>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. ^M00:00:04 ^M00:00:16 >> Catalina Gomez: I wanted to welcome all of you today to today's event. This is our second Hispanic Heritage Month Program for the year. We have a wonderful listing of events for Hispanic Heritage Month here at the Library of Congress. So I wanted to announce that we have our complete calendar of events here in the entrance of our room. It's an honor for me to introduce our featured speaker, who happens to be also my compatriot, my friend, and an artist that I admire deeply. Juana Medina is an illustrator and author of children's books, as well as a teacher at George Washington University. She grew up in Bogata, Columbia and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. Medina has -- was the first winner of the J. Kennedy Memorial Scholarship, an award given yearly by the National Cartoonist Society to top college cartoonists in North America. She is also the recipient of a Marion Vannett Ridgeway Honor Award, and [inaudible] 100 Columbians, an honor granted to 100 successful Colombians living abroad. Her books for children include One Big Salad, A Delicious Counting Book, and Smick, her latest picture book, and then Juana and Lucas, who is actually -- which is actually soon to be published and we managed to bring some copies here for the event, and it's published Candlewick Press. Juana and Lucas tells the story of a young girl's decision to learn English. All of her books are on sale here today at the event, and I'm also very excited to announce that Juana Medina is one of our featured authors this Saturday on our National Book Festival in the convention center. So I encourage everyone to go see her there as well. Her presentation, I believe, is at two p.m. at the Children's Literature Pavilion. Being an immigrant from Columbia myself, and an aspiring artist, I am very, very eager to hear -- to hear about this wonderful person's journey. Please join me in welcoming Juana Melina. ^M00:02:18 [ Applause ] ^M00:02:22 ^M00:02:26 >> Juana Medina: Hello. Thank you very, Catalina, for such a generous introduction. I really appreciate it. First, I want to say hello. It's absolutely wonderful to be here. I really cannot believe it. Many years ago now when I first got my reader ID here at the Library of Congress, I felt elated. At last I felt like I could take part in coming to the Library and taking profit of all the wonderful things that take place in this institution. Later on, a few years later while working on Smick, I was contacted by Penguin asking to send my information so that I could be part of a catalog, and I thought, great, my work is now part of the catalog at the Library of Congress, a tiny piece of me there. And so today I'm short of words to say how exciting it is to be here. I'm very humbled and very appreciative, thank you very much for this invitation. Besides saying yes to this, because of course how could I pass on this opportunity, then I realized, okay, what do I do? What do I talk about? It wasn't just that simple. And then after thinking about it for a while I thought, okay, I think I got it. I want to share what it's been like to be in this journey. I hope not to put you sleep by doing this. I promise I'll keep it brief and hopefully entertaining enough. I hope it will be inspiring, whether you are an artist, or an immigrant, or Latino or Latina, or queer, or a woman, or simply a human being here present for this talk. I hope there's something here for you. I grew up in Bogota, Colombia, as Catalina was saying. And here I am with my grandfather as a teeny tiny baby. The Andes in the back of the picture. I was very, very lucky to grow up very close to him. He was one of the first brain surgeons to go back to Columbia after preparing here in the U.S. There was such a need for brain surgeons at that time that apparently when he -- when the airplane landed there was an ambulance waiting for him to perform the first surgery. That was the need for surgeons at the time. He was a wonderful human being, and a wonderful doctor. He was also somebody who spoiled me like nobody else in life. My grandmother was also wonderfully skilled and a fantastic human being. She was a wonderful carpenter, and together they designed some of the first equipment to perform surgeries in Columbia because there was no equipment in order for my grandfather to do the surgery. So it was a collective effort. They were both very creative. Here's my grandma in her studio. So that was perhaps genetic, I got lucky. Their house was actually magical, not just by my standards, but my family and my friends and everybody around them would just come oftentimes to their house and benefit from having a very inspiring experience thanks to their creativity and their generosity. My parents were basketball players and they were wonderful athletes. I did not inherit that gene [laughter]. My mom at some point, my atrocious career in basketball didn't last long, and at some point we had a very serious talk about it being okay for me to quit the basketball team. So overall, it was a very happy childhood and I felt incredibly lucky. My father died when I was about seven months old in an accident. So I must say the strength and courage from my mother has been something that has kept me going for a very long time. I'm very lucky to have her here today. So that's me with my mom. One of the hardest things about growing up in Columbia, despite me saying I was very lucky, was the war. This were the 1980's and during the '80s the situation in Columbia was far from peaceful. It was incredibly, incredibly hard for very many. We were, again, lucky to first be comfortable to live in Bogota, which was a very extensive city where people were a lot more at peace than out in the countryside. Still, this doesn't mean we were not touched by the war. I still remember, you know, blasting bombs and, you know, people being kidnapped around us, and situations that were quite dire. But in the grand scheme of things we were quite lucky to not be touched directly by the war. Bogota is a very diverse city, very vibrant, very big, and it allowed for me to have tremendous inspiration just by hearing stories from countless people, who in a very generous and passionate way do share stories, very Colombian style just by simply opening up and saying hello. So we were very lucky. Besides that amazing environment where storytelling was very much alive, I happened to grew up in a household that was tremendously creative. These are my cousins. I'm standing with the red veil. I have no idea what we were playing. But, you know, it must've been quite exciting. And we were encouraged to think that way and to create things out of, you know, whatever we found around, like a little piece of rag, and we played for hours and we were very, very happy. The only thing I know for certain in this picture is Filipe [assumed spelling], who's in the middle, was an astronaut. That's -- that helmet -- that helmet says it all, and that was his preference. I also happened to be very lucky to go to a school that valued arts tremendously, and that was very, very helpful in my upbringing. It was a wonderful environment where everybody found constant ways of expression. So art and creative expression were from very early, just simply, you know, parts of my life. I didn't question it. I didn't think of it as art. I didn't think of it as, you know, other than just expressing. And that changed as I grew a little bit older and I started meeting people that didn't grow up in such a fortunate household and then they would say to me, well, I can't draw. And it's like, what do you mean you can't draw? I'll give you my pen, or you need paper, or how can we [inaudible] can draw, but I couldn't really conceive that people could not draw. ^M00:10:02 During the 1980's, the late 1980's also, things changed a little bit and we were touched by the financial crisis taking place in Columbia. And this was quite hard because we had lived comfortably and we had had a safe life, and all of a sudden all these conditions changed. So all of a sudden we had close to nothing, or we were very uncomfortable and it was a difficult situation. And from realizing that there were very few resources, or they were quite limited, thank goodness I grew up with a very creative mother and I learned that having nothing could be translated into making something. Everything was an opportunity to make things and shift things around. That being creative ensured that there was some sweetness in life no matter what, and a little bit of humor took us a long way. By the year 2000 my family ended up leaving and they came to the United States. I stayed behind studying physical therapy. And talk about being creative, this was during a financial crisis, working in very, very poor hospitals, and that's where you see most creativity really at work. I think we often think of creatives as entrepreneurs or designers or craftsmen. Go to a hospital, go talk to a physical therapist, to an occupational therapist, to a nurse, especially in Latin America and you will see really what creativity is at work, and not necessarily for any special award or anything, but simply to improve somebody's life. In the end, opportunities were narrowing for me in Columbia, and what made most sense was for me to leave. This was not an easy goodbye. I was leaving behind my grandparents. And, for some reason, I knew I wouldn't see them again. This was incredibly hard. That goodbye I still can sense it in me 15 years later almost. And it wasn't easy, and I don't think I have to go extensively about it. For those of you who might have been immigrants you all remember this in some kind of way. Needless to say, I still remember and miss those big mountains and miss the smells of fresh fruit and fresh flowers everywhere, and Spanish being spoken loudly everywhere, but life went on. I had in my pocket $220. Like many immigrants, many had much less than that. And I also had my bags full of books and very many expectations. I was lucky. I was lucky in many ways. One of them being I had my family here, so they were receiving me as soon as I got off that plane. I was coming to a city that I was already familiar with. I knew the language. I had been able to receive wonderful education, and that made a huge difference that I'm well aware. Not every immigrant gets those possibilities right off an airplane, or right as they walk past the frontier. But that doesn't take away the amount of uncertainty when you're an immigrant. And it's hard, it's very difficult to figure out how things will work out, what is your role, what are you supposed to do with your life? And that prompted questions for me. Who am I? What does it mean to be an immigrant? Because all of a sudden there so many labels imposed on me. Where are you from? When did you came? What are you doing here? Are you staying here for good? It's like, I don't know, I have no idea. Back in Columbia my identity was very clear. I knew who I was, what I wanted to do, and here everything shifted and all I had was a blank slate. I felt very much like one in a million. Nothing seemed to be the experience that everybody was having. It seemed to be very different and foreign to a lot of people, and that was difficult. All of a sudden also, I realized there was a label that was imposed on me. I was brown. I had never been brown in my life before. All of a sudden I was -- I would enter a shop and I would be followed by the lady at the store, and I would be stopped by police, and all these situations that, again, I'm one of the lucky ones. But it just seems so foreign to me, and something I had never encountered before. I was the other. And being the other is very scary. It's something that shuns us away, that stops conversations, that encourages fear, and we're leaving it -- we're living at quite vividly right now during this election season. While I was trying to figure out what to do with my life I happened to see that there would be -- that there was a class going to Georgetown as a continued education class that was offered and it was for drawing and painting critique. And so I joined this class just as an effort to think things differently and I happened to have the great fortune of meeting Bill Rock [assumed spelling], who was the instructor of this class. And we had wonderful conversations, and he learned a little bit more about myself as I was learning about art. I had never really taken art seriously. As I was telling you, I thought everybody could draw. And he finally said to me, well listen, it seems like things are not working. You need to change your visa. Why do you insist on physical therapy? Why don't we make a bet and you apply to art school and if you get in you start art -- going to art school. And I think I was despondent enough to say, okay, I'll give it a try. And I applied to the Corcoran and received a scholarship and I said, okay, I guess this is the route I'll take. This had been after 2 1/2, almost 3 years, of being here in the U.S. So I started at the Corcoran and I was incredibly happy to encounter a whole lot of opportunities that I would've never encountered otherwise. Also, it guaranteed a student visa, which was a big relief. This would ensure that as long as I was a student here in the U.S. I would be okay. But while I was there I realized that the graphic design program, which is where I was, wasn't necessarily what I had in mind. The program at the time was very corporate driven. Things were done using a lot of computers, and things were all about, you know, production of annual reports and digital works, and I was like, oh, I want something more tangible, and I want to get my hands dirty, and I want to explore more. And while this was going through my mind I happened to sign up for another drawing class, in this case with the wonderful artist, Bill Christenberry. And Bill, in a very gentle way, almost cornered me one day and he said, young lady, you realize this is not a place for you. And he said, you -- if the world was perfect where would you go? And I said to him, well, if the world was perfect I would go to RISD. He said, well just apply, I'll write a letter of recommendation, and then all of a sudden things started working very easily. And the next semester I ended up at RISD. It's not as easy as it sounds, but just for sake -- for sake of time, yeah, it was -- it was still quite unexpected. RISD was like being back at my grandmother's carpentry studio. It was just a shop that extended throughout the city where everybody was eager to learn something new, where everybody was eager to explore, where everybody was passionate and curious about the arts, and this offered a wonderful platform for me to reinvent myself in some way. Also, at the time, and if any of you have gone to RISD, there's a great amount of self-portrait that you have to do. They insist on working on self-portraits and family trees and exploring who you are, and that was a lot for me to figure out at the time. To add to that, I lost my grandparents. And they -- as I said in the beginning, they were incredible human beings. They have -- had been great support network for me, and losing them was incredibly hard. One of the hardest things about losing them was something that some Latinos here might have heard about, and it's what some call [speaking foreign language], or the golden cage, which is basically being in the U.S., being able to take profit of so many opportunities, and yet here we are locked and stuck here. I could not leave the country even though I was perfectly legal because I had asked for a visa while being in the U.S. ^M00:20:01 So the moment I left the United States I would have to reapply for a visa. The chances for a mid-20's woman, single, from Colombia, gay, who happened to have her family in the U.S. to get a visa to come back in, nil. When the lawyer handed me that visa he said, if you go to Columbia, or if you go out of the United States, I will not represent you. So it was very clear for me that I couldn't manage to get out and come back in again. This was one of the hardest things I had to do, and it was one of the hardest decisions to make, just keeping a very somewhat cold mind and letting my grandparents go without being there for them in their last days. And all these questions between self-portraits and family trees and all the things that were going on, people started asking me who are you? Because I was clearly not the traditional New England student at the Rhode Island School of Design. And that made me ask, yeah, who am I? Who am I? And I started thinking of self as an artist. And I started thinking of self. And the more I thought the more I realized the only way to solve this or to find enlightenment in some kind of way would be through exploration, because I clearly didn't have the answers. So there was a lot of observation and exploration through the means that were familiar to me, and that was drawing. So I drew the things I missed about Columbia, like fruits organized in the grocery store, or cars beeping horns, or fountains, or coffee shops, and [inaudible], bus brakes screeching, and the big windows, and the sun hitting the mountains almost as if they could be split open. And this -- memories started filling my journals and sketchbooks. Then I moved on try to see the world from a different interpretation, and that would be through Latin American literature. And perhaps in a crazy attempt I decided to sign up for a class that was called Magical Realism and South. So it was the first time in my life I would attempt to read Garcia Marquez in English surrounded by people who knew very little about him, and to learn not just to reminisce and to capture the essence of my culture from my perspective, but also how others were perceiving it. I remember an architecture student during class saying, well this book is ridiculous. I mean, they talk about people licking the walls. Where would that happen? And I would think, yeah, that happens in my country. People do lick the walls because they have salt deficiency and there's cal on the wall so they lick the walls. But it's the understanding of a completely different world and trying to find a way to bridge those differences. So I started looking around me and collecting objects through visuals. Everything was an opportunity to draw. So my socks, a hat, a pen, a paper -- a piece of paper, a car that passed by, absolutely everything would be recorded in drawing form. I sometimes wonder, if somebody saw these without any explanation they would think I'm the most OCD person in the world. It's absolutely nuts to see this. But at the same time, that was my possibility of exploring things and observing objects that were familiar and were foreign at the time. It was basically changing my entire perspective on how to see the world, or at least an attempt on doing so. I tried to record the architecture around me very different from the houses that I grew up seeing in Colombia. These are roofs on Benefit [phonetic] Street in Providence, Rhode Island. I started recording the buildings that I walked past and then reinterpreting them in my own way. I would also record my dreams. This was a dream of a crazy, big turnip that -- I was in a farmer's community and in my dream they needed help to take it out of the earth because it was so, so big, and I still remember vividly the colors. I don't think I was able to -- I can tell I wasn't able to portray exactly what I saw in my dream, which was absolutely surreal, but still, this was my attempt. So it all took practice. It took a lot of practice just drawing, playing with humor. This is a sneeze. Doing more serious things in the classroom and studio. Recording buildings, rerecording them using different media and trying to explore what this meant for me. What is the influence of this over me? Or how can I possibly influence it by drawing it somehow. Of course failure was also a great part of this, and it's something that in the arts and being creative there's no way to escape. But one thing was very clear, and it was that drama should stay away from all these explorations. It was simply failing and starting again but not letting myself just lose my mind simply because I couldn't register things how I intended to. And this also was filtering into my life obviously. It was not just about a very serious exploration on drawing, but instead just trying to externalize all the questions and all the anguish that was going inside. And then the other essential part for me became iterations. This is a big bad wolf on a retake on Little Red Riding Hood, and I decided to tell the story from -- with a little bit of a spinoff. I don't know if you can see clearly from there, but Red Riding Hood is walking, she's all of a sudden attacked by the wolf, but not to eat her or eat her treats or anything, but all he wanted was the cape. And so he's dancing and prancing and then at the end he flies. So that's one interpretation. Then I drew another interpretation where the -- instead of -- instead of the, you know, story that we had before, or with the super flying wolf, I just decided to have little red riding hood say, okay, enough of this. I need my cape back and then on they went. The other great factor besides observation, iteration, failing, was process. And I just have one single example of process here, and it's just documenting the buildup of an illustration that was later used for a documentary through PBS. It was about a -- the story of two Colombian women, two very brave Colombian women. One of them, the mother, who was kidnapped for seven years. The other, the daughter, who happened to be in D.C. while her mother was kidnapped in the jungle of Columbia for a number of years. So I wanted to have both worlds come together somehow. So you can see to the -- to the left Washington, D.C., and you might find some of those buildings a little bit familiar. And then towards the right the jungle. So here's a close-up of Washington, D.C. And in the animation I made the, you know, the little red lights at the top of the George Washington Monument flicker and the lights in the -- in the Kennedy Center move around a little bit, and so on. So detail was, of course, imperative. The other thing I decided to take on was to take great leaps, and these were unexpected leaps, but in a way it was just learning to say yes to projects that came my way. And I applied all of these things, as I was saying, observation, exploration, iteration, failure, process, and not only to work or life, but to play. And this allowed for me to have a much easier platform to navigate. And whenever I was asked by then, who are you? At least I could, you know, come up with an answer just based on what I had been working on. Not everything was done on my own. I was also very lucky to find wonderful mentors who offered extraordinary examples to follow. And they also made sure to point out examples not to follow, and for that I'm tremendously grateful. As I noticed through their work, and the work I was doing, and how I was encountering the world, I recognized that one very important thing was to be kind, that kindness goes a really, really long way. The other thing I realized is that working hard does help a lot. And being an immigrant, it's not just hard, it's hard. ^M00:30:02 And because of that hard work and to keep a balance in life and to not go bitter about all the work that was being done, it was important to have fun. And so I decided to keep these three rules for whatever I was doing, and I still try to keep them. Now following rules is not easy, but I certainly try. Being an immigrant makes things even harder. The level of uncertainty makes it very difficult, so as graduation got closer and closer, there I was hunting again for a visa. So what next? What could I do after all the effort that I had been putting into my work and considering myself a creative person? I noticed that many of my characteristics were considered by society as disadvantages, and I realized that I couldn't put it in their shoulders to turn those disadvantages into advantages, that it was completely up to me. And I thought if it is up to me I won't turn them only into advantages, but big advantages and make sure that I would become indispensable. I don't know how to do absolutely extraordinary things that will save humanity, that is not the way I become indispensable, but in the work I do and how I do it, that's how I could keep on working hard, being kind, and having fun\, and making things as seemingly indispensable as possible. In one of those efforts I became a VIP guide for RISD. And what this meant was I was touring all the VIP visitors that came to RISD, showing them the buildings and what was going on around the school. And this allowed for absolutely fantastic conversations, and most of them would say to me, what do you want to do? What is it that you want to do? And I would say, I just want to tell stories. And these incredible men and women would be very kind until I would say that and then they would say, you can't do that, you have to do something more than just tell stories. It's not -- I mean, are you going to tell stories? Are you going to write books? Are you going to make movies? What are you going to do? And I would say, stories, that's what I really want to do. No, not a possibility. So I just said, okay, I'll do it on my own. I kept on working hard and harder and harder. And I got, again, very lucky and while I was trying to figure [inaudible] visa would come after being a student, I happened to meet Eileen Morrison. Eileen Morrison is not only a fantastic immigration lawyer, but an extraordinary human being. And where many had said to me, there's no option, perhaps if you find somebody to get married, or do something that, you know, is perhaps not the most Orthodox option, they would say, there's no possibility. Eileen instead looked at all my work and she said, let's try, let's give this a try. And she didn't give up and she very sharply took everything I had. She didn't make any promises she couldn't, but she put in her best work, and this was the most inspiring thing I have seen when I was in a very, very dire situation. So I said before, you know, how I had decided to take these rules of being kind, of working hard, and having fun, but this took it to a whole new level. Yeah, over three years of waiting, of jumping at any project I could, of still trying to keep my life together, and it wasn't easy. It wasn't easy at all. The uncertainty was despair inducing because it affects every single inch of your life. Do I buy this book I love? But if I have to leave the country in 30 days why would I buy it? Do I really want to make this incredible friendship or what seems like -- well, I might be gone. Any conversation, it just seeps in and it's incredibly hard to shake it off. Decision-making is hard, as I said, you know. Do I take a new phone plan even though my flip phone is broken and it's partly working? Well, you don't want to get into a contract if you are going to need to leave in no time. Uncertainty could easily drive anybody insane. And, finally, before losing it, I decided, okay, what is under my control? What can I change to make things easier for myself? So I decided to reach out and to share my personal story, something I wasn't adamant to do earlier. It was just, no, work will do it, work will do it, and that's it. And I started realizing that sharing my story allowed for empathy to start building, and then people would have references, or people to point me to, and things would start changing. And I allowed for others to elevate me and to think of things differently. So taking on those personal challenges and continuing to create was imperative throughout that time. I also tried my best to aim high and turn every disadvantage into an advantage, to make sure that the uncertainty would be countered by adaptability. I don't know if there are many Colombians here, but -- or [inaudible]. In Columbia, in Bogata there's a market called San Andresito. And San Andresito, whenever you go there you can you can find anything you're looking for. And if you don't find what you're looking for, they'll tell you all, oh, I don't have this, but I have this, and I don't -- and, you know, they'll figure it out until you end up buying whatever it is. And I thought -- I never thought I would find wisdom in San Andresito, but there I was. They would call, Juana, will you do this annual report? Yes. Will you do this animation? Yes. Will you do whatever it was? Yes, I'll do it, it doesn't matter. Of course, I was collapsing out of all the work I was taking on, but it just meant a possibility and an opportunity. Meanwhile, Eileen kept on working on making sure that I could get a visa as an artist. And then I got a denial, and it was as hard as a breakup, or even harder. It -- just the idea of, you know, yeah, you're good but not that good. It was basically what that eight page letter was telling me. So I was losing it. Moreover, this process was very expensive and I didn't have a lot of money just to keep on going and spending. But I knew I needed to stay here and that there was no reason after all those years of hard work to go back to Columbia and give up. Throughout the time, of course, there were ongoing conversations with my mother. And one day in particular she pointed out to me, Juana, this is very much like swimming 1500 meters. One thing I didn't tell you early on in an attempt to make the story shorter, was that I was a swimmer for a very long time, a competitive swimmer, and believe it or not I would swim 1500 meters as -- that was what I would compete on most at my meets. And 1500 meters is a long, long swim. And your head feels like it's bursting, your eyes and the goggles feel like they're going to bulge out of your head. You barely have the physical stamina, even though I was training four hours a day, going an hour to the gym, it's very, very hard to do. And the moment my mom said this it was clear to me that I had within me the tools to keep on swimming and to keep on going forward, and to treat things basically as if it was a 1500 meter meet. There I am. I'm [inaudible] but, you know, just try. So onward, and I kept being persistent. And I had to be very, very pragmatic, which as a Colombian wasn't part -- wasn't easy to do. So I had to think of myself as a phone battery and having 15% of battery left. If you have a 15% battery left you don't check Facebook. You don't waste time, you know, chatting with somebody really don't feel like chatting, or doing things that are unnecessary, because you have to save that battery. And I felt that I had that -- a lot of energy and I could not lose it being tremendously dramatic or petty or crying about things, and instead I had to keep a mentality of, okay, that denial was very hard. Now what next? How can we overcome this? So, fortunately enough, we had done a second filing of a visa and just kept on going hoping for that to go well. And then when pragmatism doesn't work, there's optimism, and of that, fortunately as Colombian, I did have my fair share. Thank goodness by the -- by mid-December in 2012 I received one of the most delightful calls I've received. Eileen, my lawyer, called to say that my visa had been approved. We both cried on the phone. We both celebrated. ^M00:40:00 I still can't get over it. And that night of the 12th I slept like I hadn't in years. For those of you who have waited for a visa, you know what that means. Shortly after I got a book deal that made me feel like the effort was entirely worth it. I have been showing some of the illustrations of the book within this presentation. That book is called Juana and Lucas and it's back there. And this validated a lot of the work that I had been doing. Moreover, I happened to meet Sally, my partner, and this was within a span of three months, and I thought, oh my gosh, is this whole year going to go this way? So it was in a way a new life and a way to see that hard work had paid off, that there was definitely a certain amount of luck, but a lot of it had been that persistence, that pragmatism, that optimism just in the right dose to make things happen. So is now everything perfect? No, but darn close, and for that I think it's worth saying that the journey was humbling, very reassuring, fortunately, and tremendously inspiring. And for that I'm grateful. Thank you very much. ^M00:41:32 [ Applause ] ^M00:41:39 ^M00:41:44 >> Catalina Gomez: Thank you so much, Juana, for this beautiful, beautiful presentation. Again, we're selling the books in the back. And also I wanted to announce that we have this little survey close to the exit here. They're from our office of communications. If you have a second to fill those out we would really appreciate it. Thank you again for coming. >> Can I ask you a question? >> Juana Medina: Sure, yeah. >> Catalina Gomez: Questions, yeah, we have questions. We're speechless, I'm speechless. >> Juana Medina: Yes [inaudible]? >> When you're doing the illustrations with the food, do you have any set way of designing the illustrating first, or do you see a piece of food and -- >> Juana Medina: It's mostly the food first, and that does help. With the latest series of books that I've been working with food, there has been some theme set up beforehand so that I have an idea of what I have to -- you know, the parameters I have to work within. But if it's just for fun I'll look at a carrot and see, you know, what ends up happening. So it's not necessarily prescribed, yeah. >> Like the radish that you showed a minute ago. >> Juana Medina: Yeah. >> Do you draw from a photograph or [inaudible] like that? [inaudible] on paper and then you put the food there, but that's not possible. >> Juana Medina: Right. Yeah, so initially I did start drawing with pen and ink around the fruit that I was using, and then I realized that it's a lot easier to just photograph the food because it has such a short lifespan. So just to photograph the food, take it into Photoshop and try all sorts of iterations, so that guaranteed that I could play a lot more with it. So, yeah, this is Photoshop. And then I can use it, you know, for however many times I want, yeah. Yes? ^M00:43:45 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:43:59 >> Absolutely, yes. There have been many influences. I think being a child, Quentin Blake, Jules Feiffer, Kino [phonetic]. I'm blanking right now but, you know, there were so -- yeah, Cheryl Steinberg [assumed spelling], were of great inspiration. And then I started learning a whole new amount of illustrators and cartoonists and that definitely was humbling and so inspiring. Moreover, and thanks for your question, as Catalina was saying, winning the National Cartoonist Society J. Kennedy Memorial Scholarship was a wonderful way of connecting with many cartoonists, and that guaranteed that I could learn from them, not just about their work, but their personal experience with art, and that was a -- you know, just a great privilege really, yeah. ^M00:45:07 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:45:19 That's a really good question. So with Juana and Lucas, the story was very clear from the beginning. I'll just tell you very briefly. What happened was my mom picked me up at school and I was fuming and furious, and she asked what was going on. And I said, well they want me to learn something called the English. I really don't want to learn this. And she said, well, we're going to Disney World and Mickey Mouse only speaks English so you might want to give it a try. And that kind of solved it. So the structure of the story was there and it was very clear what I wanted to do. And when I started presenting the pitch for the story to different publishing houses I got all sorts of answers. Within those answers there were some that said, you know, Bogata is too remote. Nobody really knows about Columbia. Why we should kids in the U.S. learn about Columbia? That's not interesting. Some were saying, well, this is very exciting. The character is very cute. Why don't we make them Mexican, and instead of a dog we give her a burro, and instead of -- you know, oh she would be so cute with a sombrero. And I was like, Jesus, do they realize how offensive this is just, you know? And moreover, unfortunately, I've never been to Mexico so how could I tell the story. And so it was really interesting. Or turning her -- the character into an immigrant and being at Jackson Heights. And I thought that's perfectly valid, but it's not my experience. I can't really speak of that. So that was a point where instead of yes, I had to very kindly decline and say no, and know exactly what I wanted to do. And that's hard, especially after saying yes so many times to everything, and not knowing if that no is going to cut my opportunities that are lying ahead. Yeah. Yes? >> Speaking of Columbia, how does [inaudible] is that tomorrow? >> Juana Medina: It's -- the voting is next week. I'm so moved. I am so moved to think that after so, so many years we are going to see peace in our lifetime. That is the most exciting thing I can think of. And I truly hope that all of us Colombians will be able to see that in some kind of way. Is this peace treaty perfect? No, but no peace is going to be perfect. It's -- there's been so much pain and so many violations of everything that it's impossible to think of a way that would erase the problematic entirely, but I truly, truly hope for a yes and that people will see the value of what has been done in Cuba in all the talks. Yeah. Yeah. Yes? >> How much of a culture shock was [inaudible]? >> Juana Medina: Oh, it was interesting because my grandparents lived in Boston for a while, so I had grown up hearing a lot of stories about Boston and I -- we had visited. So it wasn't a tremendous shock, until conversations started to come forward. I remember in particular talking to somebody for about half an hour and she must have been completely absent-minded and all of a sudden she turns to me and she says, you know, I just realized this is the first person, I talked to a brown person. And I couldn't even think of what to say. So, yeah, there have been interesting things, but not all of them have happened in New England. I love New England. I'll be there in a week or so, and I love it. But it was interesting. D.C. also has -- I mean, I remember I was volunteering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and on my first day this very kind woman was guiding me through the hospital, which is huge. This was at the prior location. And all of a sudden she said, wait hold on, I need to show you something, because I had told her I was Colombian and I had just arrived and all these things. And she said, let me show you, this is an elevator. If you press this button you go up. If you press this button you go down. And I was like, wow, you know, we don't have those in the jungle. I mean, it's just like, oh my God. I mean, how do you even -- so I just said, thank you, thank you very much. And then later on -- because I think people most of the time do it out of kindness. ^M00:50:01 And there's some nervousness and simply not knowing. And I'm sure I have said awful, awful things to people, you know, in many situations. So it was hard. At the end of the, you know, just a few minutes later we were standing in line and she said, so how is the cultural shock? You know, how hard has it been to adapt to the city? And I said, you know, I feel like I'm in a small town. It feels so tiny and the buildings are so short. And she was like, really? Really? So, yeah, I think, again, kindness goes a long way, yeah. >> I hear that you're going to participate in a project with [inaudible]. Can you comment a little about this? >> Juana Medina: You heard right, yes. I can barely contain myself about this project. I'm so excited. Can I say the name? Catalina [inaudible] will be joining many young readers through her Technicolor Adventures. And the poet laureate has been writing absolutely fantastic, just such beautiful versus for this project. And we'll be collaborating. He will be writing. I will be illustrating. And there's a whole team behind us guaranteeing that everything will turn out as well as it can go. And it'll be a great collaboration with second graders. >> Second and third graders. >> Second and third graders, so we can't wait [inaudible] come up with, yeah. Yeah? That was your question? Oh great. Good. All right. Well, thank you very much. Thank you [applause]. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gove.