WOW Reads: S2, E6 - MSRAP Reads Alebrijes by Donna Barba Higuera

Join the Worlds of Words Center Middle School Reading Ambassadors (MSRAP) as we discuss Alebrijes by Donna Barba Higuera.

In this episode, we discuss

Other books mentioned in this episode:
The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera

We will post Higuera's graph on our Instagram account at the end of the season. Watch for it there at @WOWTeenAmbassadors.

Special shout out to Tucson Festival of Books! Watch for a bonus episode about our experience with the book festival. We are grateful for their work.

This podcast was recorded in the Digital Innovation and Learning Lab (DIALL) in the UArizona College of Education with assistance from the UA COE Tech Team.

Producer/Host: Rebecca Ballenger, Worlds of Words Center Associate Director
Audio Engineer: Liam Arias, Student Employee and Radio, TV, Film Major
Coordinator: Vianey Torres, Student Employee and Nursing Major

For more information on the Worlds of Words Middle School Reading Ambassadors (MSRAP), visit wowlit.org.

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We Can Promote Global Literature Together!

The Worlds of Words Reading Ambassador program is completely free for participants who receive a book for themselves and a book to share with their school librarian, ELA/English teacher, or other school entity. If you would like to support this program, please make a gift on-line through the University of Arizona Foundation.

Thank you for listening and keep reading!

Transcript

Welcome to Wow Reads a podcast of the worlds of words center of global literacies and literatures. We are committed to creating an international network of people who share the vision of bringing books and children together, thereby opening windows on the world. We encourage thoughtful dialog around global literature so that children can reflect on their own cultural experiences and connect to the experiences of children across the globe.

Worlds of Words reading ambassadors engage in a university experience of Children’s Literature within the University of Arizona College of Education. Reading Ambassadors learn about literature for young people under the direction of faculty.

And staff.

with expertise in children's literature, education, library, science and marketing.

We respectfully acknowledge that the University of Arizona is on the land and territories of indigenous peoples. Today, Arizona is home to 22 federally recognized tribes with Tucson being home to the O’odham and the Yaqui. Committed to diversity and inclusion, the University strives to build sustainable relationships with sovereign native nations and indigenous communities through education offerings, partnerships and community service.

Donna Barbara Higuera grew up in central California and now lives in the Pacific Northwest. She has spent her entire life blending folklore with her experiences into stories that fill her imagination. Higuera is an author of El Cucuy Is Scared Too, the forthcoming The Yellow Handkerchief, Lupe Wong Won't Dance A Winner of a Pura Belpre Honor and a Word and The Last Cuentista Winner of the Newbery Medal and the Pura Belpre Medal.

Her new book is Alebrijes. 13 year Old Pickpocket Leandro and his sister Gabi do whatever they can to get by in the cruel city of Pocatel, one of the few one of the few places left where humans will still survive. In a now barren world, everyone knows that those who venture beyond the walls of the city never return.

When I looked around out and he was given an impossible choice to accept certain death, facing the spirits and worms of the wilderness, or leave his body behind in his lap and allow his mind to be encased in ancient drum. In this form, he can fly in search of freedom, hope and the truth. Can he hold on to his memories and find a way safely back to his sister and himself?

I don't know. Let's talk about it and see. My name is Rebecca Ballenger and I am the associate director of Worlds of Words. And I'm excited to be here with our middle school reading ambassadors. Let's start with a round of introductions.

All right. I'm Gabriel. Fun fact about me. I like pasta. Yay! and Green too.

The I'm.

Nia, A fun fact about me is I guess I'm a cellist, and my favorite color is purple.

My name is Elliot, and a fact about me is I got a concussion on the U of A campus. It was by the music center. It was riding a bike downstairs and crashing into a car. so on and so on. I blacked out and stuff. My favorite color is purple.

My name is Lucia. A fact about me is that I like to swim, and my favorite color is teal.

My favorite color is also purple, and I have so many questions for after this podcast. But first. Today we got to meet Donna Barbara Higuera at the Tucson Festival of Books. Let's talk about what that was like for you.

Well, I got to say it, it was pretty amazing being there with the author, and it was the Tucson Festival books event. So there was a whole lot of people, to say the least, but it was a bit stressful. We got through it.

Yeah, you did a great job.

I thought it was really fun to get to know her well, kind of not to go, you know her, but to see her in person and get to talk to her face to face and kind of have a conversation with her. And through the dialog, learn more about what she's writing and how she wrote it and her different, like strategies and like weren't like, I guess one of the questions was like, what happened when you found out that you had like the Newberry Honor Award?

And I thought that was pretty cool to learn about how she learned that out. Like apparently.

The.

People who are giving her the award like, pranked her and she was going to talk on Zoom with Barnes and Noble and ended up being the Pura Belpre honor like Association and the Newbery Medal people. So I thought that was pretty cool.

I enjoyed getting to have some of my questions answered, and I really enjoyed having a conversation with her and she getting to learn about like how she where she got the ideas to make the characters and the setting of the book and it was really interesting.

It was really cool to meet her like she was such a nice person. Like, as Gabriel mentioned, like the room, like we were all kind of stressed like it was full of new people. But like, she came in and like, she was so kind and like, we just started by telling jokes and, yeah, like, she was so fun and nice. And yeah, it was cool getting to hear like, how she came up with the ideas, like for Alebrijes like, she was telling us about how a lot of it is inspired by like, her ancestors.

And like when they were walking, I was like feeling walkers. And like, it was interesting to hear her, like, talk about it because, like, it was interesting to hear like, how she drew from her own life to do it. And then like, another interesting thing she was talking about was like writing the book was kind of fun for her because she had to like, make bad stuff happen to the characters.

But like, she she said, like she even cried sometimes. And it was just interesting getting to, like, hear how like, emotional it was for her.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, so we had, we arrived about 10 minutes early and she did she started off making us all at ease by telling jokes. Do you guys remember any of the jokes that were told?

there was like, why do you have to wear glasses when you're in math class? And I was like, for the division or something. For division [for da vision].

That was a good one.

yeah, I think somebody did want to go to the dinosaur. About a dinosaur, I think.

Why can't you hear a pterodactyl?

Because. Because you can't. Because he can't pee. And I think I made one about Gilkes.

It was the P is silent.

yeah?

Yeah. Okay, so she started off making us very comfortable. I did appreciate that, too.

Yeah, And we, like it was exchanging jokes and roles and, like, everybody's laughing, and you just kind of got to, like, have a moment where you're kind of, like, at ease and you're not, like, super stressed about what's going to happen. And then it finally hits you. wait, I'm supposed to be doing this?

Yes. And then we get into the conversation and she does take us pretty deep and she talks about writing these characters and writing the battle scenes and things got dark. And so how were you guys feeling during that part of the discussion?

It felt like, no, it was suddenly like turning into the book for loop, as if I knew things that I never knew before. The writing and some stuff about The Last Cuentista.

Never read that one.

That'll have to go on your TBR your to be read.

Yeah.

And when we had her draw the graph, does somebody want to explain the graph.

It was like you standard, she said basically that she thinks like a lot of people think I was like it goes from like mad to not good to like and it ends really good. She drew it as like it started really low and then it went up, up and then it ended like from not she didn't really like it.

There was like a sad and meh part.


Yeah. So along the bottom of the axis, we had the beginning, middle and end of the book and on the up and down axis, we had her favorite up top and her least favorite on bottom. And yeah, I took a picture. We'll have to share it with if we can put it up on our our podcast feed. Will we'll do that.

Wait, I just realized something. She said she hates deaths. Right? How come? Whoa. A bit of a spoiler. Some guys died in the middle. How come she didn't put those? How come that didn't get a dip?

that's a good question.

like to explain the line? It was kind of like it started off kind of low, and it stayed kind of straight, and then it went up, and then it stayed up and it went up again. And you kind of felt like a short. It's almost like a straight line at the top. It's like. Maybe like, like maybe about like for long.

And then it goes back down and then it comes back up and it kind of goes down again.

So that first down part was the battle scene where where people did lose their lives. And Donna said she cried. And in that room we had asked if people wanted spoilers or not, and we saw a lot of hands that said no spoilers, but I think we might have done a little bit of spoiling that we haven't done yet on this podcast, so we'll stay true to that.

What was your favorite parts of the book? Where where did you find yourself really engaged?

I thought the like we're about to run out of time on like pollinating all of these plants that they have kind of like made me think, and everybody's working together. It's kind of like a whole team effort. But I also felt like during the battle scene, you kind of get to hear or like see it and envision,

or like, Visualize all this different stuff happening from different points of view. I thought that one was really cool and I kind of like an action, like an action scene. So I thought that was kind of like where I thought like the book was kind of reaching a fun spot, but I mean, I don't like characters dying, but I did think the action was pretty cool.

So I'm one of my favorite plots, was like some point in the middle of the book. The angel, like, runs into the person who like two men in, like, got him banished and then that person is put in harm's way and like, they are almost dying. So but like Leandro, like he was mad at them, but he doesn't just, like, turn away, like when they're in, like, harm's way, like he actually finds it like a way to forgive them and he helps them.

I don't know. I am really like, that's what we're like. He's able to forgive them and like, Yeah, And it feels to me like, like hope. And I don't know.

I liked when he tried to say when he was just like, nice to tortoise and like when tortoise just couldn’t quite he like was just kind of lost but also really liked where they were. and he just left tortoise be And he even tried to send another or another one of the characters to like comfort and like try and yeah, like comfort tortoise. Gabriel.

Well, where did you engage most with the book?

I think it was after the battles. I wanted to go find out what happened. So that's where I sort of, like clicked in with the book and was wondering what happened.

I really loved at the end where all of the bee drones sort of came together, like the idea that a lot of little bitty drone drone droid bots with Alebrijes could come together and have a big impact. And I thought that that was a great life metaphor as well.

it kind of reminds me, like my aunt told me about the Swifts in Portland where she lives like that, all fly into this one chimney, and they are like a giant swarm. And they come down to like this, like smaller, like point so they can fit. And I thought that was like, it reminded me kind of of that scene in the book, but also like when I went to see the bats and they all like, flew up in this giant mass and I thought that was pretty cool.

So one of the questions that we had for Donna going into this was about the translanguaging in the book, inserting the characters, all of the characters languages. Do any of you want to share your thoughts on trans language? You in this book or just in general?

I think that translanguaging kind of gives you a chance to think, what is this talking about? It also gives you a chance to use more context. So I don't know this language. Maybe I can look and see what it means because of all these context clues. And I thought, I mean, and since I went to a bilingual school for like six years, I thought it was easier for me to, like, know what they're talking about.

But I will admit, like, a few spots caught me like, I don't really know this word. So I had to, like, pause and think.

Sometimes you're reading, you don't know the English word either. You have to pause and look it up.

I liked how you said translanguaging it like, built a world with more depth because I think all of these people would be speaking different languages and like, she showed the language in like, in a way, like the Cascabels, Cascabeles, It was like part of the, like cultural identity kind of. So like, I really like mean like the world more deep and like it showed like it was more believable the World. Yeah.

You knew who the characters were? Yeah.

you get to see, like, maybe this isn't the language that was first in or this, character, like, not, like, has a different background than the rest of them, and you get to learn more about them. But it kind of also reminded me, like how, like, how they were farmworkers and they have like, their own kind of like language that they have because they're immigrants.

And the Pocatelans are like the kind of like white people on this understanding, like they're the ones running everything. And the Cascabeles has, like, since they came in and they weren't known, they were the ones put on the bottom. So you kind of get like this restart on history, but you also get a different understanding because you're from the lower side of the like social structure scale.

So that that was pretty interesting because you get like another language to tell you more about what's going on in this area because they they're from somewhere else. And then from Pocatelan's point of view, you don't get that, which I thought was pretty nice because you get to see the different like if you're used to reading something that has like one perspective, it's like on the higher class, then you get like the other one that's on the lower class and you see how they like the relationship and how they relate to each other and the different things that they do.

Okay, Thank you. Any last thoughts? Any final thoughts, Gabriel?

well, I well, I have a question, though. Weren't all Pocatelans, the Pocatelans also had classes, right? Like the civilians were like sort of middle classes. Not too distinguishable from Cascabeles think it was mostly like the emperors, like the directors that sort of had the higher class.

Yeah, it was kind of like you reached this point in the world where everything everybody is equal, right? And then the comment struck like when is the and you get everything after a few hundreds of years, everything is back to like you get the segre- isn't like segregation kind of I'm like not doing this right And then you also have like the social classes are much different.

Like now we have like um houseless kind of at the bottom, but they still like, they have their own things going on. And then we have everybody else and they're kind of like they're and they we kind of like have like this thing where we're all kind of at the same level, But it's not like people are lower like houseless and us, we're all kind of in this one thing.

And then let's say like the president and everything, we're all humans, so we all have a say in what's going on. But then once we go back and like it's like when you restart history in Alebrijes, you have like everything has been cut, like a layered cake. You have the lower class people, the higher class people, and then like the rulers.

And it's just kind of interesting. Like she came back and like showed how history could kind of like, come back and, like, take over again.

Huge thanks to Donna, Barbara Higuera and the Tucson Festival books. Thank you to Liam, Arias, our sound engineer, Vianey Torres, who keeps us all together. Thank you to the college of Education at the University of Arizona and their tech team. We are recording today in the Digital Innovation and Learning Lab, and we thank DIALL as well.