Children’s books are telling more immigration stories

The award-winning immigration tale has already become a mainstay on the shelves of many bookstores and libraries. And it’s far from the only one.

Inspired by the political moment and their own experiences, a growing number of authors are writing children’s books about immigration.

From 2000-2006, there were just a handful of children’s books dealing with immigration or immigrant families published each year, according to a database the group maintains. In 2016, there were a dozen. And by 2018, there were more than 100.

Some books weave immigration into their stories without directly mentioning it. Others make characters’ journeys from one country to another a central focus.

Here’s a look inside several recent children’s books, and why the authors who wrote them say they decided to tell these stories:

She read picture books with her son when she was a new immigrant

Morales’ “Dreamers” paints a vivid portrait of the struggle to understand a new place — and how books themselves can offer a refuge.

Written in the voice of a mother talking to her son, the story details their lives as new immigrants in the United States and how they found comfort in an unfamiliar land when they discovered the picture book section of their local public library.

It’s an uplifting story. But Morales also is open about the difficulties she faced along the way.

“There were so many things we didn’t know,” she writes in one section of the book. “Unable to understand and afraid to speak, we made a lot of mistakes.”

Morales says the illustrations on those pages depict mistakes she made after she came to the United States in 1994 — from being afraid to answer the phone to struggling to find place names a map.

“I gave myself permission to tell my story in the hopes that it would become an invitation for other people to tell their story…so that everyone knows, especially children, how valuable and important their stories are,” she says. “A story doesn’t have to be out of this world to be significant.”

She rewrote part of her book after the election

By the end of the book, the girl’s frustration with her name turns into a sense of pride.

“Alma is an immigrant and so is her family. I do feel it is in some ways an immigration story,” says Martinez-Neal, who immigrated to the United States from Peru. “But I think the most important part about the book is we don’t center the book on the fact that she’s an immigrant. We just center the book on the fact that she has a story and she can share it.”

Martinez-Neal says the story is something anyone can relate to, no matter their cultural background. “We all have names,” she says.

He wanted to write a book that would make his daughter proud

“There were times when my daughter, when she was much younger, kind of showed that she was both ashamed and not understanding the place of Southeast Asians in America,” Phi says. “So I wrote ‘A Different Pond’ because I wanted her to have a picture book that honored the struggle of her grandparents, working-class Vietnamese refugees.”

“I wrote this book because these issues have always been issues. … Those of us who are marginalized people, this is part of our lives always. Whether or not the larger culture or the mainstream ever focuses a lens towards us, that’s out of our control. We just have to write what’s important, and that’s what I was doing,” he says. “I wrote it for my kid. I wrote it for my parents. I wrote it for all the little kids who are friends of my daughter, so they understand the struggle of where she comes from.”

Why an immigration attorney became a first-time author

Fiona McEntee couldn’t find the right book to read during storytime at her daughter’s school. So she decided to write the story she wanted to tell.

One goal, she says, is bridging the disconnect between the way immigrants are often portrayed and what she sees in her office daily.

“I think having these conversations with children earlier, they’re not going to buy into hateful narratives,” McEntee says. “They’re going to look at immigrants like their neighbor or their teacher or their friend’s mom who’s from somewhere else, and just appreciate diversity.”

She portrayed a woman who’s a pillar in her community

“Sometimes, when you’re the second generation, you feel like you’re being pulled into two different places. Am I American? Am I Nigerian? Attaching your identity to one of those doesn’t really work. You kind of exist in this third space,” she says.

“And so it was really interesting to me … to write from my space, that in-between, and create a book where there’s such a specific connection to Nigerian — specifically Igbo — culture, but there’s also the Americanness as well. It’s not a Nigerian book. It’s not an American book. It’s in that middle space like I am.”

The book tells the story of a delicious stew made by Omu — the Igbo word for “queen” and the name Mora used for her grandmother growing up. The stew’s aroma is so alluring that a boy in her apartment building, a police officer, a nearby hot dog vendor and even the mayor stop by to try some. Over the course of the book, Omu — a Nigerian immigrant — feeds her entire American neighborhood.

“There’s so much anxiety around immigrant voices. … There’s this conflict of how people feel about immigrants. It felt very important for me to share my own experience and tell the story of this woman coming from that cultural perspective who’s here in America and honestly is a pillar of her community, who brings an entire community together.”

Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled Oge Mora’s name. It has been corrected.