May Everyone Really Mean Everyone: Interpreting Reality through Our Own Patterns

Interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.

Gabriel García Márquez

While preparing this introduction, I learned of the death of Colombian writer and Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel García Márquez. Over the following days, a multitude of endearing anecdotes invaded social networks. Apparently, everyone had something to say concerning their own experience of reading “Gabo” (as he is fondly called in México) during early youth. While his work is not considered a part of what is traditionally understood as children’s literature, some of his short stories—such as The Happy Summer of Mrs. Forbes, The Very old Man with Enormous Wings and Light is like Water—have been published as children books. However, most admit that his classic novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was the one book that left an indelible mark on their lives: a sort of initiation into becoming trained readers. Thus, although not a Mexican author, García Márquez had a great influence not only among writers, but among Mexican people in general. His greatest achievement consisted precisely in letting us see the huge coincidences between the magical, yet realistic, way we view the world from México, Colombia, or any other country in Latin America. Since the appearance of García Márquez’s early novels, during the mid-twentieth century, magical realism has become a vehicle of identification for Latin American culture as a whole.

Very few artistic expressions signify such a radical break from the traditional canon. Magical realism is an essential component of post-colonial literary practice. More than a literary style, it embodies a philosophy, based on the recognition of otherness as an essential part of oneself. Empowered by its limitless logic, magical realism pushes itself apart from those principles imposed by the literary canon that has prevailed throughout the history of literature and supported the political hegemony of national states and international powers. Up against this exclusive and excluding unit, magical realism advocates for inclusiveness. It aims to explore and transgress political, geographical, generic, and ontological boundaries, allowing the co-existence of spaces, worlds, entities, and systems that would be irreconcilable in other forms of fiction (Faris and Zamora 5–7). Magical realism focuses on plotting a narrative that interweaves reality and imagination, gracefully erasing the line between them. Through this discursive strategy—so common and even necessary in Latin American everyday life—the narrator authenticates fantastic events by presenting them as natural facts. By building bridges between different worlds, storytellers have served as decolonizing agents, lending their voices to marginal whisperers, submerged traditions, and emergent literatures (Faris).

Let the sad news of the departure of our beloved Gabo provide us with a new excuse to reflect on the way in which the development of these marvelous and spontaneous narratives have impacted children’s literature in both México and Latin America. Rather than proposing a topic of discussion, this special issue of Bookbird expresses a necessary claim for inclusiveness: “may everyone really mean everyone.” Accordingly, we have gathered seven articles addressing the construction and affirmation of collective identities through children’s books in the neocolonial context; more specifically, in México and Latin America. Each of these pieces focuses on the strategies used by children’s authors, since the 1960s, to resist narrative models imposed by the traditional canon, and proposes new parameters for understanding childhood beyond nationalist concepts. From different approaches, these papers discuss the notion of boundary: in the geographical sense of “border,” in the renegotiation of marginality, and in the redefinition of limits between the real and the imaginary.

On the one hand, in the case of boundaries, México is particularly interesting because of its proximity to the United States and the large number of Mexicans who have crossed the northern border in search of work and a more prosperous life, creating a Mexican-American community with its own traditions and identity. On the other hand, the presence of more than fifty...