A Movie in My Pillow/Una pelicula en mi almohada: Poems/Poemas

Characters: The boy, about 9 years old; the boy’s father; the boy’s grandmother, who lives in the boy’s previous home.

Setting: El Salvador is the boy’s home, until he moves to San Francisco.

Theme: Change results in loss and in positive effects, too.

Genre: Picture book/story told in poems

Audience: children ages 6-10

Curriculum ties: Geography/maps—North America & Central America; Dealing with challenging issues—war, separation from family members.

Awards: Americas Award for Latin American Literature, 2001.

Personal response: Painterly folk-art illustrations in vibrant blues, yellows, and oranges give this emotional story a happy fantastical mood with an underlying melancholy. The colorful birds, a traditional Latin American folk art motif, seem to be a constant reminder of the boy’s El Salvador home. The difficulty of this change in the boy’s life seems to be lessened by the boy’s father, who shows great love for his son. The illustrations include the simplistic lack of perspective characteristic of folk art, including an especially interesting picture of a hand throwing a yo-yo, with the words following the twisting line of the yo-yo’s string; thus, adding to the whimsical folk art feel of the book and the boy’s point of view to this picture and throughout the story. ( )

Argueta, J. (2001). A movie in my pillow: Una pelicula en mi almohada. San Francisco: Children’s Book Press.

In A Movie in my Pillow: Una Pelicula en mi Almohada, the author tells the story of his childhood through the use of poems. Poet Jorge Argueta escaped El Salvador and its deadly civil war with his family when he was a small child. The family sought refuge in San Francisco. This is the story of his childhood memories of El Salvador and San Francisco. He tells of the many things that are different between his new home and his old home. In addition to the poems, vibrant illustrations depict each poem. Additionally, the story is told using both English and Spanish.

This story is an example of the movement of people from a war-torn country to refuge in a different country. Many people come to America to escape poor living conditions and war. In his poems, Argueta describes the many different races that live in his new neighborhood in San Francisco. These people have all migrated from poor living conditions to better living conditions. This book is an excellent example of why groups of people chose to leave their home in search of a new one.

This can be used in a library for both English and Spanish speaking patrons. It can be used as a tool for learning to speak either language. This would be an excellent book to use with small children who have a Latino heritage or who have recently immigrated here from a different country. Additionally, it can be used in a classroom (English or Reading) as an example of multicultural poetry. ( )

Review: This is a good example of a poetry book. It was originally written in Spanish and then translated to English so the part I can understand does no rhyme, but is still poetry. The text is written in stanzas and each page has a new title and discusses something new, all of them related to his life in El Salvador.

Setting: The setting is an integral part of the story since he is in San Fransisco and has just moved from El Salvador. If we did not know this information the story would not make sense.

Media: Watercolors

Genre: Poetry

This is a good example of a book of poetry, because on every page, there is a different poem about El Salvador or about the author’s life from there and what may be different about it now. The poems are written both in English and Spanish, and on each page they have an illustration to go along with it. The poems do not always rhyme, in fact there are rare that do at all. The form is the author’s opinion, dreams, and ideas, and there are a lot of repeated themes throughout the book. The Spanish helps too, because it encourages the reader to look into and consider the background of the author.
The media used in this book looks like acrylic paints, because in the back of the book, the illustrator states that she is an internationally exhibited painter. As you look through the book, the colors are bright and exhibit many layers of them. It looks like it took hours to make the illustrations simply because of how detailed each painting is. The paintings go along with each poem to continue the story of the author.
Imagery is a powerful concept of style in the poems throughout the book. There is one particular image of a family being like a nest with all the birds inside, and this is also an example of a simile. On that same page there is an illustration demonstrating that exact concept. Another example of a powerful image is when a poem describes little city trains that “go in and out of the open mouths of mountains”. Mountains do not really have mouths in the literal sense of the word, but as well as being a powerful image, this is also a metaphor because the mountain’s opening can sometimes look like a mouth. Throughout the book, images are powerfully drawn and explained as the author strives to give the reader some sort of imagination and idea about his experiences in El Salvador and what his thinks about the Americas now.

This is a poetry book of a child remembering his home land and his current life in America. Each poem is told in English and Spanish on the same page. The illustrations for each poem help tell the story and allow you to have your own movie in your head.

I discovered this website from one of my parenting magazines. I love how the books are available in many languages and you're able to read them online. This book was read to my children by me and my best friend who speaks Spanish. I would read the poem first and then she would say it in Spanish.

I would use this as an extension for the children who are more comfortable speaking Spanish. I would have them recite them for the class in Spanish and then have another recite it in English. I would group the children together to create their own poems in both Spanish and English. ( )