Abstract
This article examines the racialized productions of space in Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson’s 2015 picturebook Last Stop on Market Street, arguing that depictions of characters’ movements show how Black mobility constitutes a form of resistance to state circumscription. Language and illustrations both work to portray CJ and Nana’s environment as fundamentally flexible, often exceeding the confines of what appears to be possible. The geographies of their journey on a city bus privilege communication, alternative epistemologies, and the spatial transcendence of creativity over literalism. Yet, importantly, other realities also impact the way characters move; the carceral regulation of Black people within the United States inevitably shadows this book’s spatial optimism, and Nana’s loving surveillance and careful direction shape the outlines of CJ’s imagination. To move while Black, Market Street suggests, is to create new possibilities within the confines of limitations, the process of motion a continual and unsettled oscillation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
I seek to consider the role Black embodiment plays in Market Street without resorting uncritically to the academic trend of using “Black bodies” as a synonym for Black people. Black scholars and writers have pushed back against the use of this phrase; Tanya Steele (2015) writes in the film industry publication Indiewire that referring to Black people as “Black bodies” ignores the violence white supremacy commits beyond the physical: “What purpose does that [term] serve? Why do we detach the body from the person?” My reading of CJ and Nana in this paper acknowledges corporeality and matter—the role of the material body—as a geographic process that is always necessarily in conversation with Black personhood.
An analysis of mobility in Market Street not primarily focused on race would necessarily consider how the book’s representations of homelessness complicate its broader ideologies around movement. Nicholas Blomley has argued that cities view homeless people as obstacles to the primary purpose of sidewalk design, pedestrian flow, and that the homeless are acceptable within an urban space “as long as they are treated as ‘moving and static elements’” who do not impede traffic (Blomley, 2010, p. 47). Market Street’s homeless—or, more precisely, those who arguably appear to be homeless—either move along the sidewalk or visit a soup kitchen, moving in ways that do not challenge or push back against the state. Unlike CJ and Nana, whose mobility simultaneously acknowledges and contests state interests, these characters perform a kind of univocal and uncomplicated homelessness, one that coexists comfortably with the intended design of the city space.
Last Stop on Market Street provides no numbered pagination. For citation purposes, I’ve assigned page numbers, beginning with the first page of narrative text (“CJ pushed through the church doors, skipped down the steps”).
During the period in which de la Peña and Robinson created Market Street, Robinson lived in San Francisco, in a neighborhood that borders the Tenderloin (Millner 2016).
Market Street is illustrated by a Black man, and its words are written by a non-Black (Latinx) man, a factor that deserves acknowledgment within broader conversations about the importance of #ownvoices writing. Black U.S. identity is rooted in a historical specificity linked to African diasporic survival, negotiation, and resistance, as George Yancy contends; Latinx experiences have their own axis of struggle (p. 119). And yet Market Street, as I argue in this article, very much contends with the concerns of Black geographies and Black epistemologies as articulated by Black scholars. Certainly, this productive engagement stems in large part from Christian Robinson’s illustrations, which visually center Blackness, Black negotiation, and Black joy. To some extent, the engagement also exists independently of de la Peña’s perceptions of the book. Market Street is, despite de la Peña’s statement, a book “about” diversity, about race, in that the characters’ movements cannot be divorced from the context(s) in which they exist as Black. My reading of Market Street simultaneously acknowledges de la Peña’s contributions and the limitations of his own insights.
References
Barker, John. (2009). ‘Driven to Distraction?’ Children’s Experiences of Car Travel. Mobilities, 4(1), 59–76.
Blomley, Nicholas. (2010). Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow. London: Routledge.
Collins, Patricia Hill. (1990). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge: London.
Corey, Canapary, and Galanis Research. (2016). “S.F. Municipal Transportation Agency Ridership Survey 2016.” SF MTA. Retrieved 19 October, 2018 from https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/agendaitems/2016/12-6-16%20Item%2015%202016%20Muni%20Customer%20Satisfaction%20Survey%20Report.pdf.
Cresswell, Tim. (2012). On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. London: Routledge.
Danielson, Jules. (2015). “Last Stop on Market Street: A Visit with Matt de la Peña & Christian Robinson.” Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast. Retrieved 2 October, 2018 from http://blaine.org/sevenimpossiblethings/?p=3624.
de la Peña, Matt. (2016). “2016 Newbery Acceptance by Matt de la Peña.” The Horn Book. Retrieved 14 October 2018, from https://www.hbook.com/2016/06/2016-newbery-acceptance-by-matt-de-la-pena/.
de la Peña, Matt, and Robinson, Christian. (2015). Last Stop on Market Street. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers.
Fleetwood, Nicole. (2004). ‘Busing It’ in the City: Black Youth, Performance, and Public Transit. The Drama Review, 48(2), 33–48.
Goff, Philip Atiba, et al. (2014). The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(4), 526–545.
Grengs, Joe. (2002). Community-Based Planning as a Source of Political Change: The Transit Equity Movement of Los Angeles’ Bus Riders Union. Journal of the American Planning Association, 68(2), 165–178.
Inwood, Joshua F.J., Alderman, Derek, and Williams, Jill. (2015). ‘Where Do We Go From Here?’: Transportation Justice and the Struggle for Equal Access. Southeastern Geographer, 55(4), 417–433.
Jensen, Ole B. (2013). Staging Mobilities. London: Routledge.
Katz, Cindi. (2008). Bad Elements: Katrina and the Scoured Landscape of Social Reproduction. Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 15(1), 15–29.
Koefoed, Lasse, Christensen, Mathilde Dissing, and Simonsen, Kirsten. (2017). Mobile Encounters: Bus 5A as a Cross-cultural Meeting Place. Mobilities, 12(5), 726–739.
Lurch, n.3. (2018). In OED Online. Retrieved from http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/111282.
Martin, Michelle. (2004). Brown Gold: Milestones of African American Children’s Picture Books, 1845-2002. London: Routledge.
Massey, Doreen. (1994). Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McKittrick, Katherine. (2006). Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.
Millner, Caille. (2016). “Illustrator Finds his Voice on Market Street.” San Francisco Chronicle. Accessed 24 October, 2018 from https://www.sfchronicle.com/books/article/Illustrator-finds-his-voice-on-Market-Street-8348136.php.
Morris, Aldon D. (1986). The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press.
Mountz, Alison. (2011). Specters at the Port of Entry: Understanding State Mobilities through an Ontology of Exclusion. Mobilities, 6(3), 317–334.
Shabazz, Rashad. (2015). Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Shapiro, Joseph P. (1994). No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement. New York: Broadway.
Sharpe, Christina. (2016). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press.
Steele, Tanya. (2015). “I Am Not a Black Body -- #SpringValleyHigh.” Indiewire. Retrieved 3 December, 2018 from https://www.indiewire.com/2015/10/i-am-not-a-black-body-springvalleyhigh-139087/.
Yancy, George. (2008). Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Katharine Slater is an assistant professor of English at Rowan University, where she teaches courses on children’s and young adult literature. Her previous publications include articles in Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, The Lion and the Unicorn, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, and a collection on early readers. She is currently at work on a book project that considers how spatial constructs contribute to the ideologies of visual narratives for young people, arguing that these ideologies depend upon geography for their reproduction, survival, and power.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Slater, K. “Lurched Forward and Stopped”: Last Stop on Market Street and Black Mobility. Child Lit Educ 51, 451–465 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-019-09393-6
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-019-09393-6