Pura Belpré’ acceptance Speech
July 2004
Hace mucho, mucho tiempo…A long, long time ago Conejo, Rabbit, went to live on the moon. He went there for very good reasons. The most important of them being that Coyote was madly looking for him to eat him up.
Oh, how much coyote wanted to eat Conejo! That sly rabbit had fooled him again, this time into drinking all the water from the lake, with the promise that in the middle of the lake, Coyote would find a fat, milky, round cheese wheel. Then Conejo escaped and climbed a ladder all the way to the moon. To this day Coyote still wants to eat Conejo; that is why you hear him at night looking up and howling at him.
But when I came to live in the USA, ten years ago, I heard different rumors. Here people told me that in the moon there lived a man.
Please understand my disconcertment, but ever since I was a child I had seen with my very own eyes that it was a Rabbit that lived on the moon. Couldn’t everybody see him up there outlined on the face of the full moon? What were people in the USA talking about?
As I come today to celebrate the Pura Belpré award in the company of members of the Association for Library Service to Children, members of REFORMA, colleges, awardees, librarians, teachers, editors, book lovers, friends—many of whom see a man when they look at the moon—I am delighted to announce that I have finally understood that there is room on the moon, and everywhere else for that mater, for more than one tale.
I love old stories, specially my Mexican stories, the ones that I read in my brown-paper textbooks at school. And the ones that my uncles told at the table moving their hands in ways that hypnotized me. And especially the ones that I heard from my mother and my aunts at night when the electric company had us, once more, in the dark, and we were all burrowed inside blankets. The sole light, that of the candles.
Shaking and popping our eyes, my sisters, cousins, and I heard the stories of apparitions, ghosts, espantos, headless horsemen, little people called chaneques who loved to get children lost, weeping lloronas you could hear outside your window, amazing animals like snakes and tlaconetes that came inside the houses to steal the milk from the babies, brujas transformed into fireballs rolling down the barren hills, jungles where spells were cast, and haunted haciendas with dinero, money, buried somewhere in the house.
The most fantastic moments in these tales came as my mother, or my aunts, declared that all that had either happened to them, to my grandma, or to somebody else in the family. And, yes, they said, it was my own bisabuelo, my great-grandfather who had buried his golden coins somewhere in the house not telling anybody where, and then he died. Mama said his sons and daughters dug all aver the house, but it was somebody else, a stranger, who found it when it had already been forgotten.
It is not surprise then that, many years later and one country further away, when I took a class for illustrating children’s books, and our instructor—now my friend and mentor—Ashley Wolf gave her first assignment—to come up with a concept story, alphabet, or counting book to illustrate—I arrived to the next class with the text and some drawings for a counting book about a grandmother who celebrates her birthday in the company of her grandchildren and a guest that just so happens to be…well, dead.
I might not need to explain to you that my book idea didn’t find a lot of takers along the way. Death is a delicate subject, some said, and my book was scary.
When I was a child, I was often scared. Not of espantos—or perhaps only a little; instead, many nights I went to bed convinced that UFOs were landing on the roof of our house while mama and papa where out at the movies. On those nights I lay awake believing that the day had come when Aliens from outer space had arrived to take me. I am still waiting I guess.
The other night my husband Tim told our nine-year-old son, “You might not know it but your mother is an Alien.” To prove it he asked me to bring my green card, and there on bold blue letter we all read the words: Resident Alien—below, U.S Departament of Justice-Inmigration and Naturalization Service. “Is that true?” Kelly gasped. I nodded.
I crossed the border from Mexico to the USA with my gringo husband, Tim, in 1994, two months after our son had been born. In those first years, with almost no English, no job, no friends, parents, sister, brother, aunts, uncles, cousins, I mostly felt lost.
Like many immigrants that come looking for a better life, in leaving my country I felt I had not only left behind the people, the objects, and the land of my heart, but also the language I needed to be me.
But, as my mother would say, No hay mal que por bien no venga, there is no bad from which some good does not come. And once again, mama was right.
Kelly grew up and began speaking his first words, both in English and Spanish, and along the way I learned too. Our first school was Sesame Street. I am proud to tell you that most of my English, I learned from Elmo, Cookie Monster, Grover, Big Bird, and Ernie.
Then one day my mother-in-law, who spoke no Spanish but cared for me very much, put Kelly and I in her car and took us to a place that would change my life forever. She brought us to the public library.
At this point I want to stop to say how honored I am to have won an award chosen and given by librarians. I am especially thrilled because the Pure Belpre award gave me the perfect opportunity to come declare in the open my infatuation with the Public Library.
The day my mother-in-law took me inside the library, and I ambled pushing Kelly’s stroller into the children’s section, I entered a heavenly realm. On shelves were rows and rows of books made of thick and bright paper. Inside the books there were words and also pictures or photographs, all rich, unique, artful, clearly made by great talent and much work. I was in awe. Were books for children in the USA really made like that?
Every book I opened felt like a piece of art in my hands. And what was even better? I could read the stories and understand! Most texts were clear and simple; and when I didn’t know some words, I looked at the pictures, and the meaning shone through.
I am a lucky person. My sister the astrologer tells me it is written in my stars that I would be privileged with mentors. My sister is a good star reader. On the path from that first trip to the library to this moment where I stand here celebrating children’s books with you, I have been continuously taken by the hand by extraordinary people.
Librarians at the San Francisco Public Library worked patiently with my son and I. They pointed at authors and books that would inspire me profoundly, and as days passed they made me feel that the hallways of the library were more my home than my own little apartment. At night, just as gently, they would let me know it was closing time, but that I could come back tomorrow again.
I cannot describe to you how astonished I stood when a librarian explained to me that with one library card I could take home as many as 22 books (in most recent times the that number has changed to 50) for three weeks and still renew them three times if nobody else had requested them—and Kelly and I had two library cards together! The next time we went to the library, we brought our shopping cart with us.
But my mentors are in bunches, in great numbers. Writers like Alma Flor Ada and Isabel Campoy, and illustrators like Ashley Wolf and Mira Reisberg, have inspired me with their knowledge and with their passion for children’s books. And to the beloved member of my writers group, the Revisionaries, Jim Averbeck, Karen Erhardt, Lynn Haze, Susan Katz, and Maria Vanlieshout, I thank them for joining me on the path. I also want to thank my agent Charlotte Sheedy for having the strength of a storm. When my work is in her hands, and I am out of her way, I feel safe and sound.
Today I am here to receive a Pura Belpré Medal and an honor, for the illustrations of two books that delight my heart. Harvesting Hope: the Story of Cesar Chavez was a seed rightly planted that now has germinated. Written by Kathleen Krull, extraordinaire biographer, the story of this hero of gentle manner but solid determination, came to me because Jeannette Larson, editor at Harcourt, hoped for a miracle and gave the story to a first time illustrator.
I have nothing but great gratitude for the Harcourt team, and especially for Jeannette, for bringing Cesar Chavez to my life, for working together to harvest this book, and for cheering me on all the way through.
Just a Minute: a Trickster Tale and Counting Book was a story that went haunting publishing houses before it arrived on the desk of, then editor at Chronicle, Samantha McFerrin, who, in usual circumstances, is afraid of skeletons.
I want to thank Sam for seeing beyond the espanto. Yes, Grandma Beetle’s is a tale of death and about people whose time to die has arrived. But when Señor Calavera comes to take Grandma Beetle, she stalls for more time to rejoice in life: she cleans her house, she cooks delicious food, she fills piñatas with candies, she celebrates her birthday party in the company of her beautiful grandchildren, and as the day goes on, she makes friends with death.
In Mexico people like to say that Death is our most loyal companion; after all it is born with us and with us it lives: La muerte la llevamos dentro, we all carry death inside us.
It still tickles me inside when I remember that infamous chapter of La Famila Burron, the comic magazine that my dad used to buy every Sunday and that made him laugh with his mouth open and his false teeth jumping up and down. In such episode the members of the Burron family realized that inside each of them there was a skeleton. Their skeletons walked with them, ate with them, they even slept in their same beds. And at the light of the discovery, the Burron family spent some time being afraid of themselves.
I am sorry to break the news, but inside of all of you there lives a skeleton too. However it is my hope that you treat your skeleton with courtesy, perhaps you would even invite him to your next birthday party. You’ll be surprise at how useful skeletons can be when you need a hand, or a leg, or even just a metatarsal.
I know my family wishes they could be here with me today. Kelly, my child, would love to come up to stage and receive the award for me. He would even love to deliver my speech; he has tried before. He would do an excellent job, actually. And again, like in all this years, I would have to learn from him.
My husband Tim, my favorite gringo, my patron of the arts, my most loyal fan; I would not be here without his challenging me to conquer a new language and a new life. In the long process he has rooted for me every day while loving me both in English and Spanish.
As for my parents, Eloina and Eligio, one of my sisters told me that the morning I called them to say I had won a great award, that after they hung up the telephone, both my mom and my dad sat on the bed and cried. You need to understand that my parents live many, many miles away in Mexico, where they can only hope that their child who lives in the USA never appears in the news, because when they turn on their TV or read the news paper, they are most likely to hear that one of us got deported or harassed at the airport while entering the USA, or they might heard that some people are working to implement laws that won’t allow our children to keep learning in Spanish at school, or they might even hear that one of us died while trying to cross the border.
So you might be able to understand how overwhelmed they felt the day I told them that in the news that day was a story with my name in it, because people in the USA had welcomed, recognized, and cheered for my work.
My family is my engine; they are my corazon. You can find them all in my work. They are my stories, they are the colors of my painting, they are the lines of my landscapes, they are the accents on my words. Ask beautiful Kelly, and he would tell you how convinced he is that, no matter what color, what gender, or what age, he is one and every child I paint in my books. I think he might be right.
In a world of many stories, I’m indebted to you for celebrating my way to tell the tale.
To thank you for being here today, I am asking the universe two wishes for you and I: One, uno, might we all learn to take care of all the children as all the children of the world are our own. And two, dos, should we all go home and live in harmony with others and in harmony with what lives inside us—including our “skinny one”.