Girls Save the World: Activism, Persistence, and Solidarity in Hemispheric Latin(x) American Youth Literature

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Notes

¹ Part of this article emerged from a conference presentation titled “Kids, Activism, and Public Spaces: Seeking Justice in Hemispheric Children’s Literature” given at the Children’s Literature Association Annual Conference in 2021.

² Although it refers to real-life children, I suggest that Levins Morales’s call to listen to the children also urges us to consider the role and value of youth literature, specifically as related to young people and activism.

³ I use the term “youth” to broadly refer to novels written for young people (middle-grade and young adult, ages 8–20). Novels All the Stars Denied and Al sur de la Alameda are more clearly directed at high school-age readers. Olivia, el bosque y las estrellas is geared toward readers on the younger-end of the spectrum in late elementary / middle school. I include this variety of youth literature to show the breath of works available to young readers interested in activism. With this note, I also hope to also acknowledge the variety of educational and reading experiences across the hemispheric Americas that do not fit into neat categories, a discussion also taken on by Marilisa Jiménez García in Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature and Culture (6–7).

⁴ La Alameda often refers to a central city street lined by poplar trees. In the case of this novel which takes place in Santiago, Chile, La Alameda refers to the Avenida Libertador General Bernardo O’Higgins the Chilean-Irish father of the Republic of Chile. The title references the location of the small high school where the novel principally takes place and locates the student protests in the context of the greater student movement in Chile.

⁵ For a comprehensive history of this period, see Balderrama and Rodríguez.

⁶ For an analysis of the role of youth and eco-justice in All the Stars Denied, see Postma-Montaño, “Naturalizing the Border.”

⁷ In “Carmelita Torres and Bodies of Resistance,” Cristina Rhodes persuasively argues that contemporary activists resist hegemonic discourses by calling into question negative coding and reclaiming the discourse surrounding their bodies and activism. To our purpose, Rhodes treats Carmelita Torres, a young woman who in 1917 initiated a resistance movement that would later be called the Bath Riots. For more information, see Rhodes.

⁸ For more on the deportation of ethnic Mexicans during the Great Depression, see Balderrama and Rodriguez and Alanís Enciso.

⁹ The use of the name “Jovita” for Estrella’s grandmother evokes the historical figure of Jovita Idár, a brave leader who fought state-sanctioned violence toward Mexicans and Mexican Americans. For more information, see Hernández.

¹⁰ All translations are mine unless otherwise stated.

¹¹ The novel also recalls the resistance of indigenous communities in Michoacán that have experienced disappearance and violence by organized criminals in their forests. See, for example, Cortés Calderón and Martínez Navarrete.

¹² The centrality of the forest and the community’s care of it evoke eco-justice conversations as well as those on Latinx/Latin American environmentalisms. Here, following Wald et al., we might think of “the variety of ways in which Latinx [and Latin American] cultures are often … environmental but hardly ever identify as environmentalist” (3). For more, see Wald et al.

¹³ For more information on contemporary student movements in Chile which inspired the Al sur de la Alameda, see Donoso and Somma and Wittern Bush.

¹⁴ The phrase Tu lucha es mi lucha (Your struggle is my struggle) was first introduced by artist Favianna Rodriguez in her print commissioned by US Social Forum in 2010. Emphasizing solidarity and connectivity, the phrase reemerged in 2020 when Latinx people marched in support of the Black Lives Matter movement (“Tu lucha”). I reference this phrase here as a way of pointing to the role of actual and potential solidarity among girls from across the hemisphere.