Caldecott Medal Contender: Dreamers

by Sam Juliano

She didn’t like to play with dolls, She didn’t like to skate.She learned to read quite early, And at an incredible rate.  She always took a book to bed,  With a flashlight under the sheet.  She’d make a tent of covers  And read herself to sleep.

                                                                –The Library, 1995, Sarah Stewart

America’s role as the leader of the free world and the guiding light of opportunity for those smothered by impoverishment hangs in the balance.  President Trump’s proposed wall along the US-Mexico border sends a toxic message to one of our two closest neighbors, a country on whose cooperation the United States’ national security and economic prosperity depends.  The “Land of Enchantment” is the United States’ third-largest trading partner and our common border is 1,970 miles long. Mexico collaborates on efforts to guard against extra-regional terrorists hypothetically using its territory to enter the United States. After twelve years of steadily declining migration, more Mexicans the United States than enter it each year. In January, it extradited its most notorious drug lord, “El Chapo” Guzman to the United States.

It makes no sense to undermine this relationship by building a permanent barrier along our border with Mexico. It is counterproductive to jeopardize badly needed cooperation by portraying Mexico as a sinister source of threats that should foot the bill for the wall (which, the 2018 appropriation makes clear, it will not have to do). Mexico certainly has problems, particularly corruption and human rights abuse. But these are aspects of the relationship the United States must work on, rather than push Mexico away with an aggressive construction project.  Above all a barrier at its essence reeks of inhumanity and nationalism and successful implementation of it would represent a return to a medieval mindset.

The aptly titled picture book Dreamers by Mexican-American Yuyi Morales proposes bridges rather than barriers and released in a year of political turbulence that threatens our core values it gloriously reaffirms our nation as a melting pot of immigrants, many who have realized the American dream.  The butterfly-laden Dreamers suggests relocation is wrought with inherent obstacles revolving around a different language, resentment by some who felt threatened by a stranger hoping to achieve success on their terrain and how the oldest of all learning institutions was vital in opening the door to enrichment and opportunity in what was essentially an oasis in a hostile dessert.  Tapping into her own real-life experience traveling over the border with her own child, then two-month old Kelly in 1994, Morales documents with acute sensory cognizance a life-altering journey from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico to El Paso, Texas to visit a dying older relative in San Francisco and to marry Kelly’s father, who was a United States citizen.  Morales intended to return to our beloved, all-too-familiar home south of the border, but encountered expectations to remain in the US because of permanent residency regulations.  Like other immigrants she missed her friends, the food, her job as a swimming coach and flawless command of language, but most of all the initial “fish out of water” feeling when everything seemed so alien to one who has departed the cultural nest.

The actual life-changing event both in Morales’s intended sojourn in her adapted country and indeed in her time on the planet was the discovery of the public library, where she first encountered inordinately beautiful picture books, all there for borrowing at no cost.  The author-illustrator admits the seed was planted for her own maturation into a children’s book artist and that many of the works exerted a lasting impression.  Among the books Morales chooses to include in her library room replication include Marc Simont’s The Stray Dog, David Shannon’s No David!, Zin Zin Zin A Violin by Marjorie Priceman, Doctor DeSoto by William Steig and the Caldecott Medal winner Lon-Po-Po by Ed Young.  Morales is initially skeptical when she enters, thinking it far too premature to expect a positive experience but after she observes another patron gathering books her reaction is one of incredulity and surprise.  The longtime notion that “reading can transport you to another world” is given first-hand validation in the “unimaginable” canvas where objects, sporting paraphernalia, aquatic creatures and trucks are depicted along with more books including one of the seminal works about friendship, Stevie by African-American icon John Steptoe.  When Morales asserts “We didn’t need to speak, we only needed to trust” she refers to the library card as the portal to learning a new language, the cornerstone of daily existence, and the foundation that leads to understanding and communication.

Adult or astute child readers will surely recognize more famous titles like the Caldecott Medal winning Officer Buckle and Gloria by Perry Rathmann and The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis, furthering the identification of books Morales makes a point of honoring.  Morales values the memories that helped her navigate the jarring cultural upheaval and she clutters her purposefully cluttered tapestries with artifacts from her prior town, including colored leaves she is adorned with from the moment she is first seen embarking on her new life after the birth of Kelly.  Amor. Love. Amor.  Dreamers is heavily symbolic and its title points to the springboard of imagination that not only bonds mother and son but ultimately to “make their voices heard” after speaking and writing are honed through the literary experience.  Hence the book The Arrival by Shaun Tan, shown as a library loaner announces their own scholastic advance.  When Morales opines “Someday we will become something we haven’t even yet imagined” she alludes to her coming of age at an artist simultaneously positioned at the time she became comfortable in her new country but her closing double page canvas is a freeze frame capture of concurrent stories, dual language, common resilience and shared hope for the future.

The book’s construction is thematically consistent with the theme of triumph over cultural barriers by using makeshift materials, seemingly everything but the kitchen sink.  Many of the items and materials the artist displays in her dynamic abstracts can be spotted in her lengthy delineation which reaffirms the artist’s uniquely original style and believe that all and every material has artistic potential:

I painted with acrylics and drawn on paper with ink and brushes and a nib pen that once belonged to Maurice Sendak, given to me by Lynn Caponera.  To give the book life, I photographed and scanned many things, including the floor of my studio, the comal where I grill my quesadillas, my childhood drawings kept by my mother, a chair, a brick from my house, old walls from the streets of Malinaleo, my hometown of Xalapa and my house, a metal sheet, traditional Mexican fabrics, crepe, craft and amate papers, leaves and plants from my garden, an old woven blouse, hand-painted pants I made for my son, Kelly, old wood, water in a bucket, jute twine, a traditional wool skirt from Chiapas, Kelly’s childhood drawings, my first homemade book, embroidery and more.

Not since Sarah Stewart’s inspiring 1996 picture book The Library (illustrated by David Small) has this wondrous public archive of printed materials been given such an obsessive definition.  In that notable collaboration a voracious mid-western reader since a young age named Elizabeth Brown read for practically every waking second even while performing household chores.  Based on areal-life person she eventually collected so many books that her home had little space left to walk around in.  She finally donated her vast holdings to her small town which then opened a library.  While Stewart’s book reminds readers that the library should never be taken for granted, and that there are unsung heroes among us, Dreamers celebrates the library in the most profound way possible.  This erstwhile refuge for those with a hankering to travel by just turning pages functions as a scholastic Ellis Island, where the universal bond of leaning and communication serves as an entry point to a creative career.  It does seem like this rapturous and deeply poignant book has so much to say at a time when the human race needs to be reminded what matters most.  The Caldecott committee will surely be looking at Dreamers in an all-encompassing way, and ironically enough Morales, who has won numerous awards including a Caldecott Honor for Frida a few years ago, has become a national treasure.

(postscript: A Spanish language version of the book Sonadores is also available)

Note:  This is the eleventh entry in the 2018 Caldecott Medal Contender series.  The annual venture does not purport to predict what the committee will choose, rather it attempts to gauge what the writer feels should be in the running.  In most instances the books that are featured in the series have been touted as contenders in various online round-ups, but for the ones that are not, the inclusions are a humble plea to the committee for consideration.  It is anticipated the series will include in the neighborhood of around 25 titles; the order which they are being presented in is arbitrary, as every book in this series is a contender.  Some of my top favorites of the lot will be done near the end.  The awards will be announced in late January, hence the reviews will continue until around the middle of that month.