8 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ NOVEMBER 4, 2019
companied minors from Central America began to arrive at the
U.S. border. Members of the wonderful REFORMA librarians
group began to work with these kids in 2014 and were joined by
the International Board on Books for Young People, or IBBY, in
2015 on an expedition to the border to see what was happening.
By 2016 Jorge had written a beautiful and terrible book about
these children—Somos Como las Nubes/We Are Like the Clouds, illus-
trated beautifully by Alfonso Ruano, who donated the art to raise
funds for the IBBY REFORMA project, which brings books and
reading events to the children detained along the border.
By 2016, Jorge had built the first of three libraries that he
has created in El Salvador, where he now spends most of his
time. The Library of Dreams is in his own backyard in San
Salvador. Children from the local public school come to his
home library on Thursdays. On Saturdays he runs a library in
the market of San Jacinto—in a very difficult area of the
country—and this summer he refurbished a building in his
home-town of Santo Domingo, three and a half hours away from
San Salvador, and trained young people as reading promoters.
That library is now open every Sunday. Apart from some grants
from IBBY and personal donations from librarians and others,
Jorge has financed most of this work from his income as a poet.
(Donations can be made to usbby.org/donate.html).
In January of this year, Jorge told me that he had found
time to write a novel in verse about children coming in caravans
to the U.S. today. It was in Spanish. The two of us convinced
Semareh Al Hillal of Groundwood to publish it in nine months
in both Spanish and in English translation. The translation by
poet Elizabeth Bell is excellent. Manuel Monroy—a longtime
Groundwood illustrator—did the line drawings. Groundwood
is publishing Caravana al norte—la larga caminata de Misael/
Caravan to the North—Misael’s Long Walk in two editions this
fall. ■I
first met the writer Jorge Argueta
in 2002. His book, A Movie in My
Pillow, had won the Americas
Prize, and as I was going to be in
San Francisco, I asked Harriet
Rohmer—then publisher of Children’s Book Press—to
introduce us. We are both Central American immigrants—Jorge
is from El Salvador and I’m from Guatemala—but also very dif-
ferent, in many ways. He is indigenous, I’m not; he had to flee
El Salvador and had a very difficult time establishing himself
in the U.S., whereas I went to Stanford and later moved to
Canada. Nonetheless, we hit it off immediately. Jorge is a char-
ismatic guy, and we hold similar ideas about social justice.
When we first met, I was the publisher of Groundwood Books,
based in Toronto, and he was a writer. He was, of course, looking
for a publisher, and I was very interested in expanding Groundwood’s
list of Latino books. And we both cared deeply about children from
Central America. We believed that the thousands upon thousands
of children from Hispanic families—whether newly arrived or
400-year-long residents of the U.S.—needed books about their
lives, their culture, and in their own language. Since Groundwood
publishes for the U.S. and Canadian markets, we believed this was
a good approach to reach a wide audience.
Looking back over the past 16 years of our publishing rela-
tionship, I have to say it was a marriage made in heaven. In 2003
we published Trees Are Hanging from the Sky/Los arboles están colgando
del cielo—illus. by Rafael Yockteng (now a famous creator in his
own right) and El Zipitio, illus. by Gloria Calderón. The latter is
an original book based on a Salvadoreño indigenous legend.
Talking with Mother Earth/Hablando con Madre Tierra—pow-
erful poems celebrating indigenous heritage while decrying
racism against indigenous peoples—and Alfredito Flies Home/
Alfredito regresa a casa followed in 2006–2007. Alfredito Flies
Home tells about a Salvadoreño child returning home for the first
time after being taken by his parents to the U.S. Jorge and I
then embarked on a lovely series, the Cooking Poems, cele-
brating traditional Latino dishes, each book having a noted
illustrator from the Americas.
After leaving Groundwood in 2012, I continued to be Jorge’s
editor there. Tragically, the world of Central Americans began to
darken once again. As a result, in 2014 the first “surge” of unac-A TALE OF TWO IMMIGRANTS
A Canadian publisher and an
El Salvadoran writer have a
lasting collaboration
Salvadorans take advantage of literacy and reading
programs funded by Jorge Argueta.BY PATRICIA ALDANA
Patricia Aldana is the president of IBBY Trust and publisher
of Aldana Libros, an imprint of Greystone Kids.