Mexican Children's and YA Literature

Session Submission Type: LASA Section Panel

Abstract

Children’s and YA literature drives a significant portion of the Mexican book market. Our discussant, Pedro Ángel Palou, a Mexican scholar and novelist based in the U.S., has been tasked with weighing the boom in Mexican publishing for young readers against the relative paucity of relevant criticism. Ann Gonzalez, author of Postcolonial Approaches to Latin American Children’s Literature, gives the talk “The Lure of the Crocodile in Mexican Children’s Literature.” She discusses postcolonial struggles in the context of Emilio Carballido’s Sputnik y David and Pedro Bayno’s lesser-known El cocodrilo de Matilde. Countercultural expert Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou breaks new ground regarding “Children’s Literature in the Mexican Countercultural Moment” with his study on a forgotten but compelling children’s book, Marichuloca, by Margarita Dalton—an overlooked writer who warrants new attention. Lilian Álvarez Arrellano, a researcher based in Mexico, contributes a politically oriented study of José Rosas Moreno’s nineteenth-century children’s newspaper, Los Chiquitines; she possesses intimate knowledge of this text after having edited and annotated it. Finally, Emily Hind uses information from a series of interviews to contemplate how death and energy paradigms intertwine in illustrated children’s literature by Alberto Chimal and María Barranda. Books like Chimal’s La partida and Barranda’s Querido pájaro and Diente de león both exemplify and defy Amitav Ghosh’s complaint that the multilingual cultures that ought to inform petrofiction end up homogenized in the monolingual novel. The illustrations tend to invoke homogenization, but the images work against the textual references to wider cultural influences.

Sub Track

• Section Sessions

Session Organizer

• Emily A Hind, University of Florida

Chair

• Lilian Álvarez Arellano, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)

Discussant

• Pedro A Palou, Tufts University

Individual Presentations

• "Marichuloca" and other stories: children’s literature in the Mexican countercultural moment - Iván E Aguirre Darancou, University of California at Riverside

• Literatura y política: la propuesta de José Rosas Moreno en el periódico «Los Chiquitines» (1874) - Lilian Álvarez Arellano, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)

• Good Grief and Petrofiction in Alberto Chimal’s "La partida" and María Baranda’s "Querido pájaro" and "Diente de león" - Emily A Hind, University of Florida

• The Lure of the Crocodile in Mexican Children’s Literature - Ann B Gonzalez, University of North Carolina at Charlotte