Merci Suárez Changes Gears- 2019 Newbery Medal Winner

The Newbery Medal was named for eighteenth-century British bookseller John Newbery. It is awarded annually by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.

2019 Medal Winner

Merci Suárez Changes Gears, written by Meg Medina, published by Candlewick Press.

Using humor and grace, Merci, a charming and plucky protagonist, cycles through life’s challenges with the support of her intergenerational family. This richly nuanced novel tackles the complexity of navigating a multicultural identity amidst changing family dynamics. 

“Meg Medina’s warm and honest novel masterfully depicts one Cuban-American family’s life with authenticity and empathy,” said Newbery Medal Committee Chair Ellen M. Riordan. 

* * *

Thoughtful, strong-willed sixth-grader Merci Suarez navigates difficult changes with friends, family, and everyone in between in a resonant new novel from Meg Medina.

Merci Suarez knew that sixth grade would be different, but she had no idea just how different. For starters, Merci has never been like the other kids at her private school in Florida, because she and her older brother, Roli, are scholarship students. They don’t have a big house or a fancy boat, and they have to do extra community service to make up for their free tuition. So when bossy Edna Santos sets her sights on the new boy who happens to be Merci’s school-assigned Sunshine Buddy, Merci becomes the target of Edna’s jealousy. Things aren't going well at home, either: Merci’s grandfather and most trusted ally, Lolo, has been acting strangely lately — forgetting important things, falling from his bike, and getting angry over nothing. No one in her family will tell Merci what's going on, so she’s left to her own worries, while also feeling all on her own at school. In a coming-of-age tale full of humor and wisdom, award-winning author Meg Medina gets to the heart of the confusion and constant change that defines middle school — and the steadfast connection that defines family.

Sidetracked by my Güiro

Michael Sedano

Let yourself be sidetracked by your güiro
Carnal let yourself be free
To do your music when your heart pounds
In the melody of your ringing ears

--Alurista

No one can pick up a güiro and not play it, not once, twice, but rhythmically, tra trrra trrrra trrrrrra, tra trrra trrrra trrrrrra, and after a few swipes across the raspa many people get carried away, sidetracked by a güiro.

Bamboo, Timber Bamboo, Plastic pipe güiros

I make güiros. My Dad grew a stand of timber bamboo at our house in Redlands and that was my first source of raw material. Fast forward fifty years and I learn Alfredo de Batuc lives on a property with a timber bamboo property line!

De Batuc’s landlord assented to my cutting unlimited stalks so I took ten, enough to half-fill the back of a Toyota pickup when I halved the ten- and twelve-foot poles. This was cute. I stopped on Fig at a light in front of Staples Center when a motor officer pulls alongside to ask what that stuff is? I laughed that it wasn’t weed, I was transporting bamboo to make güiros. I didn’t recite Alurista’s poem but the cop was cool about it and we laughed.

This Saturday, February 23, 2019, I’m conducting a workshop where artists will make güiro blanks that they will turn into twenty-dollar bills this December.

There’s more. The workshop equips the artists with a technology for creating a business turning “free” bamboo into capital. The workshop, at Los Angeles’ Plaza de la Raza, is the first in a series launched by Margaret Garcia and Amy Inouye, Creating Cultural Currency.

Raw Timber bamboo

The Güiro workshop promises to be fun for me, and useful to people. Artists possess unlimited capacity to create and earn money from their work. Actually converting output to income is a missing link in creative capacity. Garcia/Inouye’s project harnesses that capacity in a series of product-focused workshops.

I’ve designed the Güiro workshop as a role play based on my old career in manufacturing and sales.

We are an artist collective committed to deliver an order in December for 20 Güiros priced to sell at $20 each. This workshop will convert raw bamboo to 20 güiro bodies for the artist to finish by December 1.

A blank güiro is a cut-to-length bamboo tube, perforated with sound holes and etched on one side for rasping. Strikers for rasping are an affiliated topic.

The artist installs twenty dollars worth of value into the blank güiro by drawing or engraving or burning designs onto the bamboo and finishing the wood surface. Part of the business model is pricing and working the table selling face-to-face. If it all works out, the artists will replicate the workshop and produce supplies to meet demand from two thousand holiday shoppers. Product quality ensures ongoing orders and wider markets.

I once did this for a living, selling and making things. A highlight came when the company sold General Motors and Toyota on our ability to produce windows for trucks they made in the Western U.S. We’d made automotive windows for years, in the dog-eat-dog aftermarket where price not quality was the objection, and our “OEM-quality” prices cost us lots of sales.

Our stuff was good. A protracted process requiring years produced a contract shipping directly to the truck factories. Selling to the Original Equipment Manufacturer, OEM, market was a phenomenal change from a decade earlier when the company assembled Italian sunroofs that leaked.

For our contract with GM and Toyota-NUMMI, I wrote manufacturing standards and procedures, then converted those to training manuals. Our engineers and their engineers laid out the line, a progression of machines and tables for people to work at. Raw materials hit the line in the morning and shrink-wrapped skids of 20 windows fill a 40-footer at the end of the day.

Assembly lines are designed to produce identical assemblies hundreds of times a day, so every truck that comes off a line at some GM plant, or up at Fremont in NUMMI, has a sliding window that meets form, fit, and function standards recognized by the OEMs and the International Standards Organization, ISO9001.

The OEM project for me starts in the factory shell in Gardena, acres of bare cement floor stretching into dark open space toward the pure white light of the receiving bay door. Heavy amp power cables and limber air hoses dangle above painted lines where cutting, bending, and assembly stations shall appear in the blink of a week.

My job was to hire Mexicans and train them to fill those work stations and make those windows. None of the Help Wanted ads said that, but that’s how it turned out. La Opinion did better than the Times. Word of mouth brought in relatives, friends, neighbors of people already working for the company, and those are always better people.

My standards were simple. Can you read, follow written instructions, and fill out forms? En Inglés? Ni modo. Our work instructions come in English and Spanish, which manuals do you want? In those days if a “problem with papers” arose, I instructed the employee to remember to bring in some other documentation pretty soon.

Gente teemed at the entry gate on interview day. “No experience necessary. Training and benefits” made up for minimum wage. I hired people who proved they could read and understand text, and who spoke up for themselves. We didn’t make many mistakes.

I had an assistant who would take the GM line, I’d take the Toyota line. The procedures were mas o menos identical, so we did a week’s classroom training together and provided lonche. On Monday, it really started.

The team enters the factory floor from the front offices. I make a big deal of putting on the lentes. Making a beeline to Station One far away, I allude to staying inside the yellow lines and safety all the time. Other production lines are in production where the noise from high RPM blades sawing into aluminum and beeping forklifts sounds dangerous. It is.

I drop off “my” two saw operators, and Josefa the helper who does feed and take-off. The foreman follows the plan and explains, does, watches, discusses, watches. The dual mitre saw roars powerfully spraying aluminum chips away from the two-handed switches. The trainees flinch, envious of the saw, or glad they don’t have to do that.

Within a few motions, the saw operators get a feel for the process and the supply of sills and header pieces builds. I move the training group down the line, peeling off people to stand on their mats and wait for the in-process assemblies headed their way. The foremen conform to their written procedures, just like training. The worker learns to marry corners, drill and rivet mitres, handle the pneumatic rivet gun while holding a rivet in place. We move on to the next station and peel off the jamb people, the vinyl installers, glass installers, latch station, weatherstrippers, sealers, water testers, final inspection and cleanup.

An hour after I begin I say good-bye to the last trainee, the guy making the boxes at the packaging station. He waits most of the morning to pack his first window.

At the end of the first day we’d produced 13 windows, a lucky number. Fifty, 180, 400, followed Tuesday Wednesday Thursday. On Friday the line put out 680 windows.

A year later, I was touring a concessionario from el DF. He would order 300 units after observing the quality we were installing into every window. He sold OEM trucks and outfitted them with aftermarket parts and made money hand over fist. The assembly line made him feel all welcome.

We’d stop at busy workers and I’d chat them up then introduce them. The customer and the worker would touch bases, where you from? What are you doing? Let’s move along, gracias. At the end of the tour the rich Mexican had one question after I summarized what he’d seen, mira Fredi, you’re buying windows hechos en los estados unidos por Mexicanos.

The guy looks at me appreciating the irony with one more question about his paisanos, “How do you get them to work so hard?”

Making güiros isn’t hard. No registration fee, no RSVP, just show up at Plaza this Saturday before 9.

Interview of Manuel Ramos by Xánath Caraza

Interview of Manuel Ramos by Xánath Caraza

 

Manuel Ramos

Manuel Ramos is the author of ten novels and a short story collection. He has received the Colorado Book Award (twice), the Chicano/Latino Literary Award, the Top Hand Award from the Colorado Authors League, and Honorable Mentions from the International Latino Book Awards. His first novel, The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz, was a finalist for the Edgar® award. My Bad: A Mile High Noir was a Shamus finalist. He is a co-founder of and regular contributor to the award-winning Internet magazine La Bloga (www.labloga.blogspot.com), which deals with Latino literature, culture, news and opinion.  His latest crime fiction novel is The Golden Havana Night:  A Sherlock Homie Mystery.

1Who is Manuel Ramos?  How do you define yourself as a writer?

I’m a Chicano -- Mexican by heritage, American by birth.  I’m a retired lawyer, a writer of dark stories, usually crime fiction, a weary survivor of the cultural wars of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s … well, they never stopped. I hope to write stories that people will read.  My self-definition is that I am a writer of fiction that may contain the truth. 

2As a child, who first introduced you to reading?

I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t reading.  My grandparents gave me magazines and newspapers to read.  My parents spent hard-earned and scarce money on the so-called Book of Knowledge so I would have something meaningful to read.  The librarians in the small library of my small home town suggested books for me to read and eventually let me read any book I wanted, such as the crime classics of Chandler, Hammett and Cain.  I read everything as a kid, including canned food labels and Sunday morning newspaper comics.  That’s probably one of the main reasons I wanted to be a writer.

3How did you first become a writer?

Influenced by all the reading I did, I wrote as a kid, mostly descriptions of my relatives.  In high school I was encouraged by a teacher and because of that encouragement I wrote short stories and character sketches for a high school literary journal. These were my first publications. This happened at Harrison High School in Colorado Springs, Colorado.  My professional publishing career started with the publication of my short story “White Devils and Cockroaches,” which was published as part of a fiction writing contest sponsored by the weekly Westword, in 1986.  That year I also published “His Mother’s Image” in the short story collection entitled Southwest Tales:  A Contemporary Collection.  “His Mother’s Image” is about La Llorona, a character that consistently reappears in Chicano fiction.

Seeing my first published story, and then getting the news that my first novel would be published, were intense moments of joy and celebration.  I had tremendous respect for people who could string together words and sentences into a story that transported me into imaginative situations filled with drama, adventure, pain and happiness.  I thought that the title “author” or “writer” was a prestigious term of accomplishment and success.  When I realized that I had joined the club, I was a bit overwhelmed and insecure, but I also relished the challenge. 

4Do you have any favorite novel by other authors?  Could you share some lines along with your reflection of what drew you toward that novel?

One of my favorite authors is Alfredo Véa, a writer who lives in Oakland, California.  Alfredo has written four amazing novels that are superb examples of brilliant literature.  La Maravilla (1993), The Silver Cloud Café (1996), Gods Go Begging (1999), and The Mexican Flyboy (2016) should be on everyone’s reading list.  I believe my writing improved because I read these books – Alfredo is truly a writer’s writer.  His latest, The Mexican Flyboy, won a 2017 American Book Award.  My descriptions of these books can’t do them justice.  Instead, here are a few lines from Gods Go Begging.  The narrator is describing the children of an urban housing complex.

“Here, where Biscuit Boy was born and raised, was a free fire zone, open season on any moment of calm.  Like the Middle Ages, this was a place of basic oral communication only.  An oligarchy of sports and movie celebrities ruled over a new consumer peasantry.  Like poor soldier serfs, these children built their lives around the imaginary castles of athletes and actors.  In this land of functional illiteracy, there were icons everywhere, sports icons, icons of status, icons on the computer screen.  There were icons on every television urging children to buy denim icons for their legs and canvas icons for their feet.  As a new medieval age dawned, iconography, cryptography, and a feudal impotence merged and now held sway.”

5What is a day of creative writing like for you?

When I am fully into a project, I write every day, usually in-between my other obligations such as my exercise classes (a necessity because of my Parkinson’s Disease).  I start by going over the last few pages I’ve written, edit those, and strive to write a few more new pages.  I do this in the morning, evening, anytime that is open.  But I make sure to do it every day (as I said, when I’m fully into a project – I don’t write every day of my life – only when I’m committed to a new piece.)  My writing usually takes place in my home office on my laptop, although I keep a notebook that I carry all the time and which I use for preserving lines, dialog, ideas, etc. 

6When do you know when a text is ready to be read?

I don’t share my writing with anyone until I think it is ready for my wife, Flo, to read it.  She is always my first editor.  She makes comments, corrects mistakes and typos, and asks questions about the narrative.  When the draft passes the “Flo test” I am ready for the world to read it.

 

7Could you comment on your life as a cultural activist?

Not sure I’m much of an activist, but I have believed for most of my life that I have an obligation to speak for people who could not speak for themselves, to resist injustice, fear, and racism, and to work for peace in everything I do.  I’ve tried to uphold that belief in my professional career as an attorney, in my work as a writer, and in my interactions with friends and family.

8What project/s are you working on at the moment that you would like to share?

I am in the very beginning stages of working on my next Gus Corral novel. At least, I think it’s a Gus story – it may morph into something else.  If it works out, I intend to tell a story that picks up where The Golden Havana Night ended.  But as I said, this is only the beginning and a lot can, and will, happen to the story before I get to the end.

9What advice do you have for other writers?

Read, read, and read again.  Then write, write, and read some more.

1 What else would you like to share?

Read La Bloga – there is nothing like it anywhere else.