Dr. Oriel María Siu Is On A Mission to Empower and Liberate Children of Color. Here’s How:

Author and Educator, Dr. Oriel María Siu, has over two decades of experience pioneering educational spaces in aims to empower communities of color.

Upon entering motherhood, Dr. Siu sought to find stories that represented the resilience of communities of color in ways that children could understand. When she found out those stories had yet to exist, she wrote her own. 

The Latinx Collective caught up with Dr. Siu to discuss her children's book, Christopher the Ogre Cologre, It's Over!, the story of Christopher Columbus from the perspective of Indigenous and Black resistance, along with a few other children's books in the works that are made to empower and liberate children of the Americas.

You have such an interesting background - for example you were born in Honduras but your parents are from many other countries. Tell us more about your family history - how did your parents meet? 

I am one of two proud daughters to a strong & mighty Náhuatl/Pipil mother from western El Salvador -María E. Siu Bernal,- and a dedicated Chinese Nicaraguan father -Virgilio Siu Chang. Both my parents’ stories are stories of strength and beautiful struggle. 

My parents met during the war in Guatemala in 1976, at the Universidad de San Carlos, where they were both medical students with big HUGE dreams of serving people and communities as doctors during war-time Central America. Both of them, through determination and commitment, achieved their medical dreams and began their practices in Honduras, where they had me in 1981, and my sister, muralist Alicia María Siu, in 1983. I grew up surrounded by hundreds of chickens in the banana-growing region of El Progreso, Honduras, as that was one way patients would pay my mom for taking care of them. We were also gifted lots of aguacates, rabbits, and doves

An orphan since she was a toddler, my mother comes from a deeply impoverished family in the coffee-growing region of western El Salvador, where the Martínez government massacred thousands of Pipiles in 1932. As a child, she walked the Santa Lucía hill where she grew up, barefoot.  Their house was made of mud. And she ate what her grandma was able to grow -fruits, vegetables, leaves, tortillas and eggs. Hardly ever anything else, she tells me. This, until my mom's older sister was able to find an orphanage that took my mom in, in San Salvador.  It is at the nurse's office of that Orphanage where my mother  knew she would become a doctor one day.

My father comes from incredibly hard-working Chinese parents and grandparents who left their homeland in southern China for Bluefields, in the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, in the early 1900s. They arrived on that coast with nothing more but their willingness to make it in a land absolutely unknown to them. None of my Chinese great-grandparents knew any Spanish, or English, when they arrived in Bluefields. They only spoke Cantonese. My father tells me that, on their first day of arrival, they asked someone in the town for some sugar and flour. And that they began making Chinese sweet bread to sell on the streets of Bluefields. That is how they began their lives in Central America. For a very long time, these great-grandparents of mine had little to eat, white rice with an egg on top. Eaten with chopsticks, of course. I love hearing my dad’s and uncles’ stories about how their Cantonese grandparents made it through those initial years in Bluefields. These stories give me reasons to exist with lots of pride. 

I have written more about my mother's story here, and about my dad's story, and the Chinese diaspora in Central America, here.  

I am proud of my Pipil and Chinese heritages, of my parents' and grandparents' struggles and willingness to ascertain life despite it all. Because that is who we are in the Americas - we are products of incredible life-affirming stories. My parents have always, and will always be my roots in life.  

What was it that led you to pursue a career in education, literature and cultural studies?

The need to tell our silenced, buried stories is what led me to education, literature, and cultural studies.

As most children in the Americas still TODAY, I grew up without access to books. And the few five or six children's books my mama had manage to collect, were all books of white princess characters with experiences so far-removed from my Honduran world - fairy tales that never spoke to the realities of the Americas but instead offered imaginaries that did nothing to help us  think critically about our world. 

Neither did I connect to any of the books I had to read at school.  Even though I did not know then they were full of lies and eurocentered viewpoints, or what I now call foundational fairytales, I felt estranged from them, disconnected. And from all of the "great" male figures I had to read about in those school books, Columbus was, of course, the one that got spoken of the most, as a fairytaled story that is - that one story we've all heard in elementary school, and even our high schools.

Fast-forward to twenty plus years later, when I am now a college professor of Ethnic Studies at a university in Washington State, and a mother to a Black/Chinese/Indigenous daughter, and I have come to understand that the insistence on teaching fairytales as truths is actually a systemic American problem, -a problem that is  529 years-old. White supremacy will have us teaching fairytales as truths, writing fairytales as history, and it will even have us celebrating fairytales through annual holidays -holidays that are supposed to celebrate our foundations: Thanksgiving, Columbus Day, the 4th, President's Day, etc...

Truth is, history textbooks, teachers and school curricula insist on negating and brushing off the realities of a continent occupied for over 500 years. And the history of this occupied continent is instead taught to children as an attractive story with a pretty beginning and a happily ever after ending  - a narrative that is composed of gigantic foundational lies. These lies end up permeating the core of what children grow up to believe about themselves, others, and the land we live on.

So, at some point, I got tired of the historical lying, and decided to contribute children's books of my own. I wanted to be able to read to my daughter books that not only represented her and children of color, but that also offered all children the opportunity to imagine a different landscape; one rooted in their own histories and stories. I wanted to offer a different map for potentiating their imaginaries.  Christopher the Ogre Cologre, It's Over! is the story of Christopher Columbus, the discovery myth, and the European occupation of the Americas, from the perspective of astounding Indigenous and Black resistances to 529 years of white supremacy. It is a book for all children, and adults, of the Americas.

I know you were inspired to write children’s books because of your daughter- but what inspired you to create the “Rebedita” character and her many virtues? Where did you draw from to create her story?

I write to my daughter, and for all children of the Americas - children of color and white children. I write to undo the foundational fairy tales that schools, teachers, and textbooks insist on teaching our children because I firmly believe and know that truth liberates us from staying and becoming prisoners of our past, while also potentiating us to act against the cruelties of our present.

I write because I could not find books that empowered my daughter in liberating ways. I write so that children know that they, too, can be, and are, producers of knowledge; that they can too write history. I write children's books so that children don't get to adulthood knowing lies as truths.

Writing the Rebeldita the Fearless series has become the most important thing I can ever do with whatever time I have left on our planet.  No other writing, in my view, can ever come close in importance. No academic publication (and I have published extensively within academia) has ever felt more imperative, or vital, than writing to my daughter and for all children of the Americas.

To create Rebeldita, I drew from all the children I saw on the streets of LA and Seattle while we organized against Obama's deportation regime. I drew from my nieces' strong voice and fearlessness as she navigated life without a father due to the U.S. deportation regime, and I drew from my daughter's own fearlessness when she gets to writing, creating, and telling her own stories.   

If there could only be 1 takeaway for families that read the “Rebeldita” series - what would you want that to be?

With Christopher the Ogre Cologre, It's Over! and my Rebeldita series, I hope educators can begin to normalize speaking truth to children - the truth about the Americas, and why it is important to write and tell our stories, with joy and fearlessness.

I wish that I had learned more about the real U.S History at any point in my education. You’re advocating for Ethnic Studies to be a requirement in every US Public School - what recommendation do you have for people like myself who are no longer in school but want to educate themselves outside of the traditional education system?

Books are, and will always be, a way to ourselves, our histories, and our futures. I would recommend reading Native and Black authors, historians, and philosophers. But also read books and stories by Asian refugees, Palestinians, Africans in Europe, in the U.S., read books written by people who are writing from the margins of power, outside of the institutionalized writing structures, authors who have had to figure out how to get their story out.

And yes, I am part of a large collective of educators all throughout the United States who are saying “Ethnic Studies at every elementary school, high school, and college, NOW!” And always! Ethnic Studies is a field born only fifty years ago out of a need to challenge the white supremacist structures of knowledge production and academia imbedded within our educational systems.  Ethnic Studies ruptures racist institutional walls through truth, fearless scholarship, and narratives that have been left out of educational, social, political, and economic institutions for over 500 years. This field helps students of all ethnicities regain hope, humanity, and a voice. It is an empowering movement, and all the studies show that it helps all students thrive. I have seen it, and I have lived it when I was a student at CSUN.   

What are you working on next?

It's still a secret, but the third Rebeldita the Fearless book will be about the biggest lie ever told. For now, I am enjoying reading Christopher the Ogre Cologre, It's Over! at schools ready and willing to engage the truth, telling the stories that were not meant to be told by us, and sharing the histories that were not meant to be shared. 

Authored by Miranda Perez.