Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote: A Migrant's Tale by Duncan Tonatiuh (review)

Pancho's papá, Papá Rabbit, is leaving with Señor Rooster and Señor Ram to cross the border—illegally—to find work in El Norte for months. When Papá and the other animal fathers don't come home when they're expected, Pancho, stocked up with tortillas, mole, rice, and beans, sets out to find his father. Accepting the help of a coyote (a literal one, in a play on coyote, an often corrupt smuggler who takes people across the border for a price), Pancho hops trains, swims rivers, and bribes the rattlesnake border officials to cross the desert into El Norte, doling out his dwindling stockpile of food and drink at each step as payment to the coyote. After it's finally all gone and the coyote is still hungry, Pancho seems to be on the menu himself until the migrant fathers burst in, chase the smuggler away, and begin the trek home to reunite with their families. Tonatiuh is so careful in weaving his allegory that his empathetic contemporary tale feels like age-old folklore, with simple but compelling text and a step-by-step escalation of the story through gripping, kid-understandable challenges. The ink and digital collage illustrations evoke Aztec drawing with their distorted two-dimensionality: feet and heads are in profile, but arms and eyes face forward, and objects skew perspective to tilt toward the reader and display their most interesting side. Tonatiuh masterfully combines photographic elements to create a richly textured world (Coyote, for example, is textured with real coyote fur) and uses broad swaths of the gorgeous tans, browns, and oranges of the environment to draw attention to his characters and their journeys. An author's note describes the realities of undocumented workers in the United States today and points to web resources for further information. A glossary of Spanish terms is also included. This thoughtful allegory provides a fresh approach to introduce kids to a tough issue, but the tale is interesting enough to stand as a modern folktale on its own.