Author Michelle Mulder will be launching her new book After Peaches this coming Saturday, October 31st, at Once Upon a Huckleberry Bush, 4387 Main Street, Vancouver, BC.

“Silence is not always golden”. Ten-year-old Rosario Ramirez and her family are political refugees from Mexico, trying to make a new life in Canada. After being teased at school, Rosario vows not to speak English again until she can speak with an accent that’s one hundred percent Canadian. Since she and her parents plan to spend the whole summer working on BC fruit farms, she will be surrounded by Spanish speakers again. But when her family’s closest friend Jose gets terribly sick, Rosario’s plans start to unravel. Neither Jose nor Rosario’s parents speak English well enough to get him the help he needs. Like it or not, Rosario must face her fears about letting her voice be heard.

Michelle says that this launch will be particularly special as it will be her first time meeting Erika del Carmen Fuchs from Justicia for Migrant Workers. Erika played a critical role in Michelle’s research for After Peaches. She answered Michelle’s many questions about migrant workers, read the manuscript twice and offered to help promote the launch. Michelle says “I’m both touched and grateful and really look forward to meeting her.” It promises to be an extra special book launch.

Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month, our website currently features Juan Felipe Herrera’s personal essay, “Apartment Heritage”, in which he beautifully reminisces about his relatives’ one-bedroom apartment in San Diego, where he lived with his family in the 1960’s. The essay uses the apartment as a metaphor for his identity formation, contrasting the life inside it — an “invisible library of culture and family histories”— to the life outside— “that uncanny, whirling splish-splash of chaos, unfiltered, untold.”

Much of Herrera’s work is autobiographical, and two of his books, Downtown Boy (Scholastic. Ages 12+), winner of the 2007 Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children’s Book Award, and Upside Down Boy, illustrated by Elizabeth Gómez (Children’s Book Press. Ages 4-8), were inspired by his childhood as the son of migrant workers in the 1950’s. His family experienced what many thousands of others do who choose or are forced to leave their homeland to search for better, more secure lives.

For many years Herrera traveled with his parents through the small farming towns of California’s Central Valley, changing schools with the seasons, always the “new boy,” always yearning for stability. Stability, however, brought its own set of conflicts: between languages; between old and new; between tradition and change. In Downtown Boy, his mom worries about the lure of life in the city’s barrio, and urges him to stay “close to home.” But where is home when you have been moving around for so long?

With so many influences and so much to reconcile and draw from, it’s no surprise that Herrera not only became a poet, writer and performance artist but also founded bilingual theater, music and poetry troupes that travel the world, telling and singing stories of pride in heritage—and in newness.

Herrera’s recent poetry books for adults have been enthusiastically reviewed in The New York Times.

For more by other writers about Latino migrant workers, their struggles and accomplishments, see The Circuit, Harvesting Hope, Esperanza Rising and First Day in Grapes.

We’ve just had a seventh birthday celebration in our household. Little Brother was lucky: it was the week-end and he spent the whole day with his family. Not so poor little Graciela in Papi’s Gift (written by Karen Stanton and illustrated by Rene King Moreno) whose father is working in the United States to support his family back home. We don’t know the exact location but the gentle illustrations in soft pastels place the book in a Latino setting with many visual cultural references.

Graciela can’t have her father at home for her seventh birthday but she can at least have the parcel he sends to her… or so she thinks. But she waits and waits and the parcel never arrives. Papi cries at the other end of the phone – a very daring notion to include in a picture book, which really brings home the stress of separation for all involved. Graciela goes through many emotions – expectation turns to upset and then anger but, with her mother’s help, she emerges from the experience not unscathed but with hope in her heart.

In the same way that we feel Graciela will grow from the experience, young readers/ listeners (and this really is a book for sharing at a first reading), will find the story sobering and thought-provoking. They will empathise with the universality of her responses to what she has no control over; and they will question and learn about the reality of what life is like for some families, where separation is the only answer in order for them to survive.

There’s a great review of Papi’s Gift over at BookBuds and Picture Book of the Day recommends it as a springboard for a classroom writing activity.