Mindy:             Today's guest is Juan Pablo Villalobos, author of The Other side: Stories of Central American Teen Refugees Who Dream of Crossing the Border. Juan Pablo joined me today to talk about the experiences of young refugees and his approach to compiling their stories. Your upcoming title, The Other side: Stories of Central American Teen Refugees Who Dream of Crossing the Border is very timely, of course, and it's sure to be a conversation starter. So could you talk a little bit about what you see as the goal for a piece of young adult nonfiction like this?

Juan Pablo:       Well, first of all, I have to say that actually in Spanish, this book was published by my regular publisher in a Chronicle collection. And it's not exactly addressed to young readers. I mean it's, it's a direct address to the general public. And I think that maybe this book is actually to be written, not just for teenagers. And I thought that it was very important to tell these stories about these teenagers who are fighting for having a future and that their stories can be read exactly by equals in the United States who don't have these problems. I hope that maybe this can contribute to a better understanding of the situation and hopefully this could help to have a better situation for these kids and teenagers in the future.

Mindy:             Stories like this hopefully work to build empathy in their minds.

Juan Pablo:       Yes, empathy is exactly the word for my book. I was thinking the whole time about how to create not just a sensation of sorrow, of fear, but also a more profound and deep understanding of what is the motivation and origin of the stories of these kids. So first of all, I as a, as a writer, and then the readers can just for these maybe couple of hours can feel and understand what is to live like that. To have or not, not to have any hope in the future. You have to run away from your home because you have no options. Because actually one of the important decisions about the book, uh, was to talk about refugees and not immigrants. Because actually these kids are refugees. I mean, they don't have an option to stay in their countries because they are at risk, risk of death, risk of having a whole life. I mean, they don't have an option. So they have to run away. And that's why they decide to make this terrible and very dangerous journey through Mexico. Knowing that in that journey they will be at risk too. But at least they have a choice, a choice to survive. Some of them, sadly, not all of them, some of them succeed. These are their testimonies.

Mindy:             So tell us a little bit about the research that was involved. How did you find these refugees and how did you get them to open up to you about their lives?

Juan Pablo:       Well, obviously I, it had to work hard with NGOs and lawyers that defend and help these kids. This is something that you can't do on your own. I mean, and not just because you can't identify and go directly to these kids, but mainly because you have to take care of them. I mean working through these NGOs and through these lawyers was important not just to have access and select the kids, but also because they know who is prepared to tell their story and who isn't prepared. I mean in a way that when you are interviewing these kids, you can notice that sometimes they are suffering while they are telling their stories because obviously there is some traumatic situations in the past of these kids that are terrible and it's not easy to share with an unknown, a writer with all the good intentions will try to tell their stories. So in the first stage, there's this very careful process through NGOs and lawyers and that I went to the, to the United States, to New York and Los Angeles to interview them. You have to create a safe space, try to connect emotionally and try to make them feel that they can trust in you. Happily, that happened with these eleven kids that opened up to me and shared with me their stories.

Mindy:             And sitting and talking with them, doing this research. I'm sure it's very harrowing for them obviously, but also for you because you're interacting with them and obviously as a writer, empathy must be in your toolbox. And so I'm sure it's difficult. What was it like to have these conversations to learn about their lives and their decisions and then see them go along their way to, you know, their eventual fate. Are you in contact with them?

Juan Pablo:       Well, there's two things that were really interesting. I mean in theory were very interesting. There was a lot of confusion in the way they were telling the stories. Obviously they can't remember things exactly as they happen, not just because it was, as I said before, a traumatic experience. But also because they are kids and learning to tell your story. It's an important part of growing up. But when you have nine years or 11 years or 13, you still don't have all the strategies to tell your own story. So it was very interesting to notice that they still don't have the knowledge to tell their stories in a very structured way. And at the first moment, I mean the first interviews I had an approach similar to being a journalist. I was very worried about details. For example, trying to understand exactly what happened after the first interviews when I noticed this that they have these confusions in their stories.

Juan Pablo:       I came out to the conclusion that this was part of their stories. I mean that I had to respect that, that I couldn't push them to try to remember the things exactly as they happened because actually they don't know. They don't remember and that maybe it was very interesting literarily to reflect that on the book. To respect the original version, not to correct, not to make the work that a journalist would do. Trying to put the pieces together and trying to fact checking the the kids, but to share with the readers these confusions. I thought that that was interesting and actually I had some funny experiences with the translations of the book. Obviously I, I interviewed the kids in Spanish and I work after that with my translators into English and into German. My German publisher wrote to me with some corrections suggested for the book and he was like trying exactly to do what I couldn't do.

Juan Pablo:       And I decided not to do with the stories of this kid saying like, there are some mistakes in the stories, we should take care of this. And I said, no, it's like that. You know what kind of mistakes they were. for example, geographic mistakes. Like when we crossed the border, we arrived to Monterey and it's not Monterey, it's not in the border with Guatemala. Monterey, it's in the North of Mexico. But they are so afraid and so confused when they made this journey that obviously they are not aware of the names of the cities, the dates, the chronology of the facts that happened, et cetera. So that was very interesting. And I decided that this was a book of literature and that this wasn't a journalistic book, that it wasn't necessary to make the fact checking of the stories. And that takes me to the second part of my response that is about not to push them because at some points of their stories they still suffer when they remember.

Juan Pablo:       So if they are telling you, for example, a teenager from Honduras, the last story of the book was telling me about how she was raped in Honduras and she was crying. Well while she was telling me the story, and obviously she was talking about this in fragments, like with a lot of confusion, it wasn't important to get all the details because as I said, it wasn't my intention to make a journalistic work, but it was also like a, like a moral or ethic commitment from my, my point of view, not to push her to make her suffer more because it wasn't necessary to get more details and about my, my emotional implication on that. Yeah, it's true that it's difficult and, and that is hard to talk with them. But at the same time I had all the, I had it very, very clear that my position was very privileged and that I couldn't compare my suffering or my problems or my conflict with the situation that they were living. So for me that suffering or that conflict wasn't important. I mean, it was insignificant. Who am I? Who am I? I'm, I'm an, I'm also an immigrant. I'm a Mexico living in Spain from a long time, but I'm a a privileged, privileged one. I came here to study a PhD. I always had a legal residency, so I can't compare my situation to them.

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Mindy:             You also write short stories and you have several adult novels published. So when you are writing fiction or something different from The Other Side, do you approach the craft differently when you're a genre is changing like that?

Juan Pablo:       First of all, this is nonfiction. It's my first book of nonfiction. I worked a lot on articles and papers that are nonfiction, but this is my first book of nonfiction and this is my first book for young readers. So it was different. Yeah, because when I write fiction I had this total freedom to make the decisions, the creative decisions. And when you're working with, with these kinds of books, like The Other Side, you have like a frame. And obviously I make a lot of decisions as similar to those that I take when I write a fiction book. Because actually my idea was to take the testimonies just like a base to build something using strategies from fiction. And I should say that maybe you can read the book as nonfiction in the content. I mean the stories are real, but it's fiction in the form and actually it's almost like a short story book.

Juan Pablo:       And when I say that is fiction, it's like fiction in the form. I can put as a very simple example in one of the stories, the one called, uh, It Was Like A Current, But When I Touched it, It Was Just Ice. That story. It's a diary. This kid, he didn't write a diary, so I organized the information of his story, like a diary and I mean all, all the things that you read in that diary are true. But I decided to tell them as a diary. The decision of what to put first and the days are similar to those of the origin story, but the form is fiction. There's no diary. This kid, he didn't write a diary, so I organize the information as a diary, but all you read on that story is true. It happened.

Mindy:             What made you decide to approach that particular story in that form?

Juan Pablo:       I had to make that kind of decisions the whole time. And actually that happened because I had a huge crisis when I came back to Barcelona, after I made the interviews. I had all the testimonials recorded and I hear over and over the testimonials as I write them. I noticed that if I just make a book of testimonies, and I mean if I respect 100% the version and the way the kids were telling their stories, I felt that maybe the book would be maybe repetitive, that it can lose some of his power to create empathy. I remember that I wrote it to my publisher at FSG to Grace Kendall, and I asked her to give me permission to work with the material and I said, I need some kind of freedom to work with this. If we really want this to work, I need to use some strategies from fiction, but it will be a nonfiction book.

Juan Pablo:       She liked the idea and she wrote to me and to enthusiastically to tell me, yeah, please go on. So I then went back to the material and I selected some excerpts, some fragments, and I decided the point of view, I decided whether in each story to select some fragments and even to decide not to tell the whole story of each kid, but to select a fragment that the reader can feel like the, like the whole book was like a puzzle. Like if you read one, one of the stories is happening back in El Salvador or Honduras or Guatemala. Another story is in the border between Mexico and Guatemala and other stories in Mexico. Another one is in the border between Mexico and the United States. And then you have stories that happened in the freezers in the States or in New York, et cetera. And so reading the whole book, complete the whole picture.

Mindy:             I like that. I love that blending of the fiction approach to nonfiction. I think that's really interesting. So you mentioned that this was your first time writing something for young adults, but at the same time you believe that this, anyone can read this and relate and benefit from it. So when you went about putting together the book, were you specifically framing it for teens or were you just telling the story?

Juan Pablo:       I wasn't worried about being inappropriate, first of all, because I believe that you can't be condescending with the readers in general, not just with young readers, but in general. You can't think like, Oh, I maybe put this in a different way because my reader is not that smart. He won't understand right? No. Not just young readers in general. After this books, I wrote a children's book, my first children's book, and uh, and I remember that I had this profound feeling that I have to make the same work that I make when I write a novel for adults, but that I had to be very conscious of who was the reader, not for to decide not to talk about something because it can be inappropriate. No. Just because you have to find an adequate tone, a point of view strategy to get the attention of the readers, et cetera. But at the end, I remember that, that a friend of mine, a writer who has a lot of experience writing for children, he told me something like books for children are the same. Just don't use bad words and don't talk about sex and drugs, but the rest is the same. I mean existential conflict, all the feelings that you have, all the intellectual problems that you can put in the novel. It's the same. Just be aware not to talk about drugs and sex and everything will be fine. Wonderful. It was a very useful recommendation.