A Long-Awaited Acceptance
I am overjoyed at being able to announce the acceptance of one of my favorite stories, “How Juan Bobo Got to los Nueba Yores” to the Latinx Archive.
I remember hearing Juan Bobo stories at my late grandfather’s knee in his marquesina. He interspersed the Juan Bobo stories with his own memories of his childhood living in the mountains of Aibonito. I learned from him the fact that if you lived in rural Aibonito, you didn’t wear your shoes to come down the mountain on your way to school. You slung them around your neck by their laces and walked barefoot to school. You could always wash mud off your feet at the pump in the schoolyard, but it wasn’t so easy to do the same with your shoes. My grandfather’s stories were so vivid, they stayed with me and meshed with his own experiences. This is what inspired writing the story of Juan Bobo living with his mother in New York around the time of World War I, and what challenges he would have had faced at the time.
As you can imagine, there’s a lot of me in this story, and I can’t wait until I can share it with you all.
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