About Image
Alma Flor Ada reflects on the concept of "borders" during an authors' panel at Crossing Borders through Literature, Poetry and Personal Stories.
About the author: Alma Flor Ada was taught to read before she was three by her grandmother, who wrote the names of plants and flowers on the earth with a stick. She has recorded stories of her childhood in Cuba and tales she heard from her family in Under the Royal Palms (winner of the Pura Belpré Medal) and Where the Flame Trees Bloom. Among her more than 200 books for children (many in both Spanish and English) are: The Gold Coin; Gathering the Sun; and My Name is Maria Isabel. Alma Flor Ada is Professor Emerita at the University of San Francisco where she directed the Center for Multicultural Literature for Children and Young Adults. She is also the author of A Magical Encounter: Latino Children's Literature in the Classroom.
Date: April 7, 2011
Transcript
As I think about borders, though, I think that many times there is a confusion between another word beginning with the same sound, and that is “barriers.”
And I think that it’s essential to distinguish them, borders should not be barriers. I think they are too many times. For me, borders need to be redefined as something that is in constant evolution. And that there are borders all throughout our lives and in many ways. I mean, there is the border of childhood and then adulthood. And we know about a period in between to move from one to the other and how undefined borders can be. And how important it is when borders are open, the possibilities of moving forward and the same happens when we bring that to countries and so forth. Having been a several-times immigrant—from Cuba to Spain, from Spain to Peru, from Peru to the United States—I know very well at a personal level the difficulties entailed in changing completely from what is familiar and known to the unfamiliar and unknown, and yet how enriching that possibility can also be.