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Celeste is heartbroken when her grandmother dies. But everything changes when a letter mysteriously comes in the mail—from Grandma! As letters continue to arrive from the beyond, each with a recipe of a favorite food her grandmother used to prepare, Celeste consoles herself by learning how to cook the dishes.
Meanwhile, without Grandma’s Social Security check Mami needs to get a second job to make ends meet. Celeste has to quit dance lessons, and a bully at school gloats that she will replace Celeste as the star in the upcoming recital. To top things off, her friends think that she has gone crazy . . . dead people can’t send letters!
Soon Celeste realizes that all the recipes combined make an entire meal: café con leche, guava and cheese croissants, congrí, plantain chips, ropa vieja and flan. Can she really make a Cuban feast to celebrate her cherished grandmother’s life?
Published in bilingual "flip" format by Arte Público Press, this middle-grade novel celebrates the cultural traditions of the Spanish Caribbean while tackling challenging subjects, such as trouble with friends and the death of a grandparent. The book includes six traditional Cuban recipes with easy-to-follow instructions.
“A tender depiction of a child’s acceptance of the death of a beloved grandmother and the cultural importance of traditional foods.”—Kirkus Reviews
“This delightful novel is a Like Water for Chocolate for young readers. Celeste rises out of her grief by replacing her sadness with el sabor of life, by living as her grandmother did, with love and flavor."
— Judith Ortiz Cofer, author of Call Me María
“Add one girl who misses her abuelita to a handful of coveted Cuban recipes, stir in a pinch of magic and you get a heartening tale of love, loss and the healing power of family and friendship.”
—Laura Lacámara, author of Dalia’s Wondrous Hair / El cabello maravilloso de Dalia
“A poignant and uplifting story about the special bond only a grandmother and a granddaughter can share. Delicious and magical!”
—Reyna Grande, author of The Distance Between Us
Letters from Heaven / Cartas del cielo
What's all below doesn't directly reflect the above title, but it came to mind as I composed this.
"They don't want Us here."
The phrase comes up whenever racists, xenophobes, English-onlys and Limbaughers rear their little minds to fill the Internet, town halls or periodicals with opinions inevitably blaming immigrants (legal or otherwise), Spanish-speakers or just plain old U.S.-born, English speaking Chicanos for a laundry list of economic, social or educational failings in this country. On the surface, yes, it sounds, looks and smells like "They don't want Us."
I don't buy the argument, nor the victim-mentality it encourages, because it's a simple reaction to an immediate, specific situation, and no matter how accurate it may be, it fails to include the larger, more complex picture.
They problem lies in the signification They. Without proposing a new conspiracy theory or resurrecting a new one, we tend to throw They around to refer to distinct groups, when we might be better off always thinking of it as the distinct whole--U.S. society, meaning to include the predominant (and some fringe) groups, segments of the population, agencies, governmental bodies, body of law, philosophy and discourse.
When we include all that as They, I'd argue They do want Us here. Someone has to maintain the U.S. hotel toilets, motel bedrooms, Calif. gardens, housing developments and restaurant kitchens at a low enough wage and without drawing down on their tax contributions or good-old-Americans will go without. The food won't get harvested and delivered to those restaurant tables without Us. Manipulating the politics and repressing the economies of Latin America has kept that flow of all types of labor immigrants at an economically profitable level for most of our history.
And after we're here, They still want Us here. The racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric should be interpreted to mean, They want Us here as less-educated scapegoats, the kind that will suffer inhuman abuse in all the verbal, physical and psychological ways that America is so adept at devising. Our norms here are that it's okay to cut off funds to immigrant children, accuse their parents of being members of an ignorant race (sic), while at the same time employing Us at substandard wages without benefits, and even recruiting Us to fight the Iraq-Afghan-Pakistan War.
Homeland Security should erect a monstrous billboard on the border, facing northward, stating:
"Don't leave us. We need your labor and sweat and without you we might realize we're all fokked because we'd have to find new scapegoats and there are enough Muslims around to take all the abuse."
So, the next time your Chicano or mexicano friend says, "They don't want Us here," please try to educate them.
For a good exposure and a set of some real moronic responses, go to "Most Oregon schools slow to get English learners proficient" to see how the Oregon government thinks "punishing" school districts for under serving English language learners can be best implemented by providing even less money for that.
To read about a state notorious for never having understood how to educate Us (Chicano and mexicano kids), and where for years teachers have fought against the myopic standards-based CSAP exam, go to Colorado's new educational standards stress strategic thinking. Dumping the old one doesn't mean a new one will be any better, but th
An excellent post that goes beyond the usual victimization that most Chican@s/Mexican@s go through in this country. This is the sort of deep discourse we need not the usually, "they don't like us"...because really that is but the surface of things. Economics and power are at the heart of all these issues, and race is merely used to muddle things.
The cheap labor provided by the very people that right-wing conspiracists claim to hate, hold up this economy that is ready to tank at any moment.
I agree that it's tiresome for Latinos to assume that they're unwanted all the time. It's funny you mention "Limbaughers." I've been listening to Limbaugh for years and have grown to like him -- believe it or not, he's 1000% better than Lou Dobbs. But that's the thing; you have to be specific and not lump everyone together or judge a book by its cover. Many of the people you assume hate Latinos simply have an explicit argument about immigration law and despite what we might assume, they don't hate us and they do want many of us here, just not all of us -- and it's something other than race that determines the difference. :)