2019: MERCÍ SUAREZ CHANGES GEARS by Meg Medina
To think, only yesterday I was in chancletas, sipping lemonade and watching my twin cousins run through the sprinkler in the yard.
It's only a few years old, so you might remember the 2020 novel American Dirt, the high-profile saga of a well-off Mexican woman targeted by drug cartels and forced to seek asylum on foot in America, written as a Trump-era polemic crying out against the injustices our country inflicted upon migrants. You might remember that the novel netted its author, Jeanine Cummins, a seven-figure advance, or that Oprah selected it for her book club, or that early reviews in the trades or mainstream newspapers were overwhelmingly positive, or that a cover blurb compared the book to a modern-day Grapes Of Wrath. But if you don't remember that, you might remember all of that very quickly collapsing in a giant fiery mess after the book actually came out and everyone realized that American Dirt was actually a kind-of-unimpressive ham-handed trauma-porn book by a well-off white lady with a Veronica-in-Riverdale-level command of Spanish who made every person of color in her book either a victim to be pitied or a gangbanger to be feared as her characters stole across the desert in the night (or the noches, as the night is called in las Americas).
The American Dirt saga, summarized in outlets like Vox or Vulture, raised all sorts of complex questions. Can a white person write about other non-white cultures and characters? (Probably.) Does that white person have to be way better at researching and writing than Cummins was? (Definitely.) Does the advance and PR system in publishing houses make any sense? (No.) But one question with an unambiguous answer was "is this story extremely hilarious?" It was. Because it included beats like this:
Cummins included in an afterword that her husband was an immigrant and at one point lived undocumented in the United States, but left out that her husband was from Ireland and thus was not exactly worried about ICE agents banging down his door.
As part of four pieces publicizing the book (which presumably were tied to a broader PR push by publisher Flatiron Books), the New York Times ran a review of American Dirt by Lauren Groff. While the review was, at best, mixed, the Times shared it on social media with the pull quote "'American Dirt’ is one of the most wrenching books I have read in the past few years, with the ferocity and political reach of the best of Theodore Dreiser’s novels," which is a line that Lauren Groff didn't write and which does not appear anywhere in the review. The Times later deleted all of those posts.
At the Flatiron Books Christmas party, the centerpieces on the tables were decorated with barbed wire, encouraging everyone to kick back, let their hair down, and celebrate the success of this novel telling us how inhumanely we treated immigrants to our country.
Stuff like this happens when there's nobody in the room - at a publisher, or a reviewer, or a television show, or a newspaper, or whatever - who says "hey wait a second this seems like a terrible idea", when there's nobody in the room to ask questions like "just to follow up, where did her husband emigrate from again?". If nobody in the room has any experience or even exposure to the issues of immigration that American Dirt awkwardly tackled, nobody in the room would even consider saying things like this, and it has nothing to do with malice. If a publisher wants to avoid situations like this, there need to be very different people in the room than Flatiron had in 2019.
I didn't come up with this idea.
Five years before Mercí Suarez Changes Gears would win the 2019 Newbery medal (or before Flatiron would put together their marketing plan for American Dirt), there was a panel at New York BookCon 2014 about the future of children's literature. Every author on that panel was white, every author on that panel was a man. It was, perhaps, not thought out very well, and by 2014, you'd have hoped that the convention planners would have thought it out a little better. But again, this is kind of how publishing works. Well over 90 percent of people who worked in the major publishing houses at the time identified as white, and working at a major publishing house usually meant working in Manhattan, which was not cheap and tended to self-select an employee base that was already pretty comfortable economically, which tended to self-select a certain kind of person who had graduated from a certain kind of college, which tended to self-select people who came from certain kinds of families. The people in those publishing houses would see themselves in the manuscripts they read and, likely without ever realizing it, work with the authors and manuscripts that felt like the books they were used to reading or remembered from their childhood. It was not an industry that was intentionally evil or prejudiced, but it was an industry structured in such a way that a lot of people happened to be left out.
And that's a problem because, as of that 2014 panel, half of all American children under the age of five were not white. The "future of children's literature" was going to require a lot of books that reflected people and families and cultures and stories that, historically, the big publishing houses and all-male all-white panels had not been providing in great numbers. There needed to be big changes, made very quickly, across the publishing industry. New authors from a broader array of backgrounds needed to get their books published. New people needed to work in the publishing houses so they could help those authors get published. All of that would require building a whole pipeline of talent in high schools and universities, including material investments in things like scholarships and internships, so that historically underrepresented people knew that these careers were out there and they could develop the skills they needed to work in those careers. There were good moral reasons for doing this but there were also very practical and commercial reasons: if you are a publishing house and would like to stay in business, and you're looking at a large cohort of non-white children about to age into reading chapter books, you would really, really want to make sure you had a lot of books available for them to engage with, and it's reasonable to assume they would want at least a few books about kids with families and stories they were familiar with, and you definitely wouldn't want to pay a seven-figure advance for a novel that made you look like a bunch of insensitive and ignorant white dumbasses.
So several authors started using the hashtag #WeNeedDiverseBooks on social media, specifically as a response to the BookCon panel. If those authors had been a bunch of idiots, things would have ended with the hashtag and not gone anywhere else. But those authors were not idiots, they were up-and-comers from diverse backgrounds, writing new stories with characters that kids wanted to see, and they started forming a nonprofit organization to coordinate resources, develop guidance for all members of the industry, and start investing in mentorships and scholarships to actually make these changes happen. Several of the authors who were in the original WNDB coalition are award-winning heavy hitters in children's literature themselves. One of them was Cuban-American author, and the Library of Congress’ 2023-2024 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Meg Medina.
Guess what: Mercí Suarez Changes Gears, one of Medina's ongoing series about Mercí Suarez, is delightful and sweet and an overall great read. Mercí is a Cuban-American sixth grader in Florida whose multigenerational family lives in three adjacent houses. She really wants a new bike, she might have a crush on the new guy in her class, and she has a big group project on Ancient Egypt coming up. Not that this novel is a trifle: the main plot point is that Mercí's grandfather is developing Alzheimer's disease, and her family is finding ways to navigate that. On top of that, Mercí is a scholarship student at her high-end private school, and is constantly fighting uphill to feel like she fits in. But this isn't a parade of misery, this isn't bummer lit: the novel has some moving and sad moments, but just as many that are hilarious and awkward: Merci insists on wearing a bike helmet in the car whenever her teenage brother gives her a ride. She describes the new boy as “from Minnesota, a cold place - and I hate the cold. He likes ice fishing. He has no favorite color (suspicious).” She remembers a fancy restaurant downtown because once “we had a special dinner there. I ate twelve raviolis.” Every page has wonderful sixth-grader details like this.
Ultimately, Mercí is relatable: her family gets on her nerves, and there's a stuck-up girl in her class, and she gets nervous as she goes to the movies with a co-ed group of friends for the first time. It’s so much fun to read. Young readers would meet Mercí and think "oh yeah, she's a lot like me", not "what a window into this strange new world of 'being Cuban'". So Mercí Suarez Changes Gears wouldn't be a political polemic on the scale of, say, what American Dirt was trying to do1. Mercí is far more likely to get teased for her lazy eye than she is to be persecuted for her ethnicity. But that doesn't mean there can't be a political element to the delightful novel about a sixth-grade girl. Meg Medina made that very clear in her acceptance speech for the Newbery:
"When I sat down to write this novel, I wasn’t thinking about bikes, necessarily. Mostly I was thinking about how to write in a time when so many disparaging characterizations of Latinx people have been taking hold. Whether it was aspersions being cast or border separations or the frightening uncertainty for the Dreamers, I wanted to shake the world and shout, “Stop afflicting children with these terrible and hurtful words. Stop warping their view about who they are and what their value is. It is hard enough to start a new life in a new place.” I had just finished writing a short story called “Sol Painting, Inc.,” which appeared in Flying Lessons and Other Stories, an anthology edited by [CEO of the We Need Diverse Books nonprofit] Ellen Oh. That story was about a girl [Mercí] whose voice could help me capture the warmth and eccentricities and troubles of one immigrant family. She could make you fall in love with them, laugh with them, and feel their pain as if they were your own family, because in so many ways they are like us. They are like all of us: a big, loving mess."
Medina absolutely wanted to make a political statement - she was reacting to the same political climate as Cummins, but she was writing in a different genre and for a different audience. But she was better at it, because she stayed anchored to that core message of “the world is bigger than you think, but you’re not alone in it”. I have yet to read a Newbery medalist that puts that message in the center and doesn’t make it work; the books that don’t work are the ones that stray from this message or talk too much about ballooning. American Dirt was a book by a white person for what appears to be an audience primarily of white readers, that treats a Mexican immigrant like the ultimate Other, to the extent that Cummins had no idea how to effectively write about it and her publisher had no idea how to market it with any level of compassion or self-awareness; that multiple publishers were desperate to bid on the manuscript so they could have some sort of timely book about Mexicans reeks of cynicism. Medina wrote authentically from her own experience, and knew that the message that would work for any audience of child readers, regardless of their ethnicity: it was the powerful political message that we are all a big, loving mess.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1976 medalist, The Grey King by Susan Cooper.
Also, and I don't love this, I realize that based on demographics and geography, it's entirely possible that the Suarez family all voted for Trump, enthusiastically, twice.