Reflections on Freedom in this New Year

         In the early hours of January 3, the US government bombed strategic sites in Caracas, Venezuela and captured President Nickolas Maduró and his wife, Cilia Flores. As a former Miamian, I barely slept that night and the night after. I knew the streets of Miami, especially in enclaves such as Doral, would be flooded with Venezuelans expressing their joy in the streets and in typical food spots like El Arepazo and Don Pan. As a young girl growing up in South Florida, Latin American politics and stories of exiles from Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba, and Puerto Rico were as familiar to me as the smell of fresh coffee brewing in the morning. 

I can remember how, during the 1990s and early 2000s, there was always a recently arrived family in my school or my church who had just come from Cuba or Venezuela. You could always spot them in the crowd by their almost skeletal frames and sun-burned faces. Sometimes as kids, we marveled at the pictures other kids showed us of the rafts they had come on. “How in the world could you survive the trip? I thought in my fifth-grade brain trying to imagine the rafts at the mercy of 90 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. In church, I often heard their stories of survival and torture as we sipped apple juice and ate goldfish crackers in Sunday School. I will never forget the former pastor who showed our class his hands with several missing fingers which he told us were cut off during his political imprisonment in Cuba. Now, as a professor of Latin America and Latino Studies, I look back and know that there are so many complicated edges to the story of Latin America and its diasporas in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and capital. But no amount of education that I could receive or provide will make me forget the gaps in Pastor Yeyo’s hand. Or our Sunday School teacher who trembled with stress ticks after surviving being buried alive. Something that occurs to me now as an adult is how the communities I lived in featured closely knit adult and child support systems. As children, we heard it all from our elders—there was no separate child version of Latin American historical traumas. Not to mention the ones we had survived ourselves as children in our respective homelands.

As I watched the Venezuelans both in Venezuela and Miami celebrate the capture of Maduro, I couldn’t help but think of the scholarly conversations around young people’s literature. What are the stories that are seen as worthy of books for our young readers? What are the stories that have become synonymous with Latinx children’s and young adult literature? Certainly, our scholarly community has concerned itself with stressing the importance of diverse literature and the importance that children see themselves in books. But how are we as adults in communities of color, immigrant communities, transnational and diaspora communities—survivors of national and international traumas—shaping what we want them to see? So many times I think about the word liberation and how often in my scholarly and creative circles we declare that liberation is indeed the reason for the work we do. But how should the story of liberation be told in Latinx children’s literature and who is worthy to tell it? Especially when we know that many of our young readers learn their national histories through their families and local community leaders. 

Community storytellers—like any storytellers—might provide histories with care, but are also entrenched in narratives of racism, sexism, and respectability. Latinx readers arrive in schools where Latin American histories are not taught or are taught through the lens of purely US investments and settle into classrooms and libraries where they are lucky to find a variety of Latinx literature, especially in Southern school districts. Latinx literatures are among the most banned books in the last 15 or so years from Arizona to Texas to South Carolina and Florida, all previous territories of the Spanish empire.

When I was a young Puerto Rican girl in South Florida, I never read a book that looked like my life. I never heard of ethnic studies movements, even in schools were the majority of students and teachers spoke Spanglish and displayed their Latin American flags proudly. As Latinx students, we were surrounded by pride and nationalism in our communities, flashing our little Puerto Rican, Colombian and Venezuelan flag keychains, all while trying to fit into legacies of Jim Crow racialized categories. I remember hearing some of the same community leaders that I admired and loved make comments about how “Black” or not “Black” a child was depending on which Latin American country they were from. We were one big proud family-until we weren’t.

 Most of the images I had of Puerto Ricaness were monolithically Nuyorican. And that was indeed one part of my story, but it was only one. I never saw books about the Puerto Rican kids I knew growing up in the South, in the shadow of the Confederate Flag while also surrounded by the stories of exiles dreaming of home. It wasn’t until I read Lila Quintero Weaver’s Darkroom (2014) graphic novel that I felt someone had finally given a voice to the experiences of Latinx Southerners. Quintero Weaver’s book gave a portal into talking to my own students about the struggles of Latinxs in the South and the racial ambiguity and confusion of performing in racial categories set both by Southern US and Latin American anti-Blackness. In graduate school, I discovered Judith Ortiz-Cofer, a writer and professor at the University of Georgia who has since passed, who wrote about her experiences as a Puerto Rican woman living in the South. Suddenly, I felt less alone.  

Many of my friends and extended community always talked of going home when Cuba “was free” or “cuando caiga Chavez.” Later when I moved back to New York, I heard my friends being classified by professors as “guasanos” or worms which was what Fidel Castro called Cuban exiles in Florida. My heart broke thinking about the generations of Latin American exiles I knew at home- Could I or really anyone tell them their experiences were worthless?  As this year begins, I reflect on the complicated edges of the Latin American story and its dysfunctional relationship with the US. It is a relationship that has raised generations of diaspora children living within various versions of what it means to be free. As I reflect on the history of the US, a country with various interventions in Latin America, the Middle East and Asia, I think of young readers walking around library bookshelves and sitting in our story hours, picking up the books we want so much to represent them and their communities. 

May we have the courage to write complicated stories that reflect the multiple geographies, languages, ethnicities and political cultures of Latinx children as we strive toward a goal of collective liberation. May we have empathy and respect for Latinx families living through political turmoil and exile, no matter which side of the political spectrum they reside without dehumanizing those we see as opposing our ideologies- understanding that the Latinx story is not a monolith. As narrators of that story, whether as insiders or outsiders, may we remember that the people in our story are complicated and imperfect. That everyone is struggling to learn liberation. And that our stories provide no solace for those looking for a fairytale where evil is always vanquished. Maduro was controversially captured, but his government is still clearly in power, and the US government’s promise of “running” the country has opened up a new era of instability and confusion for many of our Latinx young readers.

Marilisa Jiménez García is an Associate Professor of Childhood Studies teaching courses in Children’s and Young Adult Literary Cultures. She is a specialist in Puerto Rican, Caribbean and Latinx Studies. Before Rutgers-Camden, Dr. J was at Simmons University in Boston and Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. Her book Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature and Culture (UPMiss, 2021) won the 2023 Book Award from the Children’s Literature Association. She is also the co-author with National Ambassador for Children’s Literature, Meg Medina of She Persisted: Pura Belpré (Philomel, 2023) for young readers. Dr. J teaches courses on US Studies, youth media and television, fantasy and science fiction, youth literature and social justice, and Latinx literatures and media. She loves Disney and dance!

Be well and do good

Filed under: Guest Author