Music Credit:  “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T from the cd Soul Sand, used courtesy of the Free Music Archive Jo Reed: Hello This is Art Works, the weekly podcasts produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. And this is a flashback episode… I’m revisiting an interview with Pam Munoz Ryan. Pam is a terrific writer and a prolific one. She’s written over 40 books for young people, including picture books and middle grade and young adult novels and many of them have become staples in classrooms, libraries, and in many homes across the country. Her list of prizes and awards is staggering. They include a Newberry Honor, the Human and Civil Rights Award from the National Education Association, the Virginia Hamilton Literary Award, and the Penn USA Award. She casts a wide net in terms of subjects, from the childhood of Pablo Neruda in The Dreamer, to a young kid living in a trailer in Oklahoma with Becoming Naomi Leon, to a young Mexican girl forced to immigrate to the United States in the 1930’s in Esperanza Rising, probably her most popular book. Written over 15 years ago, Esperanza Rising put the publishing world on notice that Pam Munoz Ryan was an author of great distinction  whose lyrical prose captivated young adults and older ones too, including me. Esperanza Rising is a classic. I gave it to my godchild, and it’s a very special book for me because it was her pathway book. We started off reading it together and then she ended up reading it on her own, finishing it. Pam Munoz Ryan: Thank you. Jo Reed: It’s really lovely. Do you mind giving me a thumbnail sketch of it? The story of Esperanza Rising? Pam Munoz Ryan:  Well, Esperanza Rising is the story of a young girl who grows up very wealthy and well taken care of and very well loved on a ranch in Aguascalientes, Mexico. Her father dies. It is a period in history where property is not left to women, so she and her mother become outcasts in the family, and the uncles inherit the land, and a series of circumstances occur that forces them to immigrate to the United States. They have employees that have worked for the family for years that are going, and so they go along, and the mother sort of embraces it as their only way out and their only way of being together and Esperanza is challenged by her demotion in society and in the pecking order of her upbringing. So she ends up in a migrant farm labor camp with many people she doesn’t know and without her father and with only her mother to rely on, and she has to learn to work and to survive. Jo Reed: It’s based on the life of your grandmother? Pam Munoz Ryan:  Yes. It parallels her immigration journey from Aguascalientes, Mexico, to the segregated farm labor camps in the San Joaquin Valley in 1930. It is a work of fiction but it does follow her journey very closely, and many of the circumstances are the same or very, very similar to what she experienced. Jo Reed: Did you grow up on your grandmother’s stories? Pam Munoz Ryan:  I grew up in Bakersfield, California. I was fortunate to have both of my grandmothers close by and especially my Mexican grandmother, Esperanza, just a few blocks away. So I spent a lot of time with her, and she spent a lot of time telling me about what her life was like in the camps near Bakersfield, California, but she never really talked much about Mexico. And it wasn’t until I was a grown woman with children of my own and she would come and stay with me sometimes for several weeks at a time that she began to open up about what her life was like before she made it to California. And I began writing those stories down because I was at that point in my life where I knew that I was going to lose them if I didn’t write them down. Jo Reed:  And what was her life like in Mexico? Pam Munoz Ryan:  She grew up with a very privileged life in Mexico. One of her uncles was the mayor of Aguascalientes. She grew up in at a big ranch. She grew up with privilege. So when she came across the border to the United States, it was a very different scene for her. Jo Reed:  What happened when she came here? Why did she come here? Is it like the story of Esperanza Rising? Pam Munoz Ryan:  It’s similar to the story of Esperanza Rising in that her father did die. A series of circumstances occurred in her life that forced her to flee across the border. She was facing basically a life of poverty if she stayed in Mexico. Property was not left to women, and so she emigrated and ended up in Di Giorgio Farms in Arvin, California, working in a migrant farm camp. Jo Reed:  How old was your grandmother when she came to the United States?  Pam Munoz Ryan:  She came when she was I believe about 17 or 18, and she lived in the camps for about five years. She’s much younger than the story of her real life. So the story of Esperanza Rising, the book is backed up a little for the age of my reader. Jo Reed: What made you decide, Pam that you wanted to shape a book around your grandmother's experience? Pam Munoz Ryan:  Well, I had written one novel beforehand, and I was talking with my editor and-- about what my next project would be. I thought that Esperanza Rising would be a very simple picture-book story about growing up with my grandmother and as I began to write this story and show it to my editor, my editor said, “You’ve got a lot more to say here.” Would you consider doing this as a novel?” and that’s how it came about. And, you know, the other part of that is as a writer when I went and pulled out all of these stories that I had written down when my grandmother had come to stay with me when my children were little it had all the premises for a great story. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end and it had all the drama of the journey and all the things that happened to her along the way. So all of a sudden I had a full box of premises from which to draw and develop. Jo Reed: Did she talk to you about doing farm labor and living in the migrant camps? Pam Munoz Ryan:  Well, I sort of grew up knowing all about her experiences in the camp because first of all the town of Arvin was very close to Bakersfield. She had many, many friends with whom she had stayed in touch when she had lived there and she had a community of friends even after the camps went by the wayside with whom she talked and went to weddings. And so I was very cognizant of that connection and why she was close to all of those people. So I just sort of grew up knowing about them, and I also had uncles who worked in the sheds during the summer so that whole lifestyle was just sort of matter of fact and something I sort of took for granted. Jo Reed: You paint such a vivid picture of life in that camp. Pam Munoz Ryan: Oh, thank you. Jo Reed: Both the difficulty of it but also the great community that it could build as well. Pam Munoz Ryan: Well, I was very fortunate because I had the family-- obviously, my grandmother lived in the camp, but there were also other people that were still alive. When I wrote Esperanza Rising my grandmother had already passed away, but I was able to find other people who’d lived in the camp and interview them. And then, of course, I had great resources in the Bakersfield library local history room. And so there were many articles about strikes and conditions. And then my father was alive at the time, and I went home a few times and he took me out and we drove the area, and he showed me exactly where the camps were and what it looked like so I had a lot of first-person accounts and then I had relatives who had worked in the sheds who could tell me things about cutting potato eyes and things like that. <laughs> So I was really fortunate in that there were many people still alive who could really give me information. Jo Reed: The book I think was also remarkably sensitive to labor issues. The strikers and labor organizers who wanted to form a union and go out on strike, the real ambivalence about many of the immigrant workers about that. It’s so multifaceted, and I think you did that so well. Can you talk about writing that part of the book? Pam Munoz Ryan:  Well, I think my goal about that was to not take a side but to show all sides so that the reader could have some empathy for the people that were striking, certainly for the conditions, for the people that were more self-actualized and could understand how much better their life could be. But also for the people who were just arriving and lived with the terror that they might be sent back and who were at a completely different level, that were more on a survival level of roof over the head, food in the mouth. So I really wanted to portray both sides of the issue, and I’ve had teachers tell me that they divide their classes in half, and they give one side one issue and one side the other issue, and they have quite heated discussions about what they would have done or what should have been done, so that really was my goal. Jo Reed: There was a ruthlessness in if immigrants and anybody of Mexican descent who could have been born in the United States if they were caught striking they were sent back to Mexico or sent to Mexico. Pam Munoz Ryan:  Right, regardless of whether they were American citizens or not; that’s true. Repatriation was a very real thing, and it was many sweeps were done, and it didn’t matter if people had papers or not; it was just-- it was 1930, ’31; this was the approach then. Jo Reed: At the end of your books, you often have and afterward in which you give readers the background that informs the story you’ve written. And at the end of Esperanza Rising, you discuss the Mexican repatriation act that took place in the 1930’s. It’s surprising how little known this is. Would you please tell us about it?  Pam Munoz Ryan:  Well, I don’t have my book right here with me to reference that, but in essence, the Repatriation Act was an effort by the government to I believe control immigration or dissuade immigrants. They would do roundups or sweeps of areas where many Mexican Americans worked. Remember this was the beginning of the Great Depression so I think that it was the government’s philosophy that they were taking jobs away from Americans although in retrospect it seems that they weren’t necessarily, so they would do sweeps and roundups and repatriate them to their own country, which was Mexico. That’s basically it in a nutshell, and many people who were repatriated were already American citizens whose families had been American citizens for many years, but because they, quote, looked Mexican they were sent back.   Jo Reed:  Yeah. I have it right here: You said between 1929 and 1935 450,000 Mexicans and Mexican Americans were sent to Mexico. Pam Munoz Ryan: Right. That number’s probably conservative. Jo Reed:  Yeah, and that’s what you say in the next sentence that some historians think the number is closer to a million. Pam Munoz Ryan:  Right, and there were even circumstances where they were sent back, and yet they never spoke Spanish; they only knew English. It was a part of our history that’s been neglected but, you know, you’ll find that in a lot of my historical fiction. And I’m very drawn to little-known episodes. Jo Reed: Well, the book that followed “Esparanza,” Becoming Naomi Leon, sort of blends both sides of your family. Tell us the story of that book. Pam Munoz Ryan:  Well, Becoming Naomi Leon first of all you said “blends both sides of my family” so my grandmother, Esperanza Ortega, was born in Aguascalientes, Mexico, and I grew up in Bakersfield, California, with her very close by in a big extended family and Mexican family. My mother married my stepdad who I consider to be my real father. She married my real father, Don Bell, when I was about four years old, and his mother was from Oklahoma, so I had a Mexican grandmother and a Oklahoma grandmother, and we saw her a lot. We saw her every single Saturday, and so she was also an influence in my life and all of those Oklahoma sayings and her personality and the humor. You know, I was privileged to have that as well, to have that Oklahoman sensibility. And so in Becoming Naomi Leon it’s the story of a Oklahoman grandmother-- a great-grandmother who has been raising these two children, and at the end of the first chapter there’s a knock at the door and their mother, who’s not been in their lives really since they were babies, appears. And so it’s the story of the great lengths that this Oklahoman grandmother will go to protect these children.    Jo Reed: And it also combines your Mexican roots as well because Mexico figures very prominently in this story. Their father is Mexican. Pam Munoz Ryan:  Right. Their father is Mexican and the grandmother when I say she goes to great lengths to protect them from this mother who has a lot of needs and a lot of dysfunction part of that is that she takes them to Mexico to find their real father so that she can meet with him and they can figure out a way that these children can stay with her. Jo Reed:  You’re so good about getting inside a kid’s head. Pam Munoz Ryan:  Oh, thank you. Jo Reed: I just loved. I think it is at the end of the first chapter or the second chapter, very early on in the book. And the way Naomi knows there is real trouble is because her grandmother leaves the house with her curlers on in the middle of “Wheel of Fortune” and it’s like “Oh, my God, this is bad.” And I just think that observation is so wonderful and it gives us such insight into that grandmother but also Naomi. Pam Munoz Ryan:  Well, yeah, I think sometimes too we forget the children have so many clues about what adults are feeling and they know and pick up so many of our gestures and idiosyncrasies and especially for Naomi who’s had a very sort of controlled life with her grandmother. And a grandmother who has done things very routinely has never left them, and her. You know, their life has been pretty programmed. And so when it becomes a tad bit un-programmed Naomi knows, she suspects something is wrong. Jo Reed:  You know, it’s a tough book in a lot of ways because it’s not just family dysfunction; these kids have really been damaged. Pam Munoz Ryan:  Right. Jo Reed: And you deal with it very delicately. Can you talk about how you, decided to portray that. And how far you decided to go? Pam Munoz Ryan: In Becoming Naomi Leon, Naomi and her little brother, Owen, were abandoned by their mother when they were very, very young, Owen was just a baby, and so the great-grandmother stepped in, and she embraced these children, and she protected them. And so it-- I didn’t want to become graphic about abuse because I don’t really know that that’s what the mother did to them; it was more neglect than anything, but of course, that in itself is abuse, and so it was walking a fine line. How to portray that and how to portray it in a way that a child wouldn’t be upset by it. And I felt like by showing the grandmother, how strong she was and how responsible she was and how dedicated she was to loving them that that would help make up for their circumstances. Jo Reed: I like the relationship that Naomi has with her brother who’s really this quirky little kid. Pam Munoz Ryan:  Owen has some physical disabilities. He was born with his head kind of scrunched up towards his shoulder, and he had to have some surgeries to help work out his spine and his neck. And he also has some little quirky things about him, he has a security issue with Scotch tape, he likes to have a piece of Scotch tape on him all the time, and he’s a little bit of a savant as well although people don’t think he’s that smart because he doesn’t look that smart. He’s a funny-looking kid so, you know, he was a combination of three little boys that I once knew. So this is Naomi’s life. You know, she lives with her great-grandmother and then she has this brother that’s very quirky on many levels, and it’s how she copes with it. Jo Reed:  Well, one was Naomi copes is by soap carving. And that becomes an integral part of the story. Pam Munoz Ryan: Right. Jo Reed: How did that make its way into the book? Pam Munoz Ryan: First of all, Naomi doesn’t speak much. It’s not that she can’t speak but she’s just very, very quiet, and I needed to give her an outlet, something to do. And several years before I wrote this book I had been to Oaxaca for the hundredth anniversary of The Night of the Radishes, which is a festival that they have there every year on the 23rd of December where all the native woodcarvers come in, and they carve these elaborate scenes out of hybrid radishes. So I had been to this festival, and I always thought that I wanted to use that event in a book, but I didn’t know at that time what that would be. I didn’t know if I would write a picture book about it or a nonfiction book, but I had set it on the back burner. So here I am writing Becoming Naomi Leon, and I have this young girl who doesn’t speak, who’s painfully quiet, and I wanted to give her some sort of outlet-- some sort of artistic outlet, and I remembered when I was a young girl in Campfire Girls that we did activities with Ivory soap where we carved figures. And so I thought oh, maybe that would be interesting to give it to my character and all of a sudden the premise of soap carving and then the carving of The Night of the Radishes it all sort of just coalesced; all of a sudden I had a connection and an avenue where I could bring those two things together. Jo Reed:  How do you begin a book? Do you begin with a character, an idea, a picture in your mind? Pam Munoz Ryan: Well, I’m a very recursive writer, and I’ll explain that in a second, and the other thing is for me writing is more of an evolution, not so much a process. I think people always want to know what’s your process like; exactly what do you do, point A, point B, point-- how do you organize the book; do you outline; do you do this; do you put things on cards and put them up on the wall. I’m actually a very sort of evolutionary writer in the sense that I usually have that beginning-- opening scene in my mind and I write that scene, and that scene rarely changes; I mean I can’t think of any of my novels where that scene has changed. I start writing, and then I stop, and the next day I go back to the beginning, and I read, and I edit, and then I continue to write a little more, and then I stop and then the next day I go back to the beginning, so it’s very recursive. I’m always going back to the beginning, I’m always rewriting and continuing to develop the book and the story. Now of course there comes a point where I can’t do that any longer so maybe I’ll start at the halfway point and continue, and it’s also not to say that I never outline but I might do that as an exercise or I might get to a point in the book where I think to myself okay, what could or should happen. And I might make a list or an outline; I’m not married to that outline, but it helps me just sort of organize my thoughts. So I would say for me that writing is more of an evolution rather than a process and I always, always start with that first scene; it’s a scene I see in my mind. Jo Reed: Now what about a book like The Dreamer? Which you wrote and was beautifully illustrated by Peter Sis. How did you collaborate on that project? Pam Munoz Ryan:  Well, it was done in a very traditional way, meaning that he was brought in after the manuscript was written. So I wrote the manuscript, and then my editor and the art director considered having an illustrator illustrate portions of the novel and then Peter was brought in, yeah, and we collaborated in a sense only with the art director and the editor, all of us together, the four of us. He would show us a variety of sketches for each illustration, and we would all discuss them and talk about them. He was wonderful. He was very sensitive and did a remarkable job. Jo Reed:  It’s a beautiful, beautiful book to look at which, given the subject, makes perfect aesthetic sense. And tell us what The Dreamer is about. Pam Munoz Ryan:  The Dreamer is about a little boy, Neftali Reyes who lives in Temuco, Chile. He’s painfully shy, he has a very severe stutter, he lives with his very domineering and sometimes dictatorial and cruel father, and the story is about this very sort of sensitive child who copes with the world by collecting things from the forest-- from the Chilean forest and from the seaside where his family visits each year. And so he creates these collections, seed pods and leaves and then from the shore seabird skeletons and shells, and it’s also-- his discovery of books also becomes a way for him to cope with his world, to sort of submerge himself in his own imagination, and all of these things, books and his collections and his forays, and really even though he does have a sibling-- siblings he’s really a very isolated and friendless child. So the whole story is about how Neftali Reyes learns to cope with his world. Neftali Reyes grows up to be the poet Pablo Neruda and so The Dreamer is about the poet Pablo Neruda’s young childhood. Jo Reed: And this is a fictionalized account based on Pablo Neruda’s childhood? Pam Munoz Ryan:  Correct. That’s correct. Jo Reed: You did a great job describing the difficulties of his childhood. A father who was so authoritarian and rigid in his expectations of his kids. And in the world of your book clearly ruined his oldest son. Pam Munoz Ryan: Right. I tried to give a little insight into the father about what his life was like. He didn’t want his children to struggle as he struggled and it was a different time, it was a different country, there were cultural issues involved, so yes, he was difficult, and it did affect his children’s lives Jo Reed: You know, in the three books that we’ve been talking about and in other of your books as well. You also, it’s very subtle, but you’re also really looking at class issues. These aren’t kids who have a lot of money. Money is always a struggle to some extent and even in the Neruda book that’s part of what is motivating his father, the fact that he grew up poor. That’s very rare to see. Pam Munoz Ryan:  Oh, well. I’m glad you said it was subtle because I meant it to be more matter of fact, and also I think it’s really important for young readers to read about a variety of circumstances. I want to portray our common humanity, and not everybody can be from one particular type of family. Jo Reed:  What do you find gratifying about writing for young readers? Pam Munoz Ryan:  Well, first of all, I get wonderful letters. It’s always really interesting to read their letters and find out the connections they’ve made with the stories because the connections aren’t ever exactly a tight parallel; they’re often very interpretive. And I think that’s what’s really so gratifying for me is to have a child open up about a circumstance based on reading my book because something in my book triggered a memory or a common incident in their lives. It just makes me feel like I have a connection to them. So I think that’s certainly very gratifying. It’s also really gratifying to see how librarians and educators and teachers present the books and the activities they do with students or their clients to enrich the story. I’m always so surprised and honored at how they make the story come alive, so I’m really grateful for that. I mean let’s face it; they put my book in children’s hands, and without them, I could not continue to do what I do. Jo Reed:  Also, I think. Man, those books you read when you’re young are with you for the rest of your life. Pam Munoz Ryan:  Well, I think honestly when I look back on my life as a reader I am writing for the age when books meant the most to me in my life and when they provided me with the most comfort, support, and escapism. I mean that middle grade, fifth through ninth grade, those were the years that really books were my biggest comfort and my biggest way of coping. So it’s interesting now to look back and to see that that is the sweet spot for me when it comes to writing. Jo Reed: Pam, Thank you for giving me your time and thank you for these wonderful books. Pam Munoz Ryan:  Well, I’m really grateful that you wanted to talk to me and thank you so much. Jo Reed: That’s author Pam Munoz Ryan, she’s written over 40 books for children and young adults. We talked about The Dreamer, Becoming Naomi Leon, and Esperanza Rising. Her latest young adult novel --and it’s another award- winner-- is called Echo. You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Subscribe to Art Works wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating on apple, it helps other people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.