San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Struggle and hope at the border
Stephen Briseño and Magdalena Mora focus on the humanity of refugees in new picture book ‘The Notebook Keeper’
Like so many moments of literary inspiration, Stephen Briseño’s lightbulb moment came at the least likely time. To hear him recall it, it was 2019 and he was driving home from a funeral of a close family member. Looking for some sort of distraction, he reached for his phone.
“It was a very sad day for me, and I just didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts,” Briseño recalls from his home in San Antonio, Texas. “I just started flipping through my podcast app and picked a random one.”
The podcast he ended up listening to was an episode of “This American Life,” the popular radio program hosted by Ira Glass. The episode revolved around the border policies of the Trump administration. One of the people interviewed for the show was a woman named “Karen,” a migrant who was serving as something called a “notebook keeper” at the San Ysidro/ Tijuana border, helping to keep track of the refugees who were attempting to cross or seeking asylum in the U.S. Briseño says he was “so moved” and immediately thought it would make for a good story for children.
“I just couldn’t believe that there would be someone who brought an ounce of humanity in the midst of all this awful bureaucracy,” Briseño says. “It just floored me. Yes, I was angry that something like this was happening, but I was also moved by it. The story just stuck with me for months.”
A little over two years later, we have the recently released “The Notebook Keeper: A Story of Kindness From the Border,” a picture book as informative as it is heartfelt. The story centers on a young refugee girl named Noemi who, along with her mother, makes the dangerous and desperate journey to the border in hopes of crossing into the U.S. While they wait, Noemi encounters Belinda, a notebook keeper who is helping to keep track of the refugees who are waiting days, weeks and months for a chance to cross.
“The Notebook Keeper” is the debut picture book for Briseño, who also works as a middle school English teacher. He says he always knew he wanted to be a children’s book author but struggled to, as he puts it, “find my way and find my story.” Still, Briseño says early drafts of the story were “too dry” and “too informational” until he had the epiphany of having the book told solely from the perspective of Noemi. He says he went through about 20 versions of the story before he really leaned into focusing on the central characters.
“I would often bring it to my wife and ask her if I was being too mean or being too harsh,” says Briseño, explaining that early iterations of the book had a lot more commentary on U.S. border policies. “What really became my focus was conveying the relationship between the mother and the daughter, and the relationship with the notebook keeper. That would give it heart, a purity to it, so that I could explore the larger issue. Otherwise, it just would have been an onslaught of heaviness, even though it is still a heavy story.”
Once he finished the story, his editor recommended illustrator Magdalena Mora, who has a number of picture books under her belt that dealt in issues of equality and deportation. Mora is based in Minnesota, but says she visited the border to find inspiration.
“I was immediately drawn to the story, because
I just hadn’t seen many picture books that took place on the border,” says Mora, who grew up in Chicago but often had her own experiences along the border while visiting family in Texas and Mexico. “Even though the border checkpoints are different, there’s still similarities in the feel of it — the sense of waiting and urgency. That in-betweenness, and that bustling energy and statelessness. I just really wanted to capture that in a visual format.”
The book works perfectly in capturing a serious issue and presenting it in a way that is both empathetic and accessible to children. Using materials such as charcoal, colored pencils and vibrant pastel paints, Mora says she didn’t want her illustrations to be too “heavy,” not wanting the characters to look sad or desperate, but rather hopeful and resilient.
“I did a lot of preliminary research, looking at photos and articles, and one of the things I often noticed was that oftentimes, when people are talking about the border, they always talk about the mass of people,” Mora says. “They lose the humanity of individuals when you present them as a mass. At the time I started illustrating it, there was always that talk of caravans. So I really wanted there to be a lot of close-ups on the faces, distinctive faces and distinctive features, to bring that human element to it.”
During the process, each time Mora sent Briseño a finished sketch, Briseño says it “surpassed” anything he’d already envisioned in his brain. Briseño’s tender story, along with Mora’s vibrant illustrations, paints a more nuanced, human picture of the struggles of migrants, one that the author hopes resonates with both children and parents.
“That didn’t occur to me at the time,” Briseño says when asked about how adults could be enlightened by the story. “I was just so focused on reaching children. It wasn’t until my editor brought it up — that it wasn’t just a kids book, but for everyone.”
“I feel like there is a trend in picture books where we are tackling heavier issues,” Briseño continues. “I’m Mexican American and I just never saw anything like this type of story, so I wanted to not skirt around the issue. I wanted it to be as central as possible, not just for the kids in those families who are experiencing this, but for a greater audience to see the humanity of what’s happening at the border. That it’s more than just a political thing.”
Briseño included an author’s note at the end of the book that explains the real-life circumstances of the notebook keepers, and how the system ceased once the border was closed during the COVID-19 crisis. But while the system itself may be gone, the issues that are presented in “The Notebook Keeper” will, sadly, remain timely.
“It’s unfortunate that this is an evergreen topic,” Mora says. “The nuances might change, the details and the laws, but it’s been a topic of discussion since I was a kid and long before that. These stories are unfortunately going to keep needing to be told. I really just hope that it does bring awareness to it.”
Briseño is already hard at work on his second picture book, “Queen of Leaves,” a biography of Mexican American botanist Ynes Mexia. Mora is currently working on a children’s book, “Still Dreaming,” about the 1929 Mexican Repatriation, which saw the mass deportation of Mexican Americans from the United States. She also has plans to work on a children’s book about Chicano Park with San Diego writer María Dolores Águila, which is planned for release in 2024.
For now, however, both Briseño and Mora are excited to be promoting “The Notebook Keeper,” hoping that it resonates with readers young and old.
“Now that it’s published, my goal is that the adults and children reading it can see for a brief second into someone else’s experiences,” Briseño says. “Too often the narrative is us versus them. I hope in reading this that people see there’s more to it than that narrative. That these are human beings with stories, hopes and dreams that are all tangled up in this mess.”