Visual Brilliance/Narrative
Deficiency
José Manuel Mateo (author) and Javier Martínez Pedro
(illustrator). Migrant. New York:
Abrams, 2014.
The first thing that one notices when picking up José Manuel
Mateo and Javier Martínez Pedro’s Migrant
is the elegance of the book as an artifact. The large, rectangular text is
bound in black cloth and a black bow. Such packaging is an interesting gesture
to restore to the book the sort of reverence and specialness that gets lost
these days with the gaudier tendencies of cover design.1 It effectively
puts the reader into an appropriate mode by prompting a mature approach to the
subject of the book and the book itself as a work of art.
Opening it one discovers an accordion fold-out that extends to a length of over 4 ft. This fold-out features one continuous 9 x 54 in.
illustration extending from top to bottom. The written narrative appears in a
blank margin to the left of the illustration. In the “Author’s and Artist’s
Note” at the end (or bottom) of the book, the reader learns that the
illustration is in the form of a codex. As Mateo and Pedro explain, “Rather
than use separate pages and then bind them together, as we do today, the
ancient people would use one long sheet of amate
and then gather it in an ‘accordian’ fold. It’s called a codex.” The use of the
codex for the purposes of this book is quite powerful and merits high
appreciation. Separate illustrations on separate pages have the effect of
chopping up a story into compartmentalized pieces (one only has to bear in mind
the popular saying of “just turn the page” to realize the internal
disconnection/amnesia that actually occurs within a conventional picture book
vis-à-vis the distribution of the art and narrative being across disparate
pages). The use of a codex here positions the reader to process the
connectedness of that which in another mode would be regarded as disparate
elements. It enables broader and more comprehensive thinking and perception by literally
laying out (or, we might say, insisting on) connectedness. Specifically, the
use of the codex to tell the story of migration is a brilliantly apt decision
(more on the aptness of the codex for this kind of narrative in a moment).
As regards the story that the codex illustrates, in all
honesty, the book presents a familiar story. The narrative voice belongs to a
Mexican boy2 who describes for the reader his life in Mexico, his
trek to the United States with his mother and sister, and, finally, a little
bit about his hard life in the United States. The structure is what one
typically finds in migration narratives (such as Francisco Jiménez’s The Circuit and Amada Irma Pérez’s My Diary from Here to There). So, too,
is the content. The narrator recounts economic troubles in Mexico, the trauma
of leaving home, the undertaking of a dangerous journey north, fear of getting
caught in the course of the journey, and the stress of living in the shadows of
the United States while eeking out a living working menial jobs. Of course
there is a poignancy to the narrative, which renders it a potentially valuable read for
children to help them think about migrant experiences. As Leo Chávez has pointed out with regard to Mexican immigration in
the United States infosphere, by and large coverage of immigration has been
“limited at best,” serving more to stoke xenophobia than to impart insight and
illumination that could provide “a more complete picture of undocumented
immigrants” (Shadowed Lives xi).
Narratives such as Migrant
offer to redress the inadequacy of popular understandings of migrant
experiences.
Yet there is something quite dissatisfying about the narrative
of Migrant owing to its relative lack
of depth (which is why The Circuit and My Diary from Here to There immediately stand out as working much more effectively). Basically, Migrant reads
likes a very, in fact excessively streamlined account of a migration experience,
with its efficiency occurring at the expense of details and development that
would have made it an even more compelling and illuminating (and haunting) approach to its
subject matter. For example, once the boy’s mother resolves to take her children
to the United States to reunite with the father (who is already in the United
States and had been sending money home but has suddenly stopped), we learn that
the child, his sister, and his mother illicitly hop a train for a ride north.
We learn nothing about the trials and tribulations of the train ride, however,
other than the fact that “When the train stopped, all of us who were travelling
up on top of the roofs of the cars got down quickly. …[M]en who looked like the
police were chasing after people and putting them in yellow trucks.” As the
text elides details about this and other aspects of the migrant experience, thus
smoothing out the migrant experience, the text becomes increasingly dogged by
the sense that more could have been done to nurture fuller respect for the
ordeals endured by migrants.
Perhaps most strikingly, the actual crossing is way too
simplified. After managing to elude arrest at the train stop, the narrator
says, “Later we came to a very high wall. We had to jump over it. Suddenly some
police arrived and let their dogs loose…I was very scared. But then they called
the dogs back. Who knows why…” Honestly, I find such a portrayal baffling and
ultimately frustrating. The crossing experience is far more complicated and
risky and scary than jumping over a high wall, especially if one is entering
the Southern California region (as indicated by the sentence, “That is how my
mom, my sister, and I arrived outside Los Angeles”). That a migrant would just
jump a wall grossly overlooks assorted challenges that crossing can actually
entail. And that dogs were let loose only to be called back "who knows why?" comes across as a narrative cop out.
In short, the details portrayed in the narrative progressively
do not add up to a realistic portrayal. My reason for holding up verisimilitude
here as a touchstone for evaluating the authorial choices in Migrant come back to maximizing insight
into and respect for migrant experiences.
Incidentally the author’s biography features the disclaimer,
“He has not lived or suffered the experience of migration, but he wrote this
story considering what could have happened to him and his family at one time.”
To be sure, it is fully possible for one to write a story about what one has
not lived through. Doing so requires that one do a lot of research, however, to
ensure proper handling of the experience. Migration
leaves me with questions about how much homework Mateo invested into the
development of this narrative. As the narrative stands, it seems more a
caricature of migration as opposed to a nuanced delving into the experience.
The implication in the author’s biography that this narrative is a product of
authorial speculation only irks me even more because it only underscores the
unactualized potentiality of this kind of book as a book for children. Indeed, un-researched
speculation seems to be masquerading as a testimonial that channels the spirit
and nature of migrant experiences.
Authorial presumptions about children’s literature might also
account for the thinness of the narrative. The biography for Mateo indicates
that he “writes poetry, stories, and essays. …He has worked as an editor for
many years and is now currently teaching university students.” No mention is
made about writing for children. If it is the case that he has no
prior experience writing for children, it could of course wonderful that he has
undertaken this project. The genre always needs new voices to help it grow and
evolve. But the problem—one which I noted yesterday in my review of Dale, Dale, Dale: Una fiesta de números—is
that writers can easily underestimate the genre, perhaps by underestimating
children. The narrative of Migrant broaches
some gritty realities, but it leaves these realities unexplained, and it
overlooks others. Even if this occurs because of the child narrator—which is intrinsically
a narrator who occupies a position of incomplete knowledge and understanding—it
would have been in the best interest of the book to disclose more than it does—even
in the guise of being written by a child migrant—rather than just duplicate
what the author imagines to be the limited perspective of the child.
Now, to come back to the codex…this part of the book is
astonishingly intricate, and as such it demands close reading on the part of
the child audience. Above all else, and as suggested above, the singularity of the
codex makes it possible for the reader to realize the ongoing simultaneity of
the social dynamics that the narrative points toward. That is, the codex, defies
liner, sequential modes of story and history through a synchronic
representation which brings to mind what Fredric Jameson dubs “the
spatialization of time” (Stephanson and Jameson 6). Explaining what he means by
“the spatialization of time,” Jameson says, “Time has become a perpetual
present and thus spatial” (6). Bearing in mind this idea as well as additional
glosses such as “Our relationship to the past is now a spatial one” and “Our theoretical categories also tend to
become spatial: structural analyses with graphs of synchronic multiplicities of
spatially related things” (6), we might consider the temporal, geographical,
historical, and relational implications of Pedro’s codex. All at once Pedro’s
codex covers and cuts across these different dimensions, rendering them
simultaneous and ongoing. While Jameson goes on with regard to “spatialization
replacing temporalization” to say, “This is bewildering, and I use existential
bewilderment in this new postmodern space to make a final diagnosis of the loss
of our ability to position ourselves
within this space and cognitively map it” (7), it strikes me that a
productive, powerfully complex cognitive mapping—one that explodes the
cognitive foreclosure that diachronic representations otherwise engender—is
precisely what Pedro accomplishes with the spatialization that he performs.
Thus, while the narrative of Migrant comes up short, there is much to say about—and do with—the artwork.
--phillip serrato, San Diego State University
Notes
 |
| Source: Bowman |
2 Unless I have missed something, I do not think
there is anything in the text to indicate that the narrator is in fact a boy. But in the “Note” at the end the author and artist say, “In our codex, we
tell of a boy and his sister and mother, and how they left their house in
Mexico to search for a new hope, in life, a place where there is work.” While
they thus pin down the gender of the narrator, it occurs to me that leaving it
unspecified would have been more interesting.
Works Cited
Bowman, Erin. "Why you should read every hardcover with the book jacket OFF." 18 August 2011. http://www.embowman.com/2011/why-you-should-read-every-hardcover-with-the-book-jacket-off/
Chávez, Leo. Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1992
Chávez, Leo. Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1992
Stephanson,
Anders and Fredric Jameson. “Regarding Postmodernism—A Conversation with
Fredric Jameson.” Social Text 21
(1989): 3-30.
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