Jorge Argueta, illustrated by Elizabeth Gómez,
A Movie in My Pillow–Una película en mi almohada.
Children’s Book Press, 2002

Poet Jorge Argueta’s first book for children is a collection of twenty-one poems written from the point of view of a young boy, Jorge, who immigrates with his father from a village in El Salvador to San Francisco. In an introductory note, Argueta explains that he was among the thousands who fled civil war in El Salvador during the 1980s.

One of the most satisfying things about A Movie in My Pillow is the way highly metaphorical and lyrical poems are arranged and presented to form a coherent narrative. At the beginning, the child speaker proclaims:

I live in San Francisco
in the Mission District…
Here in my neighborhood
you can taste
a soup of languages
in the wind.

As he brings that "neighborhood of sun" to life, Jorge also describes his former life in El Salvador, which he left in a wrenching hurry:

I didn’t say goodbye to Neto
my best friend
I didn’t say goodbye to Koki
my happy talking parakeet.

Jorge’s longing for home is rendered in a short lyric about pupusas, a favorite food, and the fear he feels in a new city is expressed in a voice that warns his father away from the sidewalk cracks: "Don’t step on the sidewalk snakes / Can’t you see that they are cobras?" Later on, buoyant poems about a bicycle, a yo-yo, and a goofy conversation with a new friend show Jorge finding happiness in his new life. Poems remembering a grandmother whose stories "filled her shack / with stars" show how firmly El Salvador is lodged in Jorge’s heart. When the boy’s mother and younger brothers arrive from El Salvador, Jorge describes his emotion:

when we hug each other
we feel like a big nest
with all the birds inside.

Elizabeth Gómez’s brightly colored artwork offers extravagant interpretations of the metaphors in the poems. The illustration of the "family nest," for example, pictures the family standing in a bird’s nest up in a tree. The approach is good-natured, but the literal representations tend to limit the readings of some poems.

Like other titles from Children’s Book Press, A Movie in My Pillow is bilingual. The text appears in both English and Spanish, with the languages given equal emphasis; neither the English nor the Spanish version is referred to as a translation. It is appropriate that ideas like these appear in both English and Spanish: "Now I can speak / English too" –"Ahora también puedo hablar inglés." "And in my dreams," Jorge continues:

I speak in Nahuatl
the language my grandma says
her people… learned
from the birds.

Susan Marie Swanson
Spring 2002