The Missouri Reader Vol. 36, Issue 1 | Page 13

beautiful comes from inside she decides to take action
in her community and clean up the street and clean
the word Die from the wall. We are left with a sense
of hopefulness that she will make a difference but have
to question the huge odds that she is up against.
In The Lady in the Box, the mother talks to Dorrie
(the woman who is without a home) at the urging of
her children. In a tense scene, their mother goes into
the store and shames the owner into letting Dorrie
sleep on the grate.
―Mama marches to the Circle Deli. We had to
run to catch up.
When she saw the owner, Mama began to give it
to him. She said that Christmas was coming soon
and it was freezing cold outside and she used
words like human kindness and simple charity
until he said ―Okay, okay, she can stay.‖
The mother introduces her children to the soup
kitchen:
When Saturday came, Mama asked us if we
wanted to help in the neighborhood soup kitchen.
―Homeless people get free lunches there,‖ she
said.
The soup kitchen was in a church basement. The
line to get in was long. I felt sad that there were
so many people needing free soup.
She extends her children‘s social imagination from the
realities of one woman living in a box, without a
home, without food, to the hundreds of other people
in their neighborhood who are living in the same
conditions. She does not offer, however, any further
explanation about the conditions of poverty or
affordable housing. Further, people without homes
are turned into ―homeless people,‖ an objectifying
linguistic strategy.
At the end of the book the author encourages the
reader to find out more about resources for people
who are homeless in their communities.
Yet another example of solidarity can be found in
The Rag Coat. The Quilting Mothers offer community,
solidarity and charity to Minna‘s family by making a
coat for her daughter so she can attend school.
In The Streets are Free, the community is privileged
over the family or the individual. When the parents

learn that the children have gone to City Hall, they go
to find them, as a community. The author keeps the
storyline moving through a series of community
meetings where people convene to organize better
conditions. The meetings function as a narrative
device to keep the story moving forward and also
provide an important dimension of the context of life
in Venezuela. That is, people engage in deliberative
democracy – they convene assemblies, march on City
Hall, conduct acts of civil disobedience, and so on. In
this book, children are foregrounded in the book as
protagonists who create social change. Other books
that did this were: Something Beautiful, Spuds, A Castle
on Viola Street and Lady in the Box. However, unlike the
other books, in The Streets are Free, the children are
depicted as having a sense of activism. As they
organize for a playground they use literacy practices
such as making lists and banners, creating maps,
reading newspapers and reading media critically.
In many of the books there are different
perspectives represented about poverty and people
living in poverty. For instance, In The Streets are Free,
the civil disobedience of the children at City Hall is
depicted as a ―riot‖ by the police and as ―trying to get a
playground‖ by the children. In The Lady in the Box, the
condition of being without a home is seen as
―uncharitable‖ by the mother and as ―bad for business‖
by the owner of Circle Deli. In Going Home, the
mother, father and son Carolos see working in the
fields as an opportunity to get ahead. But their
daughter, Delores, critiques this opportunity. The
following passage alludes to Delores‘ critique of
structural inequalities:
Sometimes behind his back, Dolores imitates
Papa.
"'We are here for the opportunities.'
I don‘t see them getting many of these
wonderful opportunities."
Dolores is very grown-up and cool.
That is why Mama worries about her.
Dolores revoices the words of her father, with
cynicism. She used the word opportunity in an ironic
way – to demonstrate her critique of the American
dream. The word ―opportunity‖ is repeatedly used

©The Missouri Reader, 36 (1) p. 13