Spotlight
Interviews with authors of new books on migration and mobility
Laura Assanmal interviews Fabienne Doucet about her book El Amor Siempre Gana/Love is Still Winning (Lil’ Libros 2024)
About the author
Fabienne Doucet takes an interdisciplinary approach to examining how immigrant and U.S.-born children of color and their families navigate education in the United States. A critical ethnographer, Doucet studies how taken-for-granted beliefs, practices, and values in the U.S. educational system position linguistically, culturally, and socioeconomically diverse children and families at a disadvantage, and seeks active solutions for meeting their educational needs. Doucet has numerous scholarly publications and is author of the children’s picture book Love is Still Winning/El Amor Siempre Triunfa (Lil’ Libros Press). She has a Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies from UNC-Greensboro.
You can connect with the author on Instagram: @bailabomba
About the interviewer
Born and raised in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, Laura Assanmal Peláez is an urban ethnographer, community organizer, and doctoral candidate at NYU Steinhardt’s Sociology of Education Program. Her research explores how immigrant and unhoused students exercise agency in a city and school system where they encounter oppressive geographies.
Laura is currently a member of the adjunct faculty of Education Studies Program at NYU Steinhardt, an incoming adjunct instructor at NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study, a Urban Democracy Lab Doctoral Fellow in Urban Practice, and a graduate researcher at the Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools.
In this interview, Laura Assanmal speaks with Dr. Fabienne Doucet, Executive Director of the NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools and an Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education and Urban Education at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human about her first bilingual picture book: Love is Still Winning/El Amor Siempre Triunfa.
This children’s book tells a story of a child reminding their mother about the enduring power of love and kindness in the face of prejudice, racism, and anti-migrant sentiments. The book begins with a mother overwhelmed at a news story of calls to “build a wall” in the U.S. Southern Border. Through tender images displaying a range of religions, races, ethnicities, and disabilities, Love is Still Winning/El Amor Siempre Triunfa encourages children to explore acts of love and service towards their communities. In this book, children and their families are encouraged to imagine a more embracing world in which love manifests itself in the form of giving, helping, opening doors, welcoming newcomers from other countries, sharing food, and listening. This book hopes to nurture in children a sense of compassion and care for communities that have been impacted by migration and displacement.
Laura:
I wanted to start by asking you about the origin story of Love Is Still Winning/El Amor Siempre Triunfa. I would love to know the beginning of how this book came to be.
Fabienne:
In 2015, I had written a different story that was a story about my family. I remember I was woken up in the middle of the night by this recurring sentence: My family tree grows magically. I couldn't stop hearing it in my head, and so in the middle of the night, in the dark, I wrote down whatever was in my mind. When I woke up the next morning, I told my husband: I think I wrote a children's book.
He was like, of course you did. It was the craziest thing in the world. I had never imagined that as an academic, despite my focus being Early Childhood and Childhood Development, that I was going to write for children. But as I began to think about this book, Donald Trump was running for president of the United States. During these years, the country witnessed marches protesting the murder of Black people by the police. There was a march protesting the death of Sandra Bland that my kids, my husband and I attended. What we saw at this march really stayed with me: so many families marching together.
Seeing families and children of all ages marching made me think about how, yes, there is so much mess going on right now, but at the same time, look at all of this. Look at all of this love. Look at all of these people showing up for each other. In this march, I witnessed a manifestation of love more than an emotion. What we saw was a kind of love that fought; that demanded rights. This experience prompted me to ask what else is love doing? And how are my children showing me to love? I started thinking about all the way love moves in this world. Loving is not simply a matter of saying “let's just cross our fingers and close our eyes and hope”. We have to live it every day. And so the story came to me, and it came to me as a bilingual English-Spanish story from the beginning.
Laura:
Triunfar, to “triumph”, has such a depth of meaning. It is more than winning a game or a single battle.
I noticed the book begins with the image of a worried mother sitting in a kitchen drinking coffee or tea, with tears rolling down her face as she reads the newspaper. Her child enters and asks her, curiously, “Por qué lloras Mamá?”, “Mama, why are you crying?”. What story did you imagine in that front page?
Fabienne:
It was a story about building the wall. About the building of a wall to keep immigrants out of the United States. It was a story calling immigrants “bad people”, “dirty people”, “rapists”, and the “worst that gets sent to our society”. That was the story in my mind that the mother in this book is reading. She is devastated, because I remember how I felt devastated when I heard that.
Laura:
This brings us to the question of how this book grapples with questions of migration and mobility. One of my favorite pages in this book features a yellow bus. Next to it, we see boxes of food and water, and we also see a family welcoming other families off the bus. In this part, you write about opening doors. Is this a nod to what we have been witnessing in New York City over the past few years, with asylum seekers being bused to New York City from the border?
Fabienne:
Wow. You know, at the time of writing this story, I was thinking about walls. I wanted to say: we don't build walls, we open doors. However, my illustrator must have gotten the story only a couple years ago. Maybe for her—and I can’t say for sure—that is what this piece of the story meant. In traditional publishing processes, the author typically does not choose the illustrator. The publisher chooses the illustrator, and the illustrator and the author typically don't know each other. I did not know J de la Vega before writing this book. But what I also didn't know at the time is that J and I were part of the same online group for radical moms. She shared that when she was offered the story, she found me in her group and felt good about taking on a project that felt so personal to her.
In the book, there is a character called Andy who is helping Señora Dominguez carry her groceries. That character represents J’s brother. There are beautiful Easter eggs and things that are meaningful to her in these illustrations. Now I really want to ask her the story behind the bus.
Laura:
There is a certain tenderness to all the bodies shown in this book. We see children, parents and neighbors with a range of abilities, races, names, religious garments and connotations. What was so important about the representations made in this book?
Fabienne:
It really mattered to me that every child would be able to see themselves in this book. I did not want anyone to be concerned about whether the story followed a boy or a girl, but simply a child. When thinking about soup kitchens, I specifically thought about a Sikh langar; a Sikh community kitchen that serves meals for anyone in need.
Laura:
That's beautiful. I want to go deeper into how this book ties into notions of migration and mobility. What would you say is your hope for how children who read this book go on to engage with people who are not from the United States, and specifically those who are undocumented? What is the hope?
Fabienne:
The hope is that children recognize the different ways that we, in community, love each other, support each other, and care for each other. The book centers the neighborhood as a crucial place for this understanding. In our neighborhoods, we have people who are born here. We have people who were born in other places. We have people who have been here for a very, very long time. We also have people who just arrived last week, and everyone is welcome.
We had an initial discussion about situating the book in New York City. New York is the context that J knows. The press, however, wanted this book to be able to be imagined anywhere. I lived in North Carolina for a very long time. So, this story could take place in North Carolina. It could be in Tennessee. It could be anywhere. We see apartment buildings, parks, and illustrations that reveal a somewhat urban place. I think there's something about it that feels transcendent, similar to how we thought about gender. I think this choice also speaks to movement and migration and where we settle and are situated. Our built environments contribute to, or don't contribute to, to the ways that we can connect with each other.
Laura:
You have been outspoken about the critical work that is instilling hope in children as part of our collective work towards liberation. I want to understand how you situate your book within that mission. What do you think is the role of children's literature in expanding children's sense of hope and possibility?
Fabienne:
There is this idea in children’s literature that books are both mirrors and windows. When we write stories, there is always an element of how we see ourselves but there is also an element of opening our eyes to something that we couldn’t imagine before. Children’s books are windows into the world, and they are also mirrors of ourselves, as adults. I hoped that this book provided everyone something they could recognize.
I want this book to be a window into how we can carry out this project of living together in community. I think children's literature has the power to do that. I recently spoke about this with Dean Jack Knott—who has been a big source of support—when I gave him signed copies for his grandchildren. Picture books only let us write 500-1,000 words, and because of that, we have to pay attention to an economy of words to convey so much in such little space. That is what is so powerful to me about picture books. You will walk after a few minutes having discovered something new, something that made you laugh, or reflect.
Laura:
We should all be reading children's literature.
Fabienne:
We really should. It’s art. Through it we can access ways of playing with language, different forms of creativity and connection.
Laura:
I have a last question. One of the things that I thought about while reading the book is about how bell hooks in all about love calls upon us to think about love not as a noun, but as a verb. And there is so much in your book that speaks to this idea of love as a verb in the form of giving, helping, including opening doors, listening. So what influences helped you shape your ideas of love and its centrality to this book?
Fabienne:
I love this question. It makes me want to cry. I devoured bell hooks’ book. I was in graduate school at the time when she wrote it, and she came to my campus in North Carolina. I got to actually ask her questions about all about love. It was transformative.
I was raised by my great aunt and uncle. My mother and father divorced when I was really young. I was born in Spain, but my mother left when I was maybe a couple of months old and moved to the US. I lived with her sister for a while, and then was sent to Haiti to be raised by my aunt and uncle. She was in the US, divorced, without knowing the country and not comfortable with the idea of dropping me off at a daycare. Her aunt, my great aunt who raised me, had told her: If you need help with your baby, you can send her to me. That offer was the greatest gift that she could have possibly given me.
My aunt and uncle, who I dedicated the book to, Maman Titine and Papa Fito, are, even though they have moved on from this world, the most loving people I have ever known. They represent love in this way. They give love in this way. They used to talk about Amour Soleil, which means “sun love”. They would say that romantic love is nice, but what you want is a love that shines bright like the sun and that shines forever. A kind of love that is not fleeting. It’s the sun. They taught me about love. They taught me, as a privileged child living in a very poor country, about respecting people who did not have the resources that we had. They taught me about the importance of being generous. They taught me that the reason I was born into this family, and into privilege, was an accident. My circumstances said nothing about me, and the lack of privilege said nothing about the person across the street. They taught me a love that is very active, outward, and service oriented. This love extends to the chosen people that I bring into the family. I think about those lessons of love, including my mom making a huge sacrifice. These people, who already had kids of their own, took another child in for 10 years. I was raised in a cocoon of love, feeling cherished and feeling valued. You can't really help but delight over it.
Laura:
Thank you. That's so beautiful.
Fabienne:
I'm just so lucky. It’s so random. I'm so lucky because it didn't have to be this way. Because of that, I don't have the choice but to keep on ensuring that other people experience this level of acceptance and unconditional love.