Mexique
A Refugee Story from the Spanish Civil War
by María José Ferrada, Illustrated by Ana Penyas
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Pub Date Oct 27 2020 | Archive Date Mar 04 2021
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company | Eerdmans Books for Young Readers
Description
On May 27, 1937, over four hundred children sailed for Morelia, Mexico, fleeing the violence of the Spanish Civil War. Home was no longer safe, and Mexico was welcoming refugees by the thousands. Each child packed a suitcase and boarded the Mexique, expecting to return home in a few months. This was just a short trip, an extra-long summer vacation, they thought. But the war did not end in a few months, and the children stayed, waiting and wondering, in Mexico. When the war finally ended, a dictator—the Fascist Francisco Franco—ruled Spain. Home was even more dangerous than before.
This moving book invites readers onto the Mexique with the “children of Morelia,” many of whom never returned to Spain during Franco’s almost forty-year regime. Poignant and poetically told, Mexique opens important conversations about hope, resilience, and the lives of displaced people in the past and today.
Advance Praise
Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection (2020)
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Specific yet universal in its narration, this makes the refugee experience accessible to young readers.”
Booklist
“In commemoration of a lesser-known predecessor to WWII’s Kindertransport, this atmospheric import recalls a 1937 voyage in which the titular ship carried 456 children of Spanish Republicans to safety in Mexico for, supposedly, a brief stay. Ferrada, a Chilean writer, takes the voice (if not the language) of a younger child for her terse, poetic narrative: ‘War is a huge hand that shakes you / and throws you onto a ship.’ Working from period photos for her illustrations, Penyas uses a dark, somber palette to portray downcast children trooping aboard a ship made small on a broad ocean, being welcomed in Veracruz, and then taking a train for Morelia, a city in Michoacán where, due to the outcome of the Spanish Civil War, most were to remain until at least 1948.”
Publishers Weekly
“A sobering contribution to the history of Spanish-speaking people in North America, and a memorial to a little-known group of refugees.”
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9780802855459 |
| PRICE | $17.99 (USD) |
