Today we’d like to introduce you to Oriel Siu
Hi Oriel, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I am the proud daughter of a strong Náhuat-Pipil woman orphaned very early on in life, María E., and a unique Nicaraguan Chinese-Central American, Virgilio Siu Chang. Both my parents met and became medical doctors in Guatemala during the Central American wars of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. I was born amidst three wars in Honduras in 1981 and was raised in the small northern-coast village of El Progreso – a place known for being an enclave of U.S. banana plantations in the region. My parents treated mostly banana plantation workers during that time. I grew up in this banana world, without books as there were no libraries in El Progreso (there are still no libraries there), but with many stories and life scenarios about the hardships endured by workers in these U.S.-owned plantations, war and displacement stories from both sides of my family, and with countless chickens, rabbits, and doves that my sister and I took care of at home. We had no toys, and definitely no screens, so I also grew up watching my sister develop into the muralist that she is today. I can vividly remember sitting there in her presence, day in day out, watching her hands create and paint the world around us.
When I was around 10 years old, we moved to San Pedro Sula (SPS), where I lived most of my adolescent years and had the opportunity to learn and fall in love with volleyball (and sports in general!). This, thanks to the Cuban Revolution which was then sending trainers to Honduras in order to help the region grow in this area. I still hadn’t read a single book by then, except for what was required and offered at school. Public libraries, to this day, continue to be a rarity in SPS. But in 1997, at the age of 16, like millions of other Central Americans, my family and I were forced to leave the homelands for Los Angeles. The post-war and entrance of neoliberal policies had left Honduras in a dire social and economic state where life became impossible. Honduras in the 90s was characterized by rampant social and political violence. We witnessed first hand the terror and consequences of more than a century of US imperial political and military intervention in the Central American region. After an incident in June of 1997 that left my family and I fearing for our lives, I was forced to flee. I left first in August of 1997, and a year later, my family was able to join me in Los Angeles.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Los Angeles was very hard to navigate as a young 16-year-old without my parents or sister. But when I later figured out how to write a college entry essay -and what it actually was-, I was able to get into California State University, Northridge, and very soon Los Angeles became a most fortunate place for me. I became wowed by libraries, access to books, and meeting people from all over Central America, Abya Yala, and the world. Through books and people’s stories, I got to know the larger history of Central America, Latin America, and the region’s relationship to the US. CSUN’s Chicana and Chicano Studies, more specifically, allowed me the space to learn about power relations in the hemisphere, the political and economic forces behind forced migrations, and the historical experiences of indigenous and U.S. communities of color. Alongside a pluri-ethnic and multicultural coalition of students (Students Against War -SAW) that we built, I started organizing around issues that impacted our communities, namely the War in Iraq, increasing college fee hikes, ROTC recruitment at college campuses were the student population was no longer mostly white, college accessibility, and the right for undocumented students to stay and thrive. It was during my years at CSUN organizing that I realized how empowering it is to take ownership of your own history and story. A group of us Central American students and community members also built the first Central American Studies program in the nation at CSUN. Many long-lasting, empowering relationships came out of my years there, from 1999 to 2004. I knew then, education was to be my path and that there was much work ahead for all of us decolonizing educational spaces and school curricula.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I write children’s books that undo the fairy tales told by the settler nations of Abya Yala – that is, the United States and all other nation states formed as a result of the European occupation of the continent. Up until the 1960s, people of color, oppressed communities and silenced voices did not have the avenues to publish our own stories, histories, and our own words. This deeply shaped the story of stories -who got to tell their story and who didn’t. It also determined who could and couldn’t produce books in the American continent; who could and who couldn’t access or see themselves in them. For centuries, and before the existence of academic fields like Ethnic Studies, school curricula in the Americas has been written to submerge people of color’s real lived histories, stories and experiences into silence. This became quite evident to me when I started teaching college in 2012 and witnessed how 18-year-old adults were arriving to college with very fairy-taled, white-washed notions of the land we live on, the history of this continent, and ideas of race. Ingrained settler colonialism in books became even more evident when I became a mother in 2013 and started looking for books to read to my daughter. Finding books to read to her became quite the impossible task. Most books we found glorified and/or decontextualized royal (colonial) cultures, capitalist ideologies, sexist and/or homophobic narratives, the supremacy of the white experience, and/or used children of color as pure tokens for the story to seem diverse, as secondary or even tertiary marginal characters. My particular preoccupation then became the many ways in which white supremacy embeds itself in children’s books, in our educational systems, libraries, school cultures, and university curricula. As a professor of Ethnic Studies and mother, I came to the conclusion that it was imperative we produce more anti-racist, de-colonizing teaching material at the K-12 level.
My second book, Christopher the Ogre Cologre, It’s Over! / Cristóbal Cologro ¡Tu Fin por Fin Llegó! is specifically born out of the need to disrupt the fairytaled stories children are still taught at schools about Christopher Columbus and the Americas. It can be found at all major bookstores, online, and many independent bookstores. Special discounts exist for schools and large purchases through the author website at www.orielmariasiu.com.
My first book, Rebeldita the Fearless in Ogreland, decenters racist, colonized and simply erroneous narratives about undocumented immigration into the U.S. and instead places the experiences of an undocumented girl who fights deportations at the core of narrative creation. This book is also found at all major bookstores, online, and can also be obtained on the author website at www.orielmariasiu.com.
Who else deserves credit in your story?
Rebeldita, my main character, is the Black and Indigenous voice of AbyaYala who reminds us we are on occupied lands, and that there is much work for us to do in telling this story. The communities I am part of, the mentors I have had the privilege of encountering along the way, their stories, my family’s, my first editor, Dr. Mario Escobar and Izote Press out of Los Angeles, my sister muralist, Alicia Siu, who beautifully and powerfully illustrated the first Rebeldita book (find her at www.aliciasiu.com), my translator, Matthew Byrne, who is an absolutely gifted translator and scholar (find him at www.matthewdbyrne.com), and the illustrator of my second book, Víctor Zúñiga-Muro, have all played a pivotal role in creating Rebeldita the Fearless.
I am always thankful to them and grateful for all the educators, teachers and professors who are bringing my books into their classrooms, the students who share their stories with me after encountering Rebeldita, and all the librarians who courageously counter book bans and truth bans on the daily.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.orielmariasiu.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dra.siu/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/orielsiu/
