmate or the kid down the street who might be going through a tough time. Everyone is going through their own personal struggles, and just have a little compassion.

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Angela Cervantes is the Mexican American author of popular children’s novels Lead with Your Heart (American Girls book); Me, Frida, and the Secret of the Peacock Ring; Gaby, Lost and Found; Allie, First at Last and; Lety Out Loud, which won a 2020 Pura Belpré Honor Award. In addition to her original novels, Angela authored the junior novelization for Disney/Pixar’s animated-film, Coco and Disney’s animated film, Encanto.

Angela is a daughter of a retired elementary-school teacher who instilled in her a love for reading and storytelling. Angela writes from her home in Kansas City. When she’s not writing, Angela enjoys reading, running, gazing up at clouds, and taking advantage of Taco Tuesdays.

Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Aster(ix) Journal, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms Be Like… (part of the Dominican Writers Association’s #DWACuenticos chapbook series), and most recently Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, “El Don,” was a prize finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. She is a proud member of Latinx in Publishing’s Writers Mentorship Class of 2023 and lives in Florida with her family and dog, Brooklyn.

Sheila Colón-Bagley on Spreading a Joyous Tradition in La Noche Before Three Kings Day

A joyous spirit runs through La Noche Before Three Kings Day. In the bright foyer of a house, a Puerto Rican family has gathered. It’s the night before el Día de los Reyes Magos—the Jan. 6 holiday that marks when the Three Wise Men brought gifts to an infant Jesus.

In the living room, children are surrounded by rolls of gift wrapping paper and small boxes. Their collective voice says: “We wrapped our shoeboxes with glee and delight, knowing the Three Kings would be here tonight.”

La Noche Before Three Kings Day, out now from Harper, was written by debut children’s book author Sheila Colón-Bagley and illustrated by Colombian artist Alejandro Mesa. The book is a sparkling ode to Three Kings Day, a Christian feast day popular throughout Latin America and other parts of the world. There are a variety of ways it’s celebrated but, in this book, the holiday is seen through the eyes of Puerto Rican children. Too excited for the arrival of the Three Kings, they fight against bedtime and place their wrapped boxes beside the front door—an offering for the Three Wise Men’s camels.

Growing up, Sheila Colón-Bagley heard stories about el Día de los Reyes Magos. “My mom would gush about how kids would fill their boxes with grass and put the boxes under their beds,” she recalled. “And the Three Kings would come and leave them gifts.”

Though Colón-Bagley was born in Puerto Rico, she was raised in Philadelphia and didn’t celebrate the beloved Puerto Rican tradition at home.

But that all changed years later, once Colón-Bagley was herself a mother. Her eldest daughter, then 6 years old, had watched a Dora the Explorer episode featuring the tradition. “She came and she asked, ‘Mami, since we’re Puerto Rican, can we celebrate Three Kings Day?’” Colón-Bagley said. “I said, ‘Of course.’ I was just thrilled to share the magic with my children.”

About a decade or so ago, Colón-Bagley searched high and low for books about Three Kings Day and noticed there were “few and far between.” “The ones I found, for me, didn’t quite capture the magic that I saw in my girls’ eyes, and their experience,” she said. “So I decided to write one.”

As you read aloud the dual-lingual text of La Noche Before Three Kings Day, you may feel a familiar tug followed by delight at discovering it was inspired by “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” For years, Colón-Bagley read the famous Christmas poem by Clement Clarke Moore to her daughters. She wondered what it would look like if there was a book about preparing for Three Kings Day, instead of the arrival of Santa Claus.

“At its core, “La Noche Before Three Kings Day” is about the joy of celebrating a beloved holiday tradition with family—and the excitement children feel in partaking.”

Moore’s poem is widely known by its opening lines:

“‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”

Colón-Bagley’s version begins:

“‘Twas la noche before Three Kings Day and all through the casa,
everyone was stirring, even Chico our chihuahua.”

“I love the similarities as well as the differences,” she said of her book and the famous poem. “I purposefully started with ‘everyone was stirring,’ because everyone knows the phrase, ‘no one was stirring, not even a mouse.’ I purposefully wanted to say, this is not that kind of quiet story. You know? We are having a ball. We’re having a party. We’re eating. We’re dancing. We’re celebrating.”

Colón-Bagley ended up setting the story aside to focus on raising her girls. By 2019, she felt it was time to revisit her work. “The writing was calling to me,” she said. She took writing courses and was later awarded a Las Musas mentorship under New York Times and international bestselling author Laura Taylor Namey. Colón-Bagley said Namey helped her hone in some of the rhyme and rhythm of the story.

At its core, La Noche Before Three Kings Day is about the joy of celebrating a beloved holiday tradition with family—and the excitement children feel in partaking. Over time, Three Kings Day has taken on greater meaning to Colón-Bagley. And she has big hopes for young readers who come across her book.

“For children like my daughters who celebrate the holiday, I want them to feel represented and seen, and recognize that their celebrations are worthy of being portrayed in books,” Colón-Bagley said. “I think it’s so important for all children to be able to see some facts about themselves in a book. So for sure, I want children who celebrate the holiday to see themselves, their family and be able to make that connection.”

And for children who don’t celebrate this holiday, the author hopes her book gives them an opportunity to learn about other traditions, and joyous experiences that Latinos and other people of color have.

“We are worth celebrating,” she added.

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Sheila Colón-Bagley is a stay-at-home mother of three. As a Puerto Rico native, she’s long dreamed of writing books featuring multicultural characters that children of all backgrounds would love—for her multicultural daughters, and kids like them—to have books about families who look and live like they do. She’s also a member of the SCBWI, was awarded a Spring 2020 Las Musas mentorship, and was a volunteer on the first-ever virtual Latinx Kidlit Book Festival in December 2020. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Journalism from Temple University and practiced public relations for over twenty-five years before becoming an author. She lives outside of Charlotte, NC, with her family, and their dog, Vader.

Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Aster(ix) Journal, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms Be Like… (part of the Dominican Writers Association’s #DWACuenticos chapbook series), and most recently Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, “El Don,” was a prize finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. She is a proud member of Latinx in Publishing’s Writers Mentorship Class of 2023 and lives in Florida with her family and dog, Brooklyn.

Sara E. Echenique on Puerto Rican Resilience & Hope in Our Roof is Blue

Our Roof is Blue opens to a sun-yellow house in what appears to be un campo. Its front windows are cracked, and two others are boarded up with metal shutters. The flag of Puerto Rico is staked on the ground. In the distance are mountains and, if you peer closely, you’ll notice some trees are down.

In front of the yellow house, just beyond the entrance gate, a girl and her brother are feeding chickens.

“Our roof is blue, azul,” the little girl narrates. “But not cerulean like the sky, or an ocean aquamarine. It is a deep, bright blue like the feathers of a peacock or a blue macaw.”

A temporary blue tarp has replaced the siblings’ old white-gray roof after it was ripped away by Hurricane Maria. The keenly observant girl picks up on the differences. Their original roof used to keep the cool in, and didn’t really allow for the pitter-patter sounds of rain. This new roof, though, holds a puddle so large that their mother has to push it with a broom so water doesn’t dump in on them all.

And it is underneath this new roof that the girl detects a major change in her brother, Antonio. She used to fall asleep to his magical stories. But his tales have ceased.

Antonio hasn’t spoken a word since the storm.

Written by Sara E. Echenique and illustrated by Ashley Vargas, Our Roof is Blue is a tender picture book about resilience and rebuilding through the eyes of two Puerto Rican siblings. The story, out now from Charlesbridge, also speaks to the trauma that can be experienced from a natural disaster. The book also has a Spanish version—Nuestro techo es azul.

Puerto Ricans inspired her picture book debut, Echenique told Latinx in Publishing in a recent interview. The author and lawyer was born in Puerto Rico and now lives in South Florida, but her parents and extended family still live on the island.

“They were there during Hurricane Maria,” Echenique said of some of her relatives, including her parents. “And for those of us who were not on the island—part of the diaspora—it was just the most heart wrenching experience I think I’ve ever had.”

She recalled how difficult it was not knowing how her family was during Maria. She’d spend hours on the Internet, searching for information and the “David Begnauds of the world” who would post updates on social media. “We were lucky enough that they made it through the hurricane, but then all of the kind of after-effects were just so tragic,” she said.

At the time, Echenique’s children were still young. She said she began thinking of how they would have processed a natural disaster like this. “I tried to think of it through the eyes of the child, and that’s kind of where it originated,” she said of the idea for Our Roof is Blue.

Then when she was able to visit Puerto Rico a few months after Hurricane Maria, Echenique saw that people were still living without electricity, and all these “horrific things that were compounding on each other.”

Her biggest impression, though, was the number of homes that lacked a roof.

“So as you drive you would just see blue roof, after blue roof, after blue roof, after blue roof,” she said. “I was just blown away because these roofs are not intended to be permanent roofs. These tarps are intended to be 30-day temporary tarps. They’re not made for heat. They’re not made for withstanding long rain or wind or anything like that. They’re truly supposed to be temporary.”

And yet, Echenique noted, there are many homes on the island today that are still using tarps as permanent. For the author, the tarp in Our Roof is Blue is a symbol of failure and hope.

In the book, the unnamed narrator, her brother, and their parents prepare for the storm. Through Vargas’ vivid and scribbly illustrations and Echenique’s clear words, readers are given a window through the preparation before an impending hurricane, and the fear during one. “We thought we were ready for anything that could blow our way,” the girl narrates. “But then… the storm blew loud and fierce all day and all night… I acted brave so I would feel brave. Inside, my heart was pounding.”

The story also touches on the power of community in helping to rebuild, and readers feel hope by the end.

“Young readers, she said, may have many takeaways. The biggest one she hopes they leave with is that Antonio and his sister are like them, regardless of what their lived experiences are.”

One of the most heartening elements of this story is the relationship between the unnamed protagonist and her brother, Antonio. Echenique said this sibling bond was drawn from her own relationship with her siblings.

“And then for me, the central focus [of the book] had to be one of hope, and one of resiliency, because I think that truly defines Puerto Ricans—especially those on the island,” she said. “Because of everything they’ve been through, they have no choice but to be like that. I wanted it to be a celebration of that and not necessarily a tragedy, even though of course there were a lot of tragedies that came out of it.”

Trauma can manifest in many different ways. In Our Roof is Blue, we see the main character’s brother, Antonio, stop speaking. Echenique recalled reading many news articles about Hurricane Maria, and one was about a young girl who hadn’t spoken since the storm. The author wondered how the girl would proceed. “Obviously there’s no follow-up in those types of stories,” she said. “In my mind, I wanted to see her on the other end of it.”

From Echenique’s perspective, stories were such a central feature of how her character, Antonio, expressed himself.

“And so to shut off that side of him so holistically and with such immediacy after this event, for me, was the most obvious way that you could show a child what he’s going through without stating it,” she said. “It was a way that felt digestible to me, and to them. . . Clearly he’s going through something, and in a way that they (readers) can understand it and potentially talk about it, too. Children don’t always have the words, and he didn’t have the words at that time.”

According to Echenique, Our Roof is Blue is also about climate change—though she said it may not be obvious to some. She said climate change affects children like Antonio and his sister every day, in a variety of ways. “This is something that’s going to be reverberating and affecting these children for the rest of their lives, potentially,” she said.

In the end, Echenique acknowledged that she has no control over what someone takes from Our Roof is Blue. Young readers, she said, may have many takeaways. The biggest one she hopes they leave with is that Antonio and his sister are like them, regardless of what their lived experiences are.

“I want them to feel that connection across whatever it is: gender, race, culture, language, whatever—and feel like that connection means that those people are worth advocating for, or worth advocating for yourself as well,” she said.

Echenique said Antonio’s sister helps him in Our Roof is Blue, but he really helps himself, too.

“I want children to feel that sense of empowerment as well,” she said. “Because without that, you’re not going to feel like they can change anything. And they can.”

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Sara E. Echenique is a Puerto Rican lawyer and children’s author living in South Florida with her three young children, husband, and their rescue dog, Luna. She acquired a degree in English from Williams College and a law degree from the University of Michigan School of Law. After almost a decade practicing as a litigator in cold New York City, Sara decided to move her family to a place that felt more like her childhood home. 

Roaring Brook Press published her debut middle grade book, Hispanic Star: Roberto Clemente in September 2022 in both English and Spanish, which received a starred review from the School Library Journal and was long listed for the SCBWI Impact & Legacy Fund's Russell Freedman Award for Nonfiction for a Better World. Charlesbridge Publishing published her debut picture book, Our Roof is Blue (Nuestro techo es azul), in April 2023 in both English and Spanish. Visit www.saraechenique.com for more.

Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Aster(ix) Journal, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms Be Like… (part of the Dominican Writers Association’s #DWACuenticos chapbook series), and most recently Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, “El Don,” was a prize finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. She is a proud member of Latinx in Publishing’s Writers Mentorship Class of 2023 and lives in Florida with her family and dog, Brooklyn.