I asked Minerva why she was doing such a dangerous thing. And then, she said the strangest thing. She wanted me to grow up in a free country.
When you’re a child in a dictatorship, your questions can be dangerous, and often adults give ambiguous answers. I recall not understanding and asking why a certain uncle was suddenly missing from family gatherings. One of those adult/cautionary looks went around the room. Se fue de viaje, was the go-to answer, or, se fue pa’ Nueva York. A euphemism for being arrested or tortured or disappeared.
But Minerva refuses to hold back and therefore collude with the dictatorship. In this passage, she is already cultivating a sense of social justice in María Teresa and thereby developing her little sister’s moral imagination. Many of us need that one bold spark to get us started. To ignite our own activism and moral imagination. Sometimes we get that inspiration from something we read, as I think happened to Minerva.
One of my favorite children’s books is The Composition by Antonio Skármeta, who, by the way, wrote the script for the Neruda film Il Postino. The picture book is unnerving—it captures completely a child’s feeling that something is awry in his country and beautifully depicts his slow awakening. Often when I do a community Big Read event, and the organizers ask what the young readers should read along with the adult selection of In the Time for the Butterflies, I recommend this Skármeta’s book.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/79746.The_Composition
Of course, I’m not above self-promotion, and I’ll also urge middle-school readers to pick up Before We Were Free, an Anne Frank-type YA novel that takes place in the Trujillo dictatorship. Goodreads has reviewed that book as well!
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17643.Before_We_Were_Free
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