About this episode
In this episode, Yuyi explores her experience as an immigrant to the United States and her “constant immigrant journey” now that she is living and creating in Mexico. She opens up about everything from how her stories helped quell her homesickness to the inspiration for her more recent picture books. She shares an incredible story about how one book completely changed her perspective on reading and made her a reader. We discuss magical realism, and Yuyi’s secret to finding joy in every crevice of life, no matter the starting point.
"It is through these books and through this work that I'm doing that I hope that I can be a worthy companion of [children's] journeys, because they have a lot of journeys to go through, and there is nothing more difficult than going through those journeys alone." - Yuyi Morales
Growing up in Mexico in the 60s and 70s, Yuyi Morales wasn’t familiar with children’s books. Instead, she was surrounded by a family of vibrant storytellers and a mother whose creative side was brought out through her passion for making anything and everything needed around the house. As an adult, Yuyi found herself living in America and learning English, through which she discovered and fell in love with children’s books. A Caldecott Honor recipient and Pura Belpré Award winner, today, Yuyi merges her youth and experience in America to create magical, colorful, and entirely original picture books.
For her reading challenge, Migration Stories, Yuyi challenges us to think about the reasons why people and animals migrate. She offers a list of picture books about people and animals alike, moving from one place to another.
This episode's Beanstack featured librarian is Pam Hamlin, the family literacy specialist at Prince George's County Memorial Library System in Maryland. Pam was one of the very first librarians I ever worked with, and she is amazing! She shares a message for parents and teachers of young children.
Contents
- Chapter 1 - The Blue Elephant (2:46)
- Chapter 2 - Baby on the Roof (8:09)
- Chapter 3 - El Ahogado Más Hermoso del Mundo (11:01)
- Chapter 4 - From Mexico to the United States, and back again (20:38)
- Chapter 5 - Dreamers (24:34)
- Chapter 6 - The Secret to Joy (32:23)
- Chapter 7 - Migration Stories (35:46)
- Chapter 8 - Beanstack Featured Librarian (37:29)
Author Reading Challenge
Download the free reading challenge worksheet, or view the challenge materials on our helpdesk.
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Yuyi Morales:
When I live in the United States, especially at the beginning, I was very homesick and very heartbroken. I started making my books from that feeling, from missing everything that was important to me, that gave me identity, that gave me validation, including the language.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Shortly after Yuyi Morales graduated college, she immigrated to the United States from Mexico. What was initially planned as a short visit to her husband's homeland, turned into a 20-year stay. Growing up in Xalapa, Mexico, Yuyi hadn't encountered many picture books, but one day her mother-in-law took her to their local library and her whole world changed. It was an awakening for Yuyi, and while she could not yet understand the language of many of the books with her then rudimentary English, she still understood them, and she was compelled to create her own. Drawing on her own cultural roots steeped in storytelling, she merged her two worlds, leading her to create books that included many stories from her childhood, and later about her own journey and perspectives as an immigrant to this country. These vibrant imaginative books range from my kids' very favorite Yuyi story, Niño Wrestles the World, to the Pura Belpre winning Viva Frida, to her more recent works like Dreamers and Bright Star.
Yuyi Morales:
I'm hoping that they are going to know that my presenter is sincere and honest, and also to have the opportunity to tell them that it is through these books and through this work that I'm doing that I hope that I can be a worthy companion of their journey, because they have a lot of journeys to go through, and there is nothing more difficult than going through those journeys alone.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And in this episode, Yuyi will share how her cultural upbringing inspired her storytelling, tell us what book rescued her from being a reluctant reader, and reveal the secret behind how all her stories lead to a place of joy and hope, no matter how challenging the starting point may be. Also, you all should know that we spoke for nearly two hours. It was painful to cut some parts of our conversation for this episode, and I'll be sharing some of those bits on Instagram throughout the next couple of weeks.
And for now, my name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and this is The Reading Culture, a show where we speak with authors and reading enthusiasts to explore ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more.
What was life like when you were a young person, the age for many of the books that you write are for?
Yuyi Morales:
When I was four, we moved from grandma's house, which is where we used to live, to a different city here in Mexico, Guadalajara, and in those places my dad was working there, but we didn't have family. What I remember about that time is just this very creative and enthusiastic mother who was doing everything the way she had been taught because she was a woman of her times and she needed to know how to do anything that was home related. I had two sisters that are younger than me, and my mother was always making everything for us, from the food, but also everything from the clothes that we wore, the bedspreads in our beds, the lamps, she would make things that we'll put on top of the couch and the curtains, everything, she made everything, and she was like this very enthusiastic machine. And I think about a machine because at some point, my mother bought herself a knitting machine. I remember that she bought it from someone who came to the door, like this street person, I mean a person who was going door to door.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Door to door, yeah.
Yuyi Morales:
Because our economy was always difficult. My mother will save money, and then when these people came to the door, she will buy things. But I think that there was a certain secrecy to it at the beginning. Usually she will buy things and put them under the bed so that maybe my father wouldn't know that she was acquiring these things. And eventually, she brought it out and she went crazy with a knitting machine. She did everything. She made everything. She made coats and socks and our panties, our underwear, and she will make them with-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Everything.
Yuyi Morales:
Everything. And that's what I think I thought about her, this knitting machine that was just going crazy, because everything was just exuding out of her, everything was being created like that. At least, this is imagine that my child-like imagination thinks of when she thinks of my mother, just making everything for us.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Like creating, but nobody presumably thought of her as an artist or whatever, she was just doing a necessity.
Yuyi Morales:
Exactly. But they can see that there was a passion, this really big, big strong energy, that she still has. And she's an old woman now, but she's unstoppable. And when she was younger, she was even more stoppable.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Were you also, you were very creative as a child, has this always been, even if you weren't creating books per se, but you were always just drawing, making, doing things?
Yuyi Morales:
Exactly, yeah. I always loved to draw. My mother kept drawings from when I was very, very little. In fact, some of those drawings, you can see them in my book, Dreamers, in the first page, where there is a girl sleeping over the table. On that table there is a pen and there are some pieces of paper with drawings.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, these are your drawings?
Yuyi Morales:
Yeah, I made them when I was three, four years old, five years old. And some of them are a little older.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's cool.
Yuyi Morales:
And that picture in Dreamers is taken from one of my very first memories, which is that, before we moved from grandma's house, my mother used to make stuffed animals. And because she had duties, because she had a lot of work to do at home, the only free time that she had was at night. And then at night she will start making these stuffed animals, which she will put by the window and sell them and help to the economy of her family. But she will always do it at night. And I remember that she will sit me next to her by the sewing machine, just like in that image, and she will be sewing and she will put paper and I will be drawing.
But her working hours were very long so most of the time I will fall asleep. And I remember, I have one memory of waking up one night and just being surrounded by this giant animal. She will make really big ones and then I was young and small, so I woke up and there was a blue elephant in front of me and giraffes and just all these toys that she was making. And I always thought that was the magic time. How could I just fall asleep and suddenly find myself in another walls surrounded by these creatures?
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Despite lots of reading in her household, spending her childhood in Mexico in the sixties and seventies meant that Yuyi wasn't really exposed to picture books. Instead, her fondest memories of storytelling come from the vibrant real life stories her family would share with each other.
Yuyi Morales:
My family is made out of stories, especially from my mother's side. There were a lot of stories that were real life stories, but they are absolutely incredible and you will not believe them. My mother also was the only person in her family who studied beyond elementary school, so everybody else just barely knew how to write or read. I always felt like she was always trying to make up for all of her brothers and sisters, and she's still studying nowadays. She went to school and she's continued. But then the stories that were told, my mother loved them because they came from her family, but she was always very skeptical. So the stories in the family were just about apparitions about things that you will see at night, about getting lost by little people. About-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wait, what? What's the little one about the little people?
Yuyi Morales:
Oh, yeah.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Or, well, do you, with that one, or is there one that you really remember that stays?
Yuyi Morales:
Yeah, my mother say that one of her brothers, I don't know if that was someone that was born before her or after, but she say that my grandmother was doing the laundry, that was by hand, so she will have to go to the patio where there was a big pile of... We call it [foreign language 00:09:58], so it's a big container with water, and she was doing the laundry and she had left the baby in some sort of a crib, maybe by the bed. And then she heard that the baby's crying and she goes and looks for the baby and the baby is not on the bed. So she starts looking for the baby everywhere, everywhere. And she goes crazy looking for baby until finally she climbs a ladder and she finds the baby on the roof of the house. And of course, the only explanation they had is something that we call Hidden [foreign language 00:10:35] in Veracruz, [foreign language 00:10:37], which are the old people, the guardians of the places.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's so interesting. So you grew up in just a very, it's very colorful in every sense of the word, the stories, the world, the things your mom was making, which seems like this world where it's like in between just some level of magical.
Yuyi Morales:
It is. Yes.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That explains. I think it says a lot about you.
Yuyi Morales:
[speaking spanish 00:11:40].
But I'm going to read to you in English so you have a little bit of an idea about this story, which I love it.
The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World. The first children who saw the dark and a slinky bulge approaching through the sea let themselves think it was an enemy ship. Then they saw it had no flags or masts and they thought it was a whale. But when it washed up on the beach, they removed the clumps of seaweed, the jellyfish tentacles and the remains of fish and flotsam, and only then did they see that it was a drowned man. They had been playing with him all afternoon, burying him in the sand and digging him up again, when someone chanced to see them and spread the alarm in the village. The man who carried him to the newest house noticed that he weighted more than any dead man they had ever known, almost as much as a horse, and they said to each other that maybe he'd been floating too long and the water had gone into his bones. When they lay him on the floor, they say he'd been taller than all other men because there was barely enough room for him in the house. But they thought that maybe the ability to keep on growing after death was part of the nature of certain drowned men.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
[foreign language 00:13:19], or The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World in English, is a 1968 short story by beloved Nobel Prize-winning Columbian author, Gabriel García Márquez. It comes from his collection, The Incredible and Sad Story of the Candid Erendira and her Soulless Grandmother, which features some of his darkest works. This particular story is about a small fishing village that discovers a remarkably beautiful drowned man. They subsequently become fascinated with him and have grand imaginations of the life he may have lived and what it would've been like to know him. This leads to a renewed sense of pride and purpose throughout the village, highlighting the transformative power of imagination and finding beauty in the world around us.
Before reading this book, Yuyi shared that she did not love reading at school. She says she didn't even ask her mom to buy the books they were required to purchase for school. But this book, one highlighting the stories that reminded her of those from her own childhood, captivated Yuyi.
Yuyi Morales:
I remember reading this and finally something clicking inside of me. Finally, this is a story that I can relate to. What we were given as an assignment was to read the last story, which is a really, really strong story, especially for a child. But I was so taken with it, and this is a book of several short stories that after I read the story that I was assigned to school, I just read the whole book, and this is my favorite story.
So what Gabriel García Márquez does for me is a connection to some of the things that we were talking about before, when she's finally hearing someone who's telling stories like the ones that I hear when I was a little child, like the ones that my mother, my family, my grandmother was living as real life. I remember coming to United States and hearing people mention the writing of writers like Gabriel García Márquez as magical realism, and I have never heard that term before. And I remember thinking, I never saw it as magic, I always saw it as realism. For me, the way that he was writing was the real life. That was the way things were happening. So before, all the books that I was reading made no sense to me, I had no interest to them. But when I start reading him, then I realized I am a reader. I love books. I really like to read. But I had to find him first.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, it's an amazing story. And I also love him, I love his writing and all of his works. And it's interesting because you definitely hear that school of writers, at least here, get labeled always as magical realism. But talking about how and where you grew up, there was just no distinction between magic and realism, it was just realism for you.
Yuyi Morales:
For me, they were in that. So when he writes that people at the town found a man on a chicken coop and suddenly they see that he has wings, that's real. When he writes that the smell of roses came from the ocean and the whole town is just intoxicated with the smell of roses, that is real. Now I live here in the city and most of the people that I talk to and that I live nearby, there are people who live city things and those stories are part of the past. But now that I have gone to live in La Mancha in this small fisher people place, sugar cane cutters, workers, now these stories have come back, because I go there and the stories that I hear as are just like that.
And there was a cat the other day that returned after seven years, or had been lost, and they say, "Finally, [foreign language 00:17:39] again. Cottontail, he's back again." And then he starts eating from people's tables, he starts stealing food and everything. And there is one of our neighbors that declares that in true [foreign language 00:17:55] is an [foreign language 00:17:56], which is a shape-shifter, that [foreign language 00:18:00], the cat that we are seeing right there in front of us every day, is not only a cat, but is a shape-shifter, and that when we don't see him, he's also a human. And those stories are just done like that, he is an [foreign language 00:18:17].
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Nobody's laughing when they're saying that or smile, people are nodding in agreement.
Yuyi Morales:
Nobody's saying, "That's crazy." Absolutely not.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Does it feel comforting for you to be home now, in that way, in the sense of just like you would never have that?
Yuyi Morales:
Yes, it is it comforting, but in a way, I have to remind myself that I have changed. I'm not that 4, 6, 8 years old anymore. I have been through a journey. I have been in the United States, I have been making books, I have hear a lot of different stories. So when I come here, when I come back, yes, there is this something that feels familiar, but at the same time it's not me anymore. So I am also letting go of my transformations, of the ways I have changed, to realize that I am also now entering a new space, a new world. Even though it feels familiar, it is a new world and I need to have also the openness and the humility to enter those worlds, because it's very easy for me to say, "Oh, of course it's not an [foreign language 00:19:39]. No, it is a cat." We all know it scientifically. That's a cat. That's not possible.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Right.
Yuyi Morales:
And it's very easy for me just to enter that space with that way of thinking, and I'm trying to let go of that, because if I want to keep hearing the stories, if I want to be someone who is honored by those stories, no matter how fantastic, how sometimes ignorant we think that they are, I won't be given the gift of those stories if I continue to label them as something that is not part of this world. So my work now is to put aside all of the things that I have learned about stories and storytelling and just be open to be told these stories and take them not as magic, but as real life.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yuyi, I remember one of the first times that we read your book, Niño Wrestles the World, with our kids and we read it so much. My son was always running around in his underwear and telling us that he was Niño, our adorable [foreign language 00:20:52], in one of your earlier works, of course you know, the Just a Minute, and it's this great original counting book and we'd always count to 10 in English and Spanish after it, and we were all drawn to these vibrant, bold colors for the fun and the quirkiness of the books. They're just so original. And hearing you talk about your journey from the US to California, and now back home to Mexico, I'm just wondering how it feels to write in these different places. Do you create differently in one place versus the other?
Yuyi Morales:
It is very different. When I live in the United States, especially at the beginning, I was very homesick and very heartbroken and I started making my books from that feeling, from missing everything that was important to me, that gave me identity, that gave me validation, including the language. And for example, I create my first book, which is Just a Minute: A Trickster Tale and Counting Book, and it's a story of a skeleton that comes one morning and knocks at the door of Grandma Beetle to tell her that it is time for her to go. When I made that book, I was missing everything from my home. I was missing the food and the family and the colors and what I do with just a minute is surround myself with all those things that I didn't have.
That book has all the food that I missed. It has the birthday parties with the pinatas that I miss. It has all the colors. When I was making books in the United States, there was always this feeling of nostalgia of the things that were part of my growing up and that were part of me having the energy to create and I was bringing it to me. But now that I'm here in Mexico, I am at a place where I always wanted to be. I move here when my son went to college and I realized now I don't have to live in the United States because the reason why I was there was so that I could support and sustain the wellbeing of my family. But once he goes away, then it was my time. I came back here to Mexico and it is another journey. It is an immigrant journey, a constant immigration journey, because in the same way that I had to wonder and ask who I was when I got to the United States for the first time, then when I come back to Mexico, the question remains.
I'm still wondering now who is this person who comes here to Mexico who likes to create stories and likes art? Because when I was living here in Mexico, I had no idea that I loved stories, and I wasn't making art, I was drawing, but I had never really painted. I had a few things that I did at school, but I had didn't have experience of creating and making it part of my working and my living being an artist. So the question linger and it had to be answered in different ways, and I think I'm still answering, who is this person? Who is this Yuyi who creates stories and tries to find the stories that are relevant to my own search?
Donald Trump Clip:
I've been hearing about DACA for so many years. Some people call it Dreamers. It's not Dreamers. Don't fall into that trap. It's just much different than Dreamers. And I said the other night, we have dreamers too, we have dreamers in this country too. We can't forget our dreamers. I have a lot of dreamers here.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
In 2018, Yuyi released her picture book, Dreamers, which is a non-fiction account of her journey immigrating to America from Mexico. With encouragement from her agent Yuyi released this story in response to the political tensions arising in the country around immigration. Despite not being a dreamer herself, she told the Journal of Children's Literature, "I want to signal that making the journey of leaving your country, all of the risk, all of the changes that you have to encounter in a new country, is the result of how we dream for a better future."
The story preceded her 2021 book, Bright Star, which explores in a very loving way, the borderlands between the US and Mexico. I asked Yuyi to speak about her impulse to create these books in response to her witnessing of sometimes painful immigration and detention stories.
Yuyi Morales:
You mentioned my last two books, and those are Dreamers and Bright Star, and they both are created from the moment that we are living on right now. Dreamers comes from Trump actually being elected president, and my disbelief that everything that I have thought that we were working for, especially us who are making books for children, I felt like I had to learn the principles of how it was like to live in a country like the United States and then seeing all of that just washed away. I remember Trump witnessing, like all of us did, that he was having a discourse up that he was using as his platform, as his political platform, which was to characterize who immigrants were, especially immigrants that come from the south borders, that's all Mexico and all the way to South America, and call us with words that were meant to dehumanize us.
When someone is not human, there is this feeling that you can do whatever you want to them. So you can deport them, you can imprison them, you can separate them from their families. You can do anything you want when you dehumanize people. So my next book, Bright Star, is a response to that, to the separation of families, and to many other things that were happening that made me think about how, especially us who care for children and children's books, we bring these stories of being brave, of growing up, of being in love, of being accepting and accepted. And I was thinking now these children who are entering the border and are being put in cages or are being separated by their families, are the stories that people like I am making, are those stories honest? Are those stories really telling them that eventually they are going to be wholesome again? That what they have been through is just something that they have to pray because eventually they are going to be productive and happy?
That felt to me dishonest, to say the least. So I had a search that was important to me, and it was a search that I needed for me, which is really if something that terrible happens to anyone, how do you come out of it? How do you heal it? If you are alive after the experience, how do you continue and grow up to feel wholesome again? So those two books are my journey of searching for those answers. Dreamers is not a book about my story, it is a book about the things that I learned when I was immigrating to the United States and the things that I have learned in the process.
For so long, for years and years, when people ask me, how did I come to the United States? My answer was always with nothing. I came with nothing. I had a baby. I had some clothes in the bag. But that was it, I came empty-handed. And through my journey I learned how false that was and also how invisiblising it was, not only for me, but for anybody who enters that journey of coming to a new place, and trying to recognize how plentiful I had been when I came to the United States instead of how empty-handed was something that took me a long time to learn, but that I wanted to make sure that I was put in a story like Dreamers.
For Bright Star, it was important to me to find answers, and it is not like at the end of the book I offered those answers because the truth is that I don't have them yet, but it is part of the journey of finding the answers. How are we going to heal something that feels irreparable? And how are we going to ask our children that they can take the journey of healing when sometimes we adults don't even know how to do it?
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Bright Star, it addresses those themes, but using the characters of a fawn and her mother surviving in this beautiful but perilous desert. Can you talk about maybe some of the different experiences you've had reading Bright Star to kids?
Yuyi Morales:
Maybe a year ago, I went to the place where I did the research originally, Agua Prieta, Sonora. So we crossed the border from Tucson and I was received there at a school of Agua Prieta, a small school. I remember it was very cold and windy that day, but all the children had gathered outside to hear me read and they were shivering and everything. And as soon as I started reading the book, suddenly there was sunshine, their faces changed. And when we finished the story, they were all cuddled together and they came and they approached me and they wanted to ask me questions about the deer and there was light in their faces.
I don't know, it was just an incredible experience. It makes me realize that as much as I love reading to children, to any child, I'm always hoping that I'm going to make a connection with that child that I visit, and I'm hoping that they are going to know that my present there is sincere and honest, and also to have the opportunity to tell them that it is through these books and through this work that I'm doing that I hope that I can be a worthy companion of their journey because they have a lot of journeys to go through. And there is nothing more difficult than going through those journeys alone, and I hope that I can be granted with their trust to accompany them when they need it.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I just feel like in all of your things, even the day I was looking on your social media, some little girl named Luna had asked you a question and then you made this hilarious video of the wind blowing. And especially in your recent books, it's taking on serious things and you are, as you said, in your heart, really thinking about so much that is heavy, but you just really maintain this joyful, creative spirit about you and I don't know what you think your secret to doing that is or how you manage to do that when your heart is heavy with other things.
Yuyi Morales:
I think that I'm making these books and sometimes I'm angry when I'm making these books and sometimes I'm sad when I'm making these books, because that's part of the journey, that's how I find what I care for. That thing that hurts me might help me find what I care for. But what I want at the end of my journey, at the end of my search, is to find wellbeing, adventure, laughing. I want to be hugging people. I want to be hugging ourselves. I want to be discovering places that make us do crazy things. That's what I'm heading towards. And through the journey, perhaps I'm going to be feeling things and I'm not always going to be happy, but I don't want to stay in that place. I want to move towards the places where what describe us and what is important to us is how much we can smile and how loud we can sing a song without being embarrassed or where we can feel safe enough to try on playing a song in a harana when I'm not very good at playing yet.
I think that what I really want is to create that space, where it's worth doing all these things, where we are safe to try being who we are without being afraid that there is no place for us here. So my books, even though they might be serious in some ways, I hope that my books are good listeners, that even when they are the ones who might be offering the words, that in that act, there is a listening act. I hope that they're created like this recipient, this place that is going to be a good listener of the reader. Because when the reader reads the book, they are also telling their story, they are also saying what they are feeling. So my books, there are some serious things, but at the end they are all looking for that playful moment where we are going to skip up the road to join the people that we love, so that we continue our journey to smile, to be happy, to thrive and to be well.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yuyi's reading challenge, Migration Stories, draws inspiration from her own journey crossing from Mexico to America and back again. She challenges us to read stories about people who move from one place to another, especially those moving to the United States through the southern border.
Yuyi Morales:
Immigrations are vast, are different, there are many ways, and we people are not the only ones who migrate. Sometimes the question is asked to science, why do anyone make migrates like animals? Why do they migrate? Again, the answers are many, but most of the time we don't know why they make migrate. Why, if an animal was born in a place where it's warm and there is all the conditions for living, why do they have to go to a different place? Sometimes animals might be born in one place and even though it is the right conditions of weather, there also might be many other animals and many other predators so they have to move to be safer. So through their cycle of life, they need to find different spaces to continue thriving and surviving. We people also do the same. So I wanted to offer a challenge where we might read some books about both animals and also people who move from one place to another.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You can check out Yuyi's challenge and all of our author reading challenges at thereadingculturepod.com, and today's Beanstack featured librarian is Pam Hamlin, the family literacy specialist at Prince George's County Memorial Library System in Maryland. She has a message for parents and teachers of young children.
Pam Hamlin:
I usually work a lot with parents and teachers of younger children, and I really encourage them to know that they're their child's first and best teacher, and encourage them to talk, sing, share books and play with their kids, make reading as pleasurable as possible so that they're always going to have a love of reading with their family members, or on their own when they get older. And to read to them anywhere, so you're on the bus, I know with my son especially, I had to read to him because he was moving around so much when he was eating a snack or when he was playing blocks or in the tub. So just making it fun for them as much as possible, letting them choose, when they can choose their own books and stories, and don't feel like you have to read the whole book or the whole chapter. When they're done, let them be done. Yeah, just giving them ownership of what they choose to read as much as possible.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been The Reading Culture, and you've been listening to our conversation with Yuyi Morales. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently I'm reading Fatty Fatty Boom Boom by Rabia Chaudry and Moonflower by Kacen Callender. If you've enjoyed today's show, please show some love and rate, subscribe and share The Reading Culture among your friends and networks. To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, you can check out all of our resources at beanstack.com, and join us on social media @TheReadingCulturePod for some very awesome giveaways.
This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport and Lower Street Media and script edited by Josiah Lamberto Egan. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode. Thanks for joining and keep reading.
When I live in the United States, especially at the beginning, I was very homesick and very heartbroken. I started making my books from that feeling, from missing everything that was important to me, that gave me identity, that gave me validation, including the language.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Shortly after Yuyi Morales graduated college, she immigrated to the United States from Mexico. What was initially planned as a short visit to her husband's homeland, turned into a 20-year stay. Growing up in Xalapa, Mexico, Yuyi hadn't encountered many picture books, but one day her mother-in-law took her to their local library and her whole world changed. It was an awakening for Yuyi, and while she could not yet understand the language of many of the books with her then rudimentary English, she still understood them, and she was compelled to create her own. Drawing on her own cultural roots steeped in storytelling, she merged her two worlds, leading her to create books that included many stories from her childhood, and later about her own journey and perspectives as an immigrant to this country. These vibrant imaginative books range from my kids' very favorite Yuyi story, Niño Wrestles the World, to the Pura Belpre winning Viva Frida, to her more recent works like Dreamers and Bright Star.
Yuyi Morales:
I'm hoping that they are going to know that my presenter is sincere and honest, and also to have the opportunity to tell them that it is through these books and through this work that I'm doing that I hope that I can be a worthy companion of their journey, because they have a lot of journeys to go through, and there is nothing more difficult than going through those journeys alone.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And in this episode, Yuyi will share how her cultural upbringing inspired her storytelling, tell us what book rescued her from being a reluctant reader, and reveal the secret behind how all her stories lead to a place of joy and hope, no matter how challenging the starting point may be. Also, you all should know that we spoke for nearly two hours. It was painful to cut some parts of our conversation for this episode, and I'll be sharing some of those bits on Instagram throughout the next couple of weeks.
And for now, my name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and this is The Reading Culture, a show where we speak with authors and reading enthusiasts to explore ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more.
What was life like when you were a young person, the age for many of the books that you write are for?
Yuyi Morales:
When I was four, we moved from grandma's house, which is where we used to live, to a different city here in Mexico, Guadalajara, and in those places my dad was working there, but we didn't have family. What I remember about that time is just this very creative and enthusiastic mother who was doing everything the way she had been taught because she was a woman of her times and she needed to know how to do anything that was home related. I had two sisters that are younger than me, and my mother was always making everything for us, from the food, but also everything from the clothes that we wore, the bedspreads in our beds, the lamps, she would make things that we'll put on top of the couch and the curtains, everything, she made everything, and she was like this very enthusiastic machine. And I think about a machine because at some point, my mother bought herself a knitting machine. I remember that she bought it from someone who came to the door, like this street person, I mean a person who was going door to door.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Door to door, yeah.
Yuyi Morales:
Because our economy was always difficult. My mother will save money, and then when these people came to the door, she will buy things. But I think that there was a certain secrecy to it at the beginning. Usually she will buy things and put them under the bed so that maybe my father wouldn't know that she was acquiring these things. And eventually, she brought it out and she went crazy with a knitting machine. She did everything. She made everything. She made coats and socks and our panties, our underwear, and she will make them with-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Everything.
Yuyi Morales:
Everything. And that's what I think I thought about her, this knitting machine that was just going crazy, because everything was just exuding out of her, everything was being created like that. At least, this is imagine that my child-like imagination thinks of when she thinks of my mother, just making everything for us.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Like creating, but nobody presumably thought of her as an artist or whatever, she was just doing a necessity.
Yuyi Morales:
Exactly. But they can see that there was a passion, this really big, big strong energy, that she still has. And she's an old woman now, but she's unstoppable. And when she was younger, she was even more stoppable.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Were you also, you were very creative as a child, has this always been, even if you weren't creating books per se, but you were always just drawing, making, doing things?
Yuyi Morales:
Exactly, yeah. I always loved to draw. My mother kept drawings from when I was very, very little. In fact, some of those drawings, you can see them in my book, Dreamers, in the first page, where there is a girl sleeping over the table. On that table there is a pen and there are some pieces of paper with drawings.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, these are your drawings?
Yuyi Morales:
Yeah, I made them when I was three, four years old, five years old. And some of them are a little older.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's cool.
Yuyi Morales:
And that picture in Dreamers is taken from one of my very first memories, which is that, before we moved from grandma's house, my mother used to make stuffed animals. And because she had duties, because she had a lot of work to do at home, the only free time that she had was at night. And then at night she will start making these stuffed animals, which she will put by the window and sell them and help to the economy of her family. But she will always do it at night. And I remember that she will sit me next to her by the sewing machine, just like in that image, and she will be sewing and she will put paper and I will be drawing.
But her working hours were very long so most of the time I will fall asleep. And I remember, I have one memory of waking up one night and just being surrounded by this giant animal. She will make really big ones and then I was young and small, so I woke up and there was a blue elephant in front of me and giraffes and just all these toys that she was making. And I always thought that was the magic time. How could I just fall asleep and suddenly find myself in another walls surrounded by these creatures?
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Despite lots of reading in her household, spending her childhood in Mexico in the sixties and seventies meant that Yuyi wasn't really exposed to picture books. Instead, her fondest memories of storytelling come from the vibrant real life stories her family would share with each other.
Yuyi Morales:
My family is made out of stories, especially from my mother's side. There were a lot of stories that were real life stories, but they are absolutely incredible and you will not believe them. My mother also was the only person in her family who studied beyond elementary school, so everybody else just barely knew how to write or read. I always felt like she was always trying to make up for all of her brothers and sisters, and she's still studying nowadays. She went to school and she's continued. But then the stories that were told, my mother loved them because they came from her family, but she was always very skeptical. So the stories in the family were just about apparitions about things that you will see at night, about getting lost by little people. About-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wait, what? What's the little one about the little people?
Yuyi Morales:
Oh, yeah.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Or, well, do you, with that one, or is there one that you really remember that stays?
Yuyi Morales:
Yeah, my mother say that one of her brothers, I don't know if that was someone that was born before her or after, but she say that my grandmother was doing the laundry, that was by hand, so she will have to go to the patio where there was a big pile of... We call it [foreign language 00:09:58], so it's a big container with water, and she was doing the laundry and she had left the baby in some sort of a crib, maybe by the bed. And then she heard that the baby's crying and she goes and looks for the baby and the baby is not on the bed. So she starts looking for the baby everywhere, everywhere. And she goes crazy looking for baby until finally she climbs a ladder and she finds the baby on the roof of the house. And of course, the only explanation they had is something that we call Hidden [foreign language 00:10:35] in Veracruz, [foreign language 00:10:37], which are the old people, the guardians of the places.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's so interesting. So you grew up in just a very, it's very colorful in every sense of the word, the stories, the world, the things your mom was making, which seems like this world where it's like in between just some level of magical.
Yuyi Morales:
It is. Yes.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That explains. I think it says a lot about you.
Yuyi Morales:
[speaking spanish 00:11:40].
But I'm going to read to you in English so you have a little bit of an idea about this story, which I love it.
The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World. The first children who saw the dark and a slinky bulge approaching through the sea let themselves think it was an enemy ship. Then they saw it had no flags or masts and they thought it was a whale. But when it washed up on the beach, they removed the clumps of seaweed, the jellyfish tentacles and the remains of fish and flotsam, and only then did they see that it was a drowned man. They had been playing with him all afternoon, burying him in the sand and digging him up again, when someone chanced to see them and spread the alarm in the village. The man who carried him to the newest house noticed that he weighted more than any dead man they had ever known, almost as much as a horse, and they said to each other that maybe he'd been floating too long and the water had gone into his bones. When they lay him on the floor, they say he'd been taller than all other men because there was barely enough room for him in the house. But they thought that maybe the ability to keep on growing after death was part of the nature of certain drowned men.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
[foreign language 00:13:19], or The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World in English, is a 1968 short story by beloved Nobel Prize-winning Columbian author, Gabriel García Márquez. It comes from his collection, The Incredible and Sad Story of the Candid Erendira and her Soulless Grandmother, which features some of his darkest works. This particular story is about a small fishing village that discovers a remarkably beautiful drowned man. They subsequently become fascinated with him and have grand imaginations of the life he may have lived and what it would've been like to know him. This leads to a renewed sense of pride and purpose throughout the village, highlighting the transformative power of imagination and finding beauty in the world around us.
Before reading this book, Yuyi shared that she did not love reading at school. She says she didn't even ask her mom to buy the books they were required to purchase for school. But this book, one highlighting the stories that reminded her of those from her own childhood, captivated Yuyi.
Yuyi Morales:
I remember reading this and finally something clicking inside of me. Finally, this is a story that I can relate to. What we were given as an assignment was to read the last story, which is a really, really strong story, especially for a child. But I was so taken with it, and this is a book of several short stories that after I read the story that I was assigned to school, I just read the whole book, and this is my favorite story.
So what Gabriel García Márquez does for me is a connection to some of the things that we were talking about before, when she's finally hearing someone who's telling stories like the ones that I hear when I was a little child, like the ones that my mother, my family, my grandmother was living as real life. I remember coming to United States and hearing people mention the writing of writers like Gabriel García Márquez as magical realism, and I have never heard that term before. And I remember thinking, I never saw it as magic, I always saw it as realism. For me, the way that he was writing was the real life. That was the way things were happening. So before, all the books that I was reading made no sense to me, I had no interest to them. But when I start reading him, then I realized I am a reader. I love books. I really like to read. But I had to find him first.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, it's an amazing story. And I also love him, I love his writing and all of his works. And it's interesting because you definitely hear that school of writers, at least here, get labeled always as magical realism. But talking about how and where you grew up, there was just no distinction between magic and realism, it was just realism for you.
Yuyi Morales:
For me, they were in that. So when he writes that people at the town found a man on a chicken coop and suddenly they see that he has wings, that's real. When he writes that the smell of roses came from the ocean and the whole town is just intoxicated with the smell of roses, that is real. Now I live here in the city and most of the people that I talk to and that I live nearby, there are people who live city things and those stories are part of the past. But now that I have gone to live in La Mancha in this small fisher people place, sugar cane cutters, workers, now these stories have come back, because I go there and the stories that I hear as are just like that.
And there was a cat the other day that returned after seven years, or had been lost, and they say, "Finally, [foreign language 00:17:39] again. Cottontail, he's back again." And then he starts eating from people's tables, he starts stealing food and everything. And there is one of our neighbors that declares that in true [foreign language 00:17:55] is an [foreign language 00:17:56], which is a shape-shifter, that [foreign language 00:18:00], the cat that we are seeing right there in front of us every day, is not only a cat, but is a shape-shifter, and that when we don't see him, he's also a human. And those stories are just done like that, he is an [foreign language 00:18:17].
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Nobody's laughing when they're saying that or smile, people are nodding in agreement.
Yuyi Morales:
Nobody's saying, "That's crazy." Absolutely not.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Does it feel comforting for you to be home now, in that way, in the sense of just like you would never have that?
Yuyi Morales:
Yes, it is it comforting, but in a way, I have to remind myself that I have changed. I'm not that 4, 6, 8 years old anymore. I have been through a journey. I have been in the United States, I have been making books, I have hear a lot of different stories. So when I come here, when I come back, yes, there is this something that feels familiar, but at the same time it's not me anymore. So I am also letting go of my transformations, of the ways I have changed, to realize that I am also now entering a new space, a new world. Even though it feels familiar, it is a new world and I need to have also the openness and the humility to enter those worlds, because it's very easy for me to say, "Oh, of course it's not an [foreign language 00:19:39]. No, it is a cat." We all know it scientifically. That's a cat. That's not possible.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Right.
Yuyi Morales:
And it's very easy for me just to enter that space with that way of thinking, and I'm trying to let go of that, because if I want to keep hearing the stories, if I want to be someone who is honored by those stories, no matter how fantastic, how sometimes ignorant we think that they are, I won't be given the gift of those stories if I continue to label them as something that is not part of this world. So my work now is to put aside all of the things that I have learned about stories and storytelling and just be open to be told these stories and take them not as magic, but as real life.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yuyi, I remember one of the first times that we read your book, Niño Wrestles the World, with our kids and we read it so much. My son was always running around in his underwear and telling us that he was Niño, our adorable [foreign language 00:20:52], in one of your earlier works, of course you know, the Just a Minute, and it's this great original counting book and we'd always count to 10 in English and Spanish after it, and we were all drawn to these vibrant, bold colors for the fun and the quirkiness of the books. They're just so original. And hearing you talk about your journey from the US to California, and now back home to Mexico, I'm just wondering how it feels to write in these different places. Do you create differently in one place versus the other?
Yuyi Morales:
It is very different. When I live in the United States, especially at the beginning, I was very homesick and very heartbroken and I started making my books from that feeling, from missing everything that was important to me, that gave me identity, that gave me validation, including the language. And for example, I create my first book, which is Just a Minute: A Trickster Tale and Counting Book, and it's a story of a skeleton that comes one morning and knocks at the door of Grandma Beetle to tell her that it is time for her to go. When I made that book, I was missing everything from my home. I was missing the food and the family and the colors and what I do with just a minute is surround myself with all those things that I didn't have.
That book has all the food that I missed. It has the birthday parties with the pinatas that I miss. It has all the colors. When I was making books in the United States, there was always this feeling of nostalgia of the things that were part of my growing up and that were part of me having the energy to create and I was bringing it to me. But now that I'm here in Mexico, I am at a place where I always wanted to be. I move here when my son went to college and I realized now I don't have to live in the United States because the reason why I was there was so that I could support and sustain the wellbeing of my family. But once he goes away, then it was my time. I came back here to Mexico and it is another journey. It is an immigrant journey, a constant immigration journey, because in the same way that I had to wonder and ask who I was when I got to the United States for the first time, then when I come back to Mexico, the question remains.
I'm still wondering now who is this person who comes here to Mexico who likes to create stories and likes art? Because when I was living here in Mexico, I had no idea that I loved stories, and I wasn't making art, I was drawing, but I had never really painted. I had a few things that I did at school, but I had didn't have experience of creating and making it part of my working and my living being an artist. So the question linger and it had to be answered in different ways, and I think I'm still answering, who is this person? Who is this Yuyi who creates stories and tries to find the stories that are relevant to my own search?
Donald Trump Clip:
I've been hearing about DACA for so many years. Some people call it Dreamers. It's not Dreamers. Don't fall into that trap. It's just much different than Dreamers. And I said the other night, we have dreamers too, we have dreamers in this country too. We can't forget our dreamers. I have a lot of dreamers here.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
In 2018, Yuyi released her picture book, Dreamers, which is a non-fiction account of her journey immigrating to America from Mexico. With encouragement from her agent Yuyi released this story in response to the political tensions arising in the country around immigration. Despite not being a dreamer herself, she told the Journal of Children's Literature, "I want to signal that making the journey of leaving your country, all of the risk, all of the changes that you have to encounter in a new country, is the result of how we dream for a better future."
The story preceded her 2021 book, Bright Star, which explores in a very loving way, the borderlands between the US and Mexico. I asked Yuyi to speak about her impulse to create these books in response to her witnessing of sometimes painful immigration and detention stories.
Yuyi Morales:
You mentioned my last two books, and those are Dreamers and Bright Star, and they both are created from the moment that we are living on right now. Dreamers comes from Trump actually being elected president, and my disbelief that everything that I have thought that we were working for, especially us who are making books for children, I felt like I had to learn the principles of how it was like to live in a country like the United States and then seeing all of that just washed away. I remember Trump witnessing, like all of us did, that he was having a discourse up that he was using as his platform, as his political platform, which was to characterize who immigrants were, especially immigrants that come from the south borders, that's all Mexico and all the way to South America, and call us with words that were meant to dehumanize us.
When someone is not human, there is this feeling that you can do whatever you want to them. So you can deport them, you can imprison them, you can separate them from their families. You can do anything you want when you dehumanize people. So my next book, Bright Star, is a response to that, to the separation of families, and to many other things that were happening that made me think about how, especially us who care for children and children's books, we bring these stories of being brave, of growing up, of being in love, of being accepting and accepted. And I was thinking now these children who are entering the border and are being put in cages or are being separated by their families, are the stories that people like I am making, are those stories honest? Are those stories really telling them that eventually they are going to be wholesome again? That what they have been through is just something that they have to pray because eventually they are going to be productive and happy?
That felt to me dishonest, to say the least. So I had a search that was important to me, and it was a search that I needed for me, which is really if something that terrible happens to anyone, how do you come out of it? How do you heal it? If you are alive after the experience, how do you continue and grow up to feel wholesome again? So those two books are my journey of searching for those answers. Dreamers is not a book about my story, it is a book about the things that I learned when I was immigrating to the United States and the things that I have learned in the process.
For so long, for years and years, when people ask me, how did I come to the United States? My answer was always with nothing. I came with nothing. I had a baby. I had some clothes in the bag. But that was it, I came empty-handed. And through my journey I learned how false that was and also how invisiblising it was, not only for me, but for anybody who enters that journey of coming to a new place, and trying to recognize how plentiful I had been when I came to the United States instead of how empty-handed was something that took me a long time to learn, but that I wanted to make sure that I was put in a story like Dreamers.
For Bright Star, it was important to me to find answers, and it is not like at the end of the book I offered those answers because the truth is that I don't have them yet, but it is part of the journey of finding the answers. How are we going to heal something that feels irreparable? And how are we going to ask our children that they can take the journey of healing when sometimes we adults don't even know how to do it?
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Bright Star, it addresses those themes, but using the characters of a fawn and her mother surviving in this beautiful but perilous desert. Can you talk about maybe some of the different experiences you've had reading Bright Star to kids?
Yuyi Morales:
Maybe a year ago, I went to the place where I did the research originally, Agua Prieta, Sonora. So we crossed the border from Tucson and I was received there at a school of Agua Prieta, a small school. I remember it was very cold and windy that day, but all the children had gathered outside to hear me read and they were shivering and everything. And as soon as I started reading the book, suddenly there was sunshine, their faces changed. And when we finished the story, they were all cuddled together and they came and they approached me and they wanted to ask me questions about the deer and there was light in their faces.
I don't know, it was just an incredible experience. It makes me realize that as much as I love reading to children, to any child, I'm always hoping that I'm going to make a connection with that child that I visit, and I'm hoping that they are going to know that my present there is sincere and honest, and also to have the opportunity to tell them that it is through these books and through this work that I'm doing that I hope that I can be a worthy companion of their journey because they have a lot of journeys to go through. And there is nothing more difficult than going through those journeys alone, and I hope that I can be granted with their trust to accompany them when they need it.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I just feel like in all of your things, even the day I was looking on your social media, some little girl named Luna had asked you a question and then you made this hilarious video of the wind blowing. And especially in your recent books, it's taking on serious things and you are, as you said, in your heart, really thinking about so much that is heavy, but you just really maintain this joyful, creative spirit about you and I don't know what you think your secret to doing that is or how you manage to do that when your heart is heavy with other things.
Yuyi Morales:
I think that I'm making these books and sometimes I'm angry when I'm making these books and sometimes I'm sad when I'm making these books, because that's part of the journey, that's how I find what I care for. That thing that hurts me might help me find what I care for. But what I want at the end of my journey, at the end of my search, is to find wellbeing, adventure, laughing. I want to be hugging people. I want to be hugging ourselves. I want to be discovering places that make us do crazy things. That's what I'm heading towards. And through the journey, perhaps I'm going to be feeling things and I'm not always going to be happy, but I don't want to stay in that place. I want to move towards the places where what describe us and what is important to us is how much we can smile and how loud we can sing a song without being embarrassed or where we can feel safe enough to try on playing a song in a harana when I'm not very good at playing yet.
I think that what I really want is to create that space, where it's worth doing all these things, where we are safe to try being who we are without being afraid that there is no place for us here. So my books, even though they might be serious in some ways, I hope that my books are good listeners, that even when they are the ones who might be offering the words, that in that act, there is a listening act. I hope that they're created like this recipient, this place that is going to be a good listener of the reader. Because when the reader reads the book, they are also telling their story, they are also saying what they are feeling. So my books, there are some serious things, but at the end they are all looking for that playful moment where we are going to skip up the road to join the people that we love, so that we continue our journey to smile, to be happy, to thrive and to be well.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yuyi's reading challenge, Migration Stories, draws inspiration from her own journey crossing from Mexico to America and back again. She challenges us to read stories about people who move from one place to another, especially those moving to the United States through the southern border.
Yuyi Morales:
Immigrations are vast, are different, there are many ways, and we people are not the only ones who migrate. Sometimes the question is asked to science, why do anyone make migrates like animals? Why do they migrate? Again, the answers are many, but most of the time we don't know why they make migrate. Why, if an animal was born in a place where it's warm and there is all the conditions for living, why do they have to go to a different place? Sometimes animals might be born in one place and even though it is the right conditions of weather, there also might be many other animals and many other predators so they have to move to be safer. So through their cycle of life, they need to find different spaces to continue thriving and surviving. We people also do the same. So I wanted to offer a challenge where we might read some books about both animals and also people who move from one place to another.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You can check out Yuyi's challenge and all of our author reading challenges at thereadingculturepod.com, and today's Beanstack featured librarian is Pam Hamlin, the family literacy specialist at Prince George's County Memorial Library System in Maryland. She has a message for parents and teachers of young children.
Pam Hamlin:
I usually work a lot with parents and teachers of younger children, and I really encourage them to know that they're their child's first and best teacher, and encourage them to talk, sing, share books and play with their kids, make reading as pleasurable as possible so that they're always going to have a love of reading with their family members, or on their own when they get older. And to read to them anywhere, so you're on the bus, I know with my son especially, I had to read to him because he was moving around so much when he was eating a snack or when he was playing blocks or in the tub. So just making it fun for them as much as possible, letting them choose, when they can choose their own books and stories, and don't feel like you have to read the whole book or the whole chapter. When they're done, let them be done. Yeah, just giving them ownership of what they choose to read as much as possible.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been The Reading Culture, and you've been listening to our conversation with Yuyi Morales. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently I'm reading Fatty Fatty Boom Boom by Rabia Chaudry and Moonflower by Kacen Callender. If you've enjoyed today's show, please show some love and rate, subscribe and share The Reading Culture among your friends and networks. To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, you can check out all of our resources at beanstack.com, and join us on social media @TheReadingCulturePod for some very awesome giveaways.
This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport and Lower Street Media and script edited by Josiah Lamberto Egan. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode. Thanks for joining and keep reading.