17 October 2019 BETWEEN US AND ABUELA: A FAMILY STORY FROM THE BORDER by Mitali Perkins and Sara Palacios, Farrar Straus Giroux, September 2019, 40p., ISBN: 978-0-374-30373-0

“The Trump administration has sparked outcry in Arizona after video posted on social media showed construction crews tasked with building President Donald Trump’s long-promised border wall bulldozing down some of the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument’s most ‘iconic’ cacti.”

-- Newsweek (10/7/2019)

“I don’t believe in guarded borders

And I don’t believe in hate”

-- Bruce Cockburn, “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” (1984) 

“Las Posadas is a nine-day festival celebrated throughout Mexico and in other countries from December 16 until December 24. It is a time to remember the birth of Jesús and how his parents, María and José, searched for shelter on the night he was born. Turned away from the inns of Bethlehem, María gave birth to her baby and laid him in a manger instead.

Every night during Las Posadas, two people dress up as María and José. A procession of neighbors holding candles and poinsettias join them to knock on the door of an ‘inn’ or ‘posada.’ On these nights, though, unlike that long-ago night in Bethlehem, this Holy Family and their companions are welcomed, sheltered, and feasted by the hosts.

La Posada Sin Fronteras (‘The Inn Without Borders’) is celebrated on one day during Las Posadas along the border between Mexico and the United States of America. People in Tijuana work with people in San Diego to plan the event. Friends and families gather in Friendship Park in San Diego and in Playa de Tijuana by the lighthouse in Tijuana. They sing traditional Posada carols, hear the stories of migrants living in the United States and in Mexico, and listen in silence to the naming of people who died trying to cross the border. “

-- from the Author’s Note

Some years, I spend Christmas Day with my young grandchildren. Other years, I don’t. Frankly, it’s not the biggest deal in the world to me. With rare exceptions, I visit and play with them every week. It’s one of the funnest parts of my life. Fortunately, they’re only an hour away. Just the other day, I was singing to the twins as I pulled them in their wagon to the park, where I ran up and down the climbing structures with them.

My inspiration for being a grandparent comes from happy memories of my own grandfather. He was gentle, permissive, and treated me like I was the absolute center of his world. Now that I have my own grandkids to love, I see how that treatment was not necessarily an act.

This is why BETWEEN US AND ABUELA gets me right between the eyes. It’s a wonderful fictional picture book story of María and Juan, two young California Latino kids who accompany their mother to La Posada Sin Fronteras. They go there to share Christmas through the fence with their maternal grandmother, who is on the other side. 

It’s a joyful tale. Young María, who narrates the story, successfully brainstorms a clever scheme for delivering, over the fence, the piece of art that her little brother lovingly created for this Abuela he doesn’t really know. It’s a big deal because Juan is too young to understand the concept that, by law, nothing can be passed through the fence. He really wants Abuela to have his gift.

For those of us whose grandparent was a regularly-present, forever-loving adult in his or her young life, this might be a somewhat sad book. I feel for this family who can’t have what I had, or that I’m trying to provide to my grandkids. What would it be like, I shudder to think, to have to visit my grandkids only on rare occasions, and from opposite sides of a fence

Will we ever succeed in having love triumph over hate? 

This unusual holiday-related picture book is a lovely, moving, and memorable story 

Richie Partington, MLIS

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