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Still Dreaming / Seguimos soñando

Review
By The New York Times

STILL DREAMING by Claudia Guadalupe Martínez follows a boy and his family through the history of Mexican repatriation, when, because of economic hardship and bias, the United States government forced Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants to leave the country in the midst of the Great Depression, even though many were citizens. The first-person account begins with the family’s departure from their village, moves through a lyrical interlude with “the people on the road,” whose experiences across the United States read like a folk song, and ends in the family’s car as they cross back into Mexico, the boy “not done dreaming.” The boomerang-shaped narrative reflects the cruelty of forcing a family to resettle twice simply to stay together, and the soft washes of color in Magdalena Mora’s illustrations — no harsh lines, no sharp borders — swim with nostalgia and hope, a landscape where the boy’s memories are painted across the sky and his dreams of return find an echo in the migratory path of monarch butterflies.