Welcome to Windows & Mirrors, where we feature books that provide us windows to lives outside our own and mirrors to our shared common human experiences.
Today we are featuring MANUELITO, written by Elisa Amado and illustrated by Abraham Urias.
Kids hear adults talking all the time about the refugee crisis, families seeking asylum, ICE, deportation, and problems at our borders. It must be confusing to them, trying to understand the complexities of these problems that even adults tend to grapple with.
MANUELITO is a graphic novel that portrays the dangers of seeking asylum from the perspective of a thirteen-year-old Guatemalan boy. When cartel-backed drug gangs invade his village, it is no longer safe for anyone to live there, but especially teen boys. They are recruited into the dangerous gangs, killed, or, disappear. Manuelito’s parents make the desperate decision to hire a coyote (a human smuggler who will take him to the border with the US), give Manuelito a small amount of cash, and send him to the US to seek asylum and then stay with his aunt. Through powerful, yet simple-to-understand text and strikingly-rendered illustrations, we witness what it is like to make that dangerous trip to the US border, to be processed through customs, and to try to find your way in America.
The perspective of this story is what really sets it apart––a brave young teen telling his truth, experienced as he made the dangerous journey to America only to be sent back by ICE just when he thought he was safe. Manuelito is one fictional example of the over 100,000 children from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Hondura who have made this perilous journey, hoping to find safety. Many of those children are now detained in Mexico, separate from their parents, with no access to lawyers, and will most likely be sent back to their dangerous lives from which they risked everything to escape.
Though I already knew a lot about these issues and have great empathy for the families trying to protect children from the horrors of war and violence, MANUELITO inspired a new urgency to help refugees. The first-hand experiences of both the author and the illustrator in working with refugees shines through in the story, making it a must read for all. Those who are already socially conscious will be morally activated; those don’t understand the plight of refugees will gain a deeper knowledge of a complicated topic.
Thank you to #KidlitExchange and Annick Press for providing me with a review copy. All opinions are my own. MANUELITO releases on 4/9/19. Preorder it from your favorite bookstore or request it from your library today. This makes for an excellent discussion book and is perfect for classroom libraries. For ages 12+
Elisa Amado is a Guatemalan-born author and translator. She has written Barrilete: A Kite for the Day of the Dead, Cousins, and Tricycle, which is on the Americas Award Commended List and is a USBBY Outstanding International Book. She is also the author of What are You Doing? and Why Are You Doing That?. She currently lives in Toronto.
Abraham Urias was born in El Salvador and immigrated to the United States in 1981 after El Salvador’s civil war forced him to leave the country. He works as a designer at a Warner Bros. in Los Angeles.
