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My Diary from Here to There / Mi diario de aquí hasta allá gently explores one family's process of traveling, waiting, working, and hoping as they immigrate from northern Mexico to Los Angeles, California. The story stresses the closeness of the family's friends and relatives as they work their way north and west, as well as the positive growth that can come from such a stressful change as leaving one's home, community, and country. The form of the book – a young girl's journal-highlights this personal journey and explores how personal writing can be a means of understanding oneself and conquering one's fears, as well as coming to know oneself. Each of Amada's diary entries marks an important point along the journey she takes, with the support of her family.
Author Amada Irma Pérez offers her own personal experience of leaving her home in Ciudad Juárez as a little girl, and artist Maya Christina Gonzalez intimately renders the details of family life on both sides of the border. Through diary entries and paintings, readers come to know the tight-knit communities and physical landscapes of northern Mexico and California. This story will resonate with students who have faced a major change such as moving, starting a new school, or traveling to a new place with or without their family. It will resonate with teachers as well, as they integrate the book into studies of Mexico, immigration, journal-writing – and learning to face your fears.
Because My Diary from Here to There / Mi diario de aquí hasta allá tells the true story of one family's journey to the United States, it cannot describe all the different shapes that immigration takes. As a resource for discussion of immigration, it is best used in the context of a larger unit of study of many immigrant stories. We recommend that you use it together with other books that describe alternative paths to the United States, such as Friends from the Other Side / Amigos del Otro Lado.
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Mexican American
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Crossing Borders:
Immigration; Citizenship; U.S. / Mexican Geography
Adjusting to Change:
New Schools; New Communities; Family Networks
Personal Narratives:
Journals; Letters; Autobiographies
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Amada Irma Pérez is a third-grade teacher in Oxnard, California, and a leading advocate of programs encouraging multicultural understanding. Like many of her students, Amada Irma was born in Mexico and came to the United States as a young child. Amada Irma based My Diary from Here to There/ Mi diario de aquí hasta allá on her own journey across the border as a girl with her large family. In Amada Irma's first book, My Very Own Room/ Mi propio cuartito she dealt with the issues she faced living in a small space with her large family. “My parents,” she wrote, “wanted to provide us with more space, but they could not. However, they taught us strong values, supported our education, and insisted that we become bilingual . . . [Today,] we are all committed to improving the lives of those who are struggling with the realities of poverty or adjusting to a new and different life.” My Very Own Room/ Mi propio cuartito won the Tómas Rivera Award and the Américas Honor Award, among others. Amada Irma Pérez lives with her husband and children in Ventura, California.
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Born outside of Los Angeles and raised in Oregon, Maya Christina Gonzalez is one of the most promising young painters in the San Francisco Bay Area. My Diary from Here to There is her eighth book for Children's Book Press. Most recently, she also illustrated Iguanas in the Snow and Other Winter Poems/ Iguanas en la nieve y otros poemas de invierno, her fourth and final book in a series with prominent Chicano poet Francisco X. Alarcón. She was also the artist for Amada Irma Pérez's first book, My Very Own Room/ Mi propio cuartito. Her work has been praised by reviewers as “lively” and “so bountiful it feels as if it's spilling off the pages.” Maya's top reviews, though, come from her students. A long-time participant in Children's Book Press Community Programs, Maya serves as artist-in-residence at several Bay Area elementary schools. Through her innovative workshops, Maya helps students express their visions of the world – and themselves. “By beginning with self-portraits,” Maya says, “art is immediately marked as something that is your own, very personal, very true. How can this be wrong? It is me!”
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