 My gratitude goes to the San Francisco Public Library and the committee that celebrates Effie Lee-Maurice's extraordinary life. I am the character in maybe something beautiful and I would like to explain to you why. Here we are in libraries, temples of ideas, vessels where the imagination travels free to new continents of discovery. I decided to take you today following the trail of my voice to Alicante, the place where I was born in a trip along time and space. I was born in the first half of the 20th century. I can't believe I'm saying that. Alicante was very different then. Our harbor was used by small fishing boats. Almost all were sailboats. Transportation was mainly done in tramways, like this one to Muchamiel. Muchamiel translates as a lot of honey and that is where my parents had their home. Traffic was minimal and life was peaceful. Many houses, however, showed the destruction caused by war. Today, yachts from all over the world come to enjoy the climate and the active social life of the city. Buildings have crowded the seashore all along the Mediterranean. This is Benidorm, 50 miles north of Alicante, our Manhattan by the beach. Horrible in summer, believe me. The privilege of sitting in the lap of a parent or grandparent wrapped by their arms, sharing the wonderfuls and wonders of imagination through a book was one I did not have as a child. The rhythm of family life in post-war Spain focused on imperatives. Adults spent long time in lines to buy coal to cook, to buy whatever was available to improvise a meal. Children concentrated in being minimally invasive in the adults' multiple tasks. This is very much my mother's kitchen and we used to cook in those squares. You would put the coal there. It was a 24-hour job to live life then. The Spanish Civil War initiated by Franco to depose a democratic elected government had ended a few years before I was born and I was only one when World War II ended. But the grip of the dictator Francisco Franco imposed in our country lasted until 1975 for a total of 40 years. I had already ended my degree at the university and my masters and he was still in power. International support was not provided by governments but by enlightened intellectuals and defenders of democracy. For example, the US Lincoln Brigade in which Ernest Hemingway came to fight the good fight in Spain or the Brigade of Mackenzie Papineau that I actually took this photograph last summer in Victoria, Canada. They also went to hell. The all efforts to reinstate the lawfully elected president of the República failed. Republicanos were elected to end the monarchy and dictatorships and republicanos and republicans do not translate the same spirit. Republicanos in Spain defended a democratic government full of efforts to install the open education and civil rights and social justice. Hitler helped Franco to win the Civil War and strengthen his power. There you have Franco, the second one on the left of this picture and Hitler and they were getting into an agreement that we saw happening a few days after this conversation. Also the Spanish Catholic Church helped tremendously to keep Franco in place. Franco approved the testing of German bombers in the north of Spain and the city of Guernica was destroyed in a few hours. Picasso reflected that massacre in this painting that remained outside of Spain first in Paris and later in New York until the dictator died in 1975. My privilege was the uniqueness of a family who valued education and was able to supplement with the stories the void of meaningful books in libraries and bookshops as well as contradicted home with meaningful conversation the Nazi propaganda of my textbooks. This is a page of my social studies book and it says first quote, Spaniards have the obligation to observe holy obedience. There is no room for backbiting reservations or discussion and who is capable to judge the high power only God and history. He will respond to them, the rest is nobody's business. Beautiful description also. The second quote says at home father rules at the school the teacher rules in the village the major rules in the province the governor rules in Spain the Caudillo rules. He rules because he's responsible for all. You must obey him so that he can make Spain happy again. The third quote is written by Primo de Rivera and I tell you this so that you understand why I wrote maybe something beautiful. I needed to make the world beautiful. Women never discover anything. They lack the creative talent that God has reserved for the intelligence of men. We can only interpret what men give us already done. And that was my everyday life in school. Repression, isolation and fear. But I had the privilege of my parents. Maria Coronado Guerrero and Juan Diego Campoy Coronado. What beautiful people. They knew what we were suffering. They knew what they needed to do and they did it. And there I am, you know. My childhood photos show a little girl that whenever she could took the reins of the moment. Do you see the photo? It is a merry-go-round but I have the reins of that little thingy. From my earliest year my father supported my determination. Who says I cannot do that? Who says I can't? Yes, I can. And as you can see my father is pushing me forward saying yes, yes, you can. Hidden smiles, hidden lives, hidden rebellions. This is a photo of my family in 1992. My parents had already had my oldest sister Pilar, my oldest brother Diego, me on the right, already wearing ties. I knew where power was. And my little brother Vincent. Only Vincent and I are alive today. I held alive in my heart that yes I can until I met Alma Florada. And then we started saying together yes we can. I would need hours to say thank you to Alma Florada, her help, her way of inspiring me to be the best that I can continues to be a solace to my soul. And so we started saying yes we can. And we wanted to give children the richness of our folklore, our music, our stories and challenge the status quo. The status quo was not publishing Spanish books. This happened over two decades ago. P.O. Peep and Mumu and Mamagu's are bilingual books that have all the wonderful playful nanas and the children finger plays. And they are still, after so many years, they are still in print. And it makes us very happy. We had publishers that understood that it was possible to publish for diverse readers and invested in wonderful illustrators. We have had the privilege of having over 200 of illustrators from all over the world. And we had music. We published these 10 books with 120 poems of Alma's poetry or my poetry or their folklore with music of Sunni. Sunni is an award-winning composer and has been recorded by the Esmitsonian. In this song, this poem that she put music to, I say don't forget. Don't ever forget to say family, to say friend, to speak in Spanish. Don't forget, don't. Because when you speak two languages, you are educated and rich and you are worth two people. This has become a song in many schools but I had an exception. I had Good Night Moon. Books were smuggled through the border with France or brought hidden in luggage from trips abroad. My father was a professor of English and he supplemented his meager salary translating for businessmen in meetings abroad. One day upon his return from France, he brought Good Night Moon. It was 1952. Father also told us that the author had just died there where he was dancing can can which I truly found terrifying. I couldn't imagine how a person would die dancing can can but the truth and the history of the issue is that Margaret Weiss-Brown, the author of Good Night Moon, while on a book tour in Nice, France, died of an embolism kicking up her leg to show her nurses how well she was feeling and that caused the blood clot to dislodge and travel to her heart. I promise I would never dance can can no matter how happy the occasion. The norm, however, were books with a moral ending and a version of history and literature that pleased the dictator. My secret pleasure was the National Geographic Magazine. My father had been a member of the National Geographic Magazine and he built a bookshelf that went along the corridor of the house and when that wasn't enough, then he built another one on top of that and there were hundreds of National Geographic Magazine and there I could see that the world was different to what I was reading in my books and I realized that history belongs to those who write it and that fake news are indeed the tools of dictatorships. I would like to say that one day my mother said there were so many magazines, the corridor was so crowded and my mother looked at my father and said, Diego, either the National Geographic Magazine or me. The next day my father took hundreds of National Geographics to the public library. We wrote about the rich culture and history of Latin America. They're pre-Columbian architects, sculptors, languages so that children would feel proud of their origins, their people and the places they come from. Sometimes I am in a school and I am presenting to children and I ask where are their pyramids? And the first that I hear is Egypt, which is true but sometimes I am in San Diego and those pyramids are a hundred miles away and they don't know, they have not been told that their culture is a beautiful reach and energetic culture they need to know. So we have written many books on that subject. I wish my father had lived long enough to see Alegria, our books of poetry published by the National Geographic Magazine. What a proud girl I was when I signed that contract with the National Geographic. This is a book with 400 poems written either by Alma or myself or from the folklore. So there are, should be 365 but there are more than 400 because in some days we have 200 illustrated with the magnificent photographs of the National Archives. Back to my history, I was 15 and I knew there were scholarships to the United States and I said, I am going. Yes, I can, I can do it. And you know, my mother said no way. That is an ocean away and it's impossible. You cannot do these. And then my father said the exams are so difficult just let her go. She will never pass the exams. It's very, very difficult. So my mother said, okay, if you say so, but I passed, I passed the exams and I obtained one of these scholarships and we received a letter with all the things that my mother needed to put in my luggage. And one of the things was a pair of pants. And my mother said, a pair of pants. Well, I'll take you to my dressmaker because there was no, no wear to buy a pair of pants in Alicante. Girls did not wear pants. We wore skirts and I remember my mother speaking with Donia Concha, trying to imagine in what situation but a girl wear pants. She lived long enough to see me wearing pants most of my life. And the day before my departure, my father said, we are going to the cinema because they have just opened a movie that you should see and it's West Side Story. And it is American English pronunciation and this is going to be very good for you. We went and when I left the theater, I was terrified. I didn't understand a word of what they said and much less what was the complex situation of Puerto Ricans in New York. I had quite a landing the following day in La Guardia and I had all these preparation and workshops. And then to a very few of us, they took to Washington to be together with the group that was leaving after the year they had spent and it was a very special, very special opportunity. And they took us to the White House and we were introduced to John Fridgero Kennedy. I am one of those raising my hand in that picture, the third from the right. It was such, he was so handsome and he spoke in such a deep voice and he told us, open your hearts to the message of democracy we leave in this country and take this message back to your countries. It was very, very painful when three months later, the Trenton High School principal called us all to tell us through the microphones that John Fridgero Kennedy had been assassinated and it made me wonder the words that I had heard from him about democracy. So there I was, multiculturalism was a rarity in the 60s and I was news to be followed by the press, what I ate, how I dressed, my accent, my food, but it was an incredibly rich year. I am the third from the left on the second tier and I learned a lot and I appreciated very much every single minute of my life in Trenton, Michigan. Upon return, my years at both the University of Valencia and the Complutense University in Madrid were a constant challenge to authority with sad and frequent consequences for my freedom. Being arrested in a dictatorship is not fun and it was frequent, but I finished. I knew that I could and I finished there in the University Complutense of Madrid, my degree on philology and linguistics. Multicultural education grew out of the social ferment of the civil rights movement of the 60s. Scholars of critical pedagogy such as Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux, Antonia Darder, Sonia Nieto, James Bank, Alma Florada herself and many others have offered an emancipatory perspective on multicultural education and that is what we try to infuse in the books that we write. This theory concentrates on the need of including notions of race, class, and diversity while teaching and demanding social justice for them all. You must have seen this poster. I am sure that you are familiar with it, but for those that are not, I would like to call your attention to the size of the mirror that we hold in our hands. The first girl, an American Indian First Nations girl has a mirror in her hand that doesn't even cover her hand and that is the size of the number of books published for her minority, 0.9%. To the right are the Latinos with 2.4, a little bigger, but not much. To the right is a 3.3% of Asian and Pacific Americans. To the right is 7.6 of books published for African American. To the right is 12.5 of animals and trucks. Yes, we publish more books with main characters, truck or a car than for minorities. And to the right, you have mirrors everywhere, up and down and right and left, because 73.3% of the books published have a white person as a main character. I started publishing for our minority with a message of collaboration and community and recognition of the value of all is at the heart of all the good hands. This was the first book that I published with the same message of maybe something beautiful. The thing about this book is that it's the first book that Yuyi Morales published. She is an illustrator and Yuyi Morales illustrated my book and many years ago and now she is a fantastic author and a wonderful illustrator. I am so happy to have seen in these 25 years her success. 25 years. I kept in my heart the meaning of democracy and the strength of community that gave life to this book. If you remember, the beginning of the book is dark, like dark where the faces of the people and the streets where I lived as a child. In this photograph you can see Rafael and Teresa and in the back a mural that we helped paint in San Diego a couple of years ago. This book has given us tremendous pleasure. It has received the Mexican-American award of Tomás Rivera and it has passed the frontiers of languages now is Quizás Alguermoso, and I cannot pronounce it in Chinese, but I am very, very happy that it is also in Chinese. And I would like to talk about the influences that inform the writing. And as a linguist, I lived across from MIT and across from the Charles River and MIT and Noam Chomsky and my passion for linguistics as, you know, had a call in my heart. Chomsky had a class on Thursdays, not every day, not every year, but whenever he had, I would attend this class and I would, you know, it was open for anybody that could find a chair in the room, so I would get very early to get a chair. We never knew what Noam Chomsky was going to talk about, but I must say that not only his transformative generative grammar ideas influence my writing, but also his social and political ideas of the world. And so we wrote about grammar and we wrote about the pedagogy of poetry. Talabra Amiga is one of three books that we are publishing about grammar. Estalinda Lamar is a book about how to teach poetry in the classroom and then we have a series of little books for children. Actually, La Fascinante Historia de la Lengua Española, the fascinating history of the Spanish language has taken the last 10 years to write and is now in the hands of publishers and I hope that we will see it soon. You have already heard about the wonderful honor that the North American Academy of the Spanish Language, one of 23 academies of the Spanish language in the world has named their award for children's literature, el premio, Campoy, Ada. So, published 13 years ago, we published the tales and both in English and Spanish. And 15 years ago, we published authors in the classroom to recognize that all teachers, parents, children are the protagonists of their life and their life experiences deserve to be written always with a message that history belong to those who write it. The years passed and we all got old parents. We were celebrating their anniversary in these photograph, Pilar, Diego, myself and Vincent. And we also recovered the smiles and the glasses and married and husbands and wives and children were born into the family. Although I always leave the very far away. So, other influences for the books that I have published is that I have hobbies and art is in my heart. I enjoy clay and I do it very badly as you can see. My sculptures are not very good but I enjoy tremendously doing that or painting. And I love New Mexico so I have lots of paintings of New Mexico and those passions are at the heart of the books that we have published for the Latino children about the art of the Latino world. We have published Botero and Frida Kahlo and Picasso and Simone Silva who really has enlightened some of our work because again children need to know they come from a very rich background. So we began publishing for children about 1995 about painters and scientists and leaders and writers and dancers and actors and philosophers. We hear with pride others referring to us as the grandmothers of Latino literature and it is something that we take at heart. Our friend Claudia Hernandez has published a book and has called us the revolutionary women of color. So I know that still the icon is alive and well. And our friend Margarita Engel that is about to publish with a star in my hand, the biography of Ruben Dario has dedicated this book to us calling us the heroes of bilingual literature. This thing I think implies that we have been on this picture for very long. And I published Poesiatis II that you so nicely described and yes we are Latinos. And then I gave the children the possibility of changing reality. This is my Cinderella and my Cinderella is a Cinderella and it's a Chatsky that were the runners that took messages in the empire, in the Peruvian empire. And one day in one of his runs he loses a shoe and you will have to read the end of the book. But I love doing these with other folklore pieces of the folklore and change them. And definitely I wrote these for the new generations to see if this happens soon, that we have equal pay for equal work. I strongly believe in the need for translations and you have mentioned how I have translated, I don't know, maybe 50 or 60 authors and many, many books. But I love translating more Williams that is not at all easy. If you have read the books about Trixie and Canuffal Bunny it's not easy to translate it's not easy to create phonetic symbols in another language, but it is so much fun. I have also translated Alice Schertl in more than one way and with that had a difficulty that she loves, rhyme, and to rhyme in another language it is, but. And these books I have translated from English to Spanish, but there is a need to translate from Spanish to English and actually to translate from any language into English. The number of 1% of books published for children in this country being in translation is definitely insufficient. And I am coming to an end. I am an old tree. The branches of my life have reached far and plentiful. Now, as they bend towards earth where they belong, I want to leave you with thoughts of hope. Once you have seen beauty and experienced justice, you will not cease to reach for it. I will continue writing until diversity is the norm and the canon reflects the stories of all our children disabled and bilingual, immigrant, binary and non-binary of any race, class and faith. I will continue writing until history is written by all and for all. Let us fly. Thank you so very much. Thank you.