A collection of ten classic tales from Northern New Mexico retold in Spanish and English.

A collection of ten classic tales from Northern New Mexico retold in Spanish and English.

Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote is an allegorical picture book about the hardships and struggles of immigration from award-winning children’s book author and illustrator Duncan Tonatiuh. A Pura Belpré Author and Illustrator Honor Book! An ALA/ALSC Notable Children’s Book! Papa Rabbit left two years ago to travel far away north to find work in the great carrot and lettuce fields to earn money for his family. When Papa does not return home on the designated day, Pancho sets out to find him. He packs Papa’s favorite meal—mole, rice and beans, a heap of still-warm tortillas, and a jug full of fresh aguamiel—and heads north. Along the way, Pancho crosses a river, climbs a fence, and passes through a tunnel guarded by uniformed, bribe-taking snakes. He soon meets a coyote, who offers to help Pancho in exchange for some of Papa’s favorite foods. They travel together until the food is gone and the coyote decides he is still hungry . . . for Pancho! Tonatiuh enlivens Pancho’s story with the spirit of regional folklore, and he adds cultural atmosphere in arresting, flat folk art filled with cultural references. Of course, “coyote” has two meanings here. With tenderness and honesty, he brings to light the trials and tribulations facing families who seek to make better lives for themselves and their children by illegally crossing borders. “Incandescent, humane and terribly necessary.” ―Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review) “Pancho Rabbit’s trip has the feel of a classic fable or fairy tale.” ―Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

Recovering lost voices and exploring issues intimate and institutional, this sweeping examination of Spanish California illuminates Indian struggles against a confining colonial order and amidst harrowing depopulation. To capture the enormous challenges Indians confronted, Steven W. Hackel integrates textual and quantitative sources and weaves together analyses of disease and depopulation, marriage and sexuality, crime and punishment, and religious, economic, and political change. As colonization reduced their numbers and remade California, Indians congregated in missions, where they forged communities under Franciscan oversight. Yet missions proved disastrously unhealthful and coercive, as Franciscans sought control over Indians' beliefs and instituted unfamiliar systems of labor and punishment. Even so, remnants of Indian groups still survived when Mexican officials ended Franciscan rule in the 1830s. Many regained land and found strength in ancestral cultures that predated the Spaniards' arrival. At this study's heart are the dynamic interactions in and around Mission San Carlos Borromeo between Monterey region Indians (the Children of Coyote) and Spanish missionaries, soldiers, and settlers. Hackel places these local developments in the context of the California mission system and draws comparisons between California and other areas of the Spanish Borderlands and colonial America. Concentrating on the experiences of the Costanoan and Esselen peoples during the colonial period, Children of Coyote concludes with an epilogue that carries the story of their survival to the present day.

A hiking trail through majestic mountains. A raw, unpeopled wilderness stretching as far as the eye can see. These are the settings we associate with our most famous books about nature. But Gavin Van Horn isn’t most nature writers. He lives and works not in some perfectly remote cabin in the woods but in a city—a big city. And that city has offered him something even more valuable than solitude: a window onto the surprising attractiveness of cities to animals. What was once in his mind essentially a nature-free blank slate turns out to actually be a bustling place where millions of wild things roam. He came to realize that our own paths are crisscrossed by the tracks and flyways of endangered black-crowned night herons, Cooper’s hawks, brown bats, coyotes, opossums, white-tailed deer, and many others who thread their lives ably through our own. With The Way of Coyote, Gavin Van Horn reveals the stupendous diversity of species that can flourish in urban landscapes like Chicago. That isn’t to say city living is without its challenges. Chicago has been altered dramatically over a relatively short timespan—its soils covered by concrete, its wetlands drained and refilled, its river diverted and made to flow in the opposite direction. The stories in The Way of Coyote occasionally lament lost abundance, but they also point toward incredible adaptability and resilience, such as that displayed by beavers plying the waters of human-constructed canals or peregrine falcons raising their young atop towering skyscrapers. Van Horn populates his stories with a remarkable range of urban wildlife and probes the philosophical and religious dimensions of what it means to coexist, drawing frequently from the wisdom of three unconventional guides—wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold, Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu, and the North American trickster figure Coyote. Ultimately, Van Horn sees vast potential for a more vibrant collective of ecological citizens as we take our cues from landscapes past and present. Part urban nature travelogue, part philosophical reflection on the role wildlife can play in waking us to a shared sense of place and fate, The Way of Coyote is a deeply personal journey that questions how we might best reconcile our own needs with the needs of other creatures in our shared urban habitats.

Folklore About A Young Boy And A Tricky Coyote.

Holly Menino is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in National Geographic and Smithsonian. She is the author of Calls beyond Our Hearing: Unlocking the Secrets of Animal Voices and Forward Motion: Horses, Humans, and the Competitive Enterprise.