Every year, roughly 50,000 unaccompanied minors arrive at the U.S. – Mexico border for asylum. While this is a hot-button political issue, the human dimension behind these numbers is rarely explored. As someone who has approached children’s literature in many different ways, from historical and literary scholarship to reading with my kids at bedtime, I’ve tended to shy away from mixing childhood and politics. However, current events have caused a shift in my perspective. Realities of Covid-19 and all the related explosive societal issues demand an explanation. Just as conversations in the news and social media help us put things into context, books can help us clarify to our children as best we can just what in the heck is going on.
In addition, we are all realizing beyond a shadow of a doubt that children need to see themselves in the books they read. The #weneeddiversebooks movement has pushed the issue forward. But early pioneers in the field have known about this for some time. In the 1940’s, Lois Lenski wrote a series of illustrated “Regionals,” books that highlighted the lives of real children living in various parts of the country at that time. Lois went in person to all the places and children she wanted to explore and write about, from Texas to Oklahoma, to Louisiana and beyond. Then she would write (and illustrate) an exciting piece of realistic fiction, based on her travels to these various places and illuminating the particular slices of childhood culture that flourished there. In addition to creating a mirror for different children, it was her hope that young people would share in the life of these children, and learn something of tolerance towards others different from themselves.
A Journey Toward Hope is that sort of picture book. It truthfully tells the story of four fictional unaccompanied migrant minors as they trek to the Mexican border in hopes of finding asylum in the United States. Based on research conducted by Baylor undergraduate students as part of a course called “Child Migration in the Western Hemisphere,” the book was written in collaboration with Dr. Victor Hinojosa of Baylor University’s Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty and the Global Hunger and Migration Project. It aims to bring the plight of these courageous children to the public arena, and to create a book where such children can see themselves – noble motives, indeed, with a weighty topic for a picture book.
Yet the text has a light touch, giving spare details that point to larger issues. For example, fourteen-year-old Rodrigo is on his way to join his parents in Nebraska. He comes from Honduras, where his “friends are doing things they shouldn’t be doing. They want him to join them, but he refuses.” It’s up to the grown-up in the room to fill in more details, if need be, depending on the audience. Then there is ten-year-old Alessandra, from Guatemala. Her mother had left for America four years earlier. She meets Rodrigo walking on the trail to Mexico, and the two become friends. Laura, 13, and Nando, 7, want to stay in El Salvador, but their parents want them to go live with their aunt and uncle in the United States. These four children meet up at a shelter in Oaxaca, sleeping on a cardboard mattress “like family.” We travel with them by boat – where Laura slips on the edge of a raft and falls into the water! – and then on to La Bestia, the network of Mexican freight trains that haul cargo (and migrants) to the United States. The children have to run and climb up a ladder to jump onto the top of the moving train. Rodrigo loses a sneaker as it falls down onto the tracks, to be shredded in two as the train rolls over it.
The whole journey seems so impossibly fraught with danger, yet there are kind adults along the way. There are women – women who have sent their own children off on the journey toward hope – who throw bundles of bread, crackers, and bottles of water up to the children riding on top of the train; even a doll. At a huge market in Mexico City, more people give them food, and soap, and Rodrigo gets a pair of shoes. Finally, a compassionate soul with a blue pickup truck drives the children to the US border, where they can see across the Rio Grande into Laredo, Texas. This is where the book ends.
As in all really good picture books, wonderful details emerge as you re-read it and pore over the illustrations; little things to pick up that bring you deeper into the narrative. You might notice that each child in the story is shown with what looks like a spirit animal that travels along with them. They don’t appear in the text at all, just in the illustrations. A note from illustrator Susan Guevara at the end of the book clarifies her choice: she had “…shown aspects of each of the children in the form of an animal, influenced by the folk art of the northern triangle of Central America.” Alessandra’s butterfly is “light in body and spirit,” Nando’s monkey is “speedy and ingenious,” Laura’s bird is “nurturing with food and hope,” and Rodrigo’s jaguar is “strong, fierce, silent and smart.” What a wonderful way to honor and express aspects of personality and culture!
A sense of hope permeates the treacherous journey, in a subtle way. Each child, at some point on the journey, does something that reveals what they will be when they grow up. Nando, sprinting super-fast onto La Bestia, will be a track star one day. Laura puts food together from the bundles on the train; she will be a chef like her mother. And so it goes. We get a sense of where they come from, and where they will hopefully end up. As Ms. Guevara puts it so well at the very end, “..we all hope for the same thing: a peaceful productive life shared with those we love, in a safe home.”
In these polarized and troubled times, planting such seeds of understanding in the hearts of our children goes way beyond politics. It crosses over into the urgent, important work of coming together with all our differences intact, to find our common humanity.
A Journey Toward Hope
Written by Victor Hinojosa & Coert Voorhees
Illustrated by Susan Guevara
Six Foot Press, 2020
Ages 0-99
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