As a young child picking strawberries alongside his family, Pedro Martin learned that hard work is survival. Even then, he loved to draw cartoons when he wasn’t in the fields and especially loved Saturdays when he could watch cartoons and draw. While in the fields, he imagined the characters of his creations, including a Mariachi band and Elvis Presley, making music nearby.
Of the life in the fields that he captures in this second graphic memoir, Mexikid Dreams, Pedro says, “I think we [he and his 8 siblings] have all have noted it was difficult out there, but this story has to be told.” He explains, “I started at 7 years old out in the field. This was the only life we knew. The idea of working hard was really my father’s thing and we just wanted to make him happy. As we got older, we recognized there were differences between our family and other families. We also knew the dangers of pesticides. But if we weren’t out there, we knew our family’s finances would collapse.”
Pedro’s childhood was also full of joy and music. While attending school, Pedro picked up a trombone and played in a band organized by his parish priest. It was that priest who convinced Pedro’s Apá that his purpose in life was to ensure his children made better lives than he had experienced. Each generation helps the next generation move forward.
“Once we realized there was a way out, we all worked to find that way,” says Pedro who studied graphic design and music composition in college before finding himself “in the arts 100%.” That led to an early career and a move to the Midwest with Hallmark to design and create greeting cards. But he never forgot his beginnings. He grew up eating foods native to his Mexican culture, having strawberry fights with his many siblings, and listening to shared music with his siblings as it played on his transister radio. The love of family and music eased time as the siblings worked. He admitted they all always scanned the horizon for dust clouds that could mean La Migra raids. These raids were dangerous even for the siblings were all legally in the US, but more dangerous for the migrants who had to prove their right to be in the country. Pedro makes all of these memories come alive in Mexikid Dreams.
A Newbery Honor winner and Pura Belpre Author/Illustrator for his first memoir, Mexikid, Pedro talked about the reality of writing about family. He says of his award-winning book, “I sent a text to my brothers and sisters, and wrote, “if you have a problem with it, tell me now. To a person, they all said, ‘Sounds great! Good luck to you.’ Which was sibling-speak for that’s never going to happen.”
He admits that his brother Hugo struggled after publication of that first memoir with one story, claiming he wasn’t the one who stalled a motor home on a hill. “You defamed me and I want a public apology,” Hugo. He has since used humor to remind Pedro that he believes his brother misremembers by adding “Justice for Hugo” to all of his brotherly correspondence.
All of Pedro’s siblings recognize the value of telling the immigrant story and reminding readers that immigrant labor is still a reality. As Pedro points out, “If you ever go into a produce department in a grocery store and you see all these fruits and vegetables stacked beautifully in the stores, there’s no machine that picks strawberries, no machine that picks cilantro, or broccoli. Somebody bent over in a field, all day long for ten hours a day.”
While many laws have changed child labor laws, there are family farms. “In family farms, the rules are way more lax, and so, kids do end up picking things out in the field with their family because that’s the only way they can survive. A lot of times the hands of mothers, fathers, children, picked these fruits and vegetables you see every day in your local market. I always hope people start recognizing that. Even though these people seem invisible, you can actually touch their labor. It’s really important that people have empathy and a realization that those people are basically invisible and they have no rights in the US and they have no way to fight injustice that comes to them. They’re all here doing a thing that nobody here wants to do. And they’ve crossed deserts and rivers to do it. It’s an amazing story of tragedy and heroics to survive.”
As Pedro points out, industrial farming has changed the way immigrant laborers are treated to an extent. Industrial farms have more rules but tenant farming, much like share cropping, exists on these farms.
In this memoir, Pedro shows how La Migra or ICE frightening and dehumanizing the immigrants he worked alongside. He admits, “I had trouble talking about it. Should I lay weight on injustice or show what I experienced?” He decided in this writing, “Let’s tell the story as it happened so people can experience along with you. Everybody was scared all the time, on guard.
In one instance, Pedro includes the story of the death of an immigrant in this memoir. “It happened and I was trying to show all the different outcomes of immigration I experienced.” So he showed the good and bad of his life. “Here is success when I got to play music. Here’s the hard path my father took but he survived. Not everybody made it back.”
Pedro hopes readers find empathy in his story, and he wants them to recognize that his culture is rich in tradition, food, and hard work. “It might kickstart readers to look into their own backgrounds and rituals. I think every culture and every group has regional cultural things they can celebrate.” He wants his story to encourage readers to “celebrate where they comes from and how they got here.”
He hopes teachers and librarians use his memoir to bring about conversations about cultural diversity and immigration. He recalls how his first book brought up questions. “I was surprised the kids had very deep questions about immigration, I’ve learned immigration has always been there. For us to survive we have to move geographically, if we run out of food, we have to move toward food. This is the way humanity has existed for hundreds of thousands of years. Don’t let this moment in time, even though it’s a terrible moment in time, scare you. Immigrations infuses us and makes things happen.”
This is a book about empathy, Pedro explains. “I want kids to experience something different and try to understand that, specifically now, the people they’re scooping up and taking are people they’ve gotten to know in this book. These are the people being disappeared.
Pedro’s stories can create shared experience, and he has a special place in his heart for those who bring his stories to his readers. “I really want to thank librarians and teachers from the bottom of my heart. I understood how hard their work is and thank you for the subtle ways they influenced my life. The one librarian moved me toward a book about Norse gods. That little nudge opened a whole new world for me. That magic teachers and librarians have to nudge kids is powerful.”
Pedro’s hope is for the US and all countries. “I’m hoping that there’s more acceptance, better paths to security and higher education and creating new ideas for all immigrants everywhere. Very simply, I hope this country and any other countries become so much more responsive to the needs of our neighbors. We must get past this idea of us and them and into the idea of we.”
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