Mexique: A Refugee Story from the Spanish Civil War
by María José Ferrada (Author) Ana Penyas (Illustrator)
On May 27, 1937, over four hundred children sailed for Morelia, Mexico, fleeing the violence of the Spanish Civil War. Home was no longer safe, and Mexico was welcoming refugees by the thousands. Each child packed a suitcase and boarded the Mexique, expecting to return home in a few months. This was just a short trip, an extra-long summer vacation, they thought. But the war did not end in a few months, and the children stayed, waiting and wondering, in Mexico. When the war finally ended, a dictator--the Fascist Francisco Franco--ruled Spain. Home was even more dangerous than before.
This moving book invites readers onto the Mexique with the "children of Morelia," many of whom never returned to Spain during Franco's almost forty-year regime. Poignant and poetically told, Mexique opens important conversations about hope, resilience, and the lives of displaced people in the past and today.
Locate at a Library Near You WorldCat is the world's largest library catalog, helping you find library materials online.
Find books about:
Publishers Weekly
"Three or four months./ Like summer vacation, only longer." That is what the narrator's parents say when a child is placed on the Mexique, a ship bound for the Mexican city of Morelia during the Spanish Civil War. Working in a somber palette of black and white with accents of faded red, illustrator Penyas draws in childlike art, sometimes over photographed images of the 456 children aboard, "all children of Spanish Republicans," with expressive strokes and smudges. On board, older children minister to younger ("sisters/ we didn't have before"). Ferrada (Tweet!) creates powerful metaphors ("War is a huge hand that shakes you/ and throws you onto a ship") and expresses the children's realization when they arrive in Mexico: "We think that the war stayed behind. But it's not true--we bring the war in our suitcases." The story ends there, but journalist Ferrada's detailed afterword tells the grim truth: safer in Mexico throughout the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, many of the children never went home. It's a sobering contribution to the history of Spanish-speaking people in North America, and a memorial to a little-known group of refugees. Ages 7-10. (Oct.)
Copyright 2020 Publishers Weekly, LLC Used with permission. María José Ferrada has a degree in Social Communication from the Universidad Diego Portales in Chile. She studied Applied Linguistics in Translation at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile and has a masters in Asian Studies from the Universidad de Barcelona. Her previous works include El idioma secreto (The Secret Language), which won the Orihuela Prize.
Mariana Alcántara Pedraza was born in Mexico City in 1991. She has won the 29th Illustrator's Catalog at the 2019 Encuentro Valladolid Ilustrado International Children's and Young Adult Book Fair in Spain, and 3rd Prize at the Sharjah Children's Reading Festival in 2018. Her work was included in The White Ravens Catalogue in 2019.
JUV039250 - Juvenile Fiction | Social Themes | Emigration & Immigration
JUV039180 - Juvenile Fiction | Social Themes | Violence
Mexico
Refugees
Refugee children
Spain
Unaccompanied refugee children
Civil War, 1936-1939
1910-1946
