Background

Picturebooks have adapted a notion of single motherhood for new generations because of their exceptional role in children’s upbringing. This role is multifunctional and embraces an invaluable tool of socialization (Gooden, 2001, p. 89), and “a key means of apprenticeship into literacy, literature and social values” (Painter, et al., 2014, p. 1). A notion of single motherhood could logically be modelled and reproduced through children’s picturebooks.

The value and necessity of questions broached in this article is at least threefold. First, researchers insist on a ‘dearth of attention to mothers in humanities’ (Fraustino and Coats 2016, p. 7). The representation of single mothers in picturebooks, as a constantly underrepresented or often misrecognized social group, has been an overlooked area of study, despite its significant relevance for young readers. Scholars’ attempt to bring to the fore a depiction of single mother families in children’s picturebooks is rare (Fraustino, 2009, p. 68). Rare and therefore significant contributions have been made in this field by researchers who have examined particular instances of mother-headed family portrayals in children’s picturebooks. For instance, Fraustino critiques the book Big Momma Makes the World (2002), authored by Phyllis Root and illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, for its reinforcement of “middle-class momism values” (2009, p. 68), whilst Dorina K. Lazo Gilmore (2016) applauds the depiction of a minority widow mother in Mama Does the Mambo (2001) written by Katherine Leiner and illustrated by Edel Rodriguez. Gilmore claims that picturebook mothers from an ethnic minority enrich mainstream motherhood and mothering models with multidimensional examples outside white, middle-class culture. She argues: “These mothers are naturally emotional and resilient, creative, and in touch with their sexual identities, all the while encouraging independence, promoting education, and preparing their children for challenges such as dealing with racial oppression” (2016, p. 97).

Research also suggests that Anglophone children’s literature adopts a narrow view and repeats topics related to issues of contemporary Latinx and Caribbean cultures, such as migration (Jiménez García, 2017, p. 115) or poverty and the colonial past. For example, it has been argued that Caribbean Anglophone children’s picturebooks largely explore ‘transition experiences of young Caribbean children […] either via immigration or death of a loved one’ (Malcolm and Lowery, 2011, p. 47). Researchers feel cautious about the recurrence of Caribbean rural and traditional culture in picturebooks that may create distorted assumptions about ‘authentic portrayals of the typical contemporary Caribbean lifestyle’ (Malcolm and Lowery, 2011, p. 47). This narrow focus on particular topics reflects a peripheral position of Latinx and Caribbean literatures within Anglophone narrative space. A broader look at the discussions about these literatures shows scholars’ interests in more diverse topics, such as activism (Rhodes, 2021), agency (Vaughn et al., 2022), or transnationalism and transnational identity (Brochin, 2017).

At the same time, scholars have been developing an extensive methodological toolkit to better understand the representations of these topics in picturebooks. For example, critical content analysis of visual images has been augmented by a raft of theories such as postcolonial and decolonizing theories, Latinx and Chicanx epistemologies and narrative aesthetics, allowing Carmen M. Martínez-Roldán and Denise Dávila to examine the reproduction of colonial ideologies in visual and narrative strategies of culinary children’s picturebooks (2019). Janine M. Schall, Julia López-Robertson and Jeanne G. Fain applied Latino Critical Race Theory ‘to examine ways that Latinx immigrants are positioned in the illustrations of Latinx immigrant journey books’ (2019, p. 59), and Aisha Spencer (2017) brings a postcolonial framework to the research of Caribbean children’s literature, focusing largely on literacy and children’s education in the region.

The visibility and diversity of Latinx and Caribbean characters in Anglophone children’s literature remains a minefield of heated debate. Overall, the diversity of picturebook characters and their cultural otherness in Anglophone children’s literature across different national traditions still cause much controversy (Pearson, et al., 2019). On the one hand, researchers confirm that cultural diversity in childhood and teen life enables the development of imagination (Thomas, 2016); on the other, unfamiliar ethnicities and cultures might still be treated as marginal and insignificant exoticism (Habib, 2018).

In this article, I use the term ‘Anglophone’ primarily to refer to English-speaking contexts of the United States, where the analyzed picturebooks were written and published, as well as the broader international English-speaking community. The contemporary cultural environment provides this survey with a rather unique opportunity to envision English as a lingua franca and therefore to survey the ways in which other cultures are translated and constructed through the lens of the language of global communication and their respective cultures. From this perspective, I put together Latinx American and Caribbean children’s literatures that share the same marginalised place within English-speaking North American literature. Geographically, historically, and culturally, the Caribbean region and Latin America in its entirety are often viewed as being on the periphery of US dominance in the Western hemisphere and globally. From an Anglophone point of view, Latinx American and Caribbean children’s literatures and literary studies are frequently placed together and described as marginalised and peripheral. As Ann González stated, they are ‘the periphery of the periphery of the periphery’ (2009, p. 3). Articles, books, and collections report on ‘the paucity of Latino/a representation in children’s literature’ (Serrato, 2014, p. 1), or even doubt its existence (Jiménez García, 2017, p. 104), suggesting contemporary Caribbean children’s and young adult literature is in a stage of delayed recognition (Spencer, 2021). The scarcity of Latinx American and Caribbean names among winners of prestigious awards in children’s literature and their absence in well-known literary anthologies serves as further evidence of their marginalised status in Anglophone mainstream literature (Aldama, 2018, p. 9–10). Scholars and educators continue to debate ‘criteria to recognize whether a book promotes understanding and acceptance of others or contains stereotypical images’ (Martínez-Roldán, 2013, p. 5).

The Anglophone lens also facilitates discussions about authenticity in children’s literature with an extensively debated topic of insider/outsider positionality (Barrera and Quiroa, 2003). In this survey I also examine the strategies employed by White writers to legitimise their position when portraying Latinx characters, as well as those used by the Caribbean American illustrator who was born outside the Caribbean region. The culturally diverse collaboration between a writer and an illustrator may serve as a means for outsiders to bridge cultural gaps. However, Anglophone children’s picturebooks featuring Latina American and Caribbean single mothers can simultaneously challenge and reinforce myths about ethnic single motherhood. By comparing these picturebooks with those authored by cultural insiders, I aim to assess ongoing dynamics, if present. My objective is to reevaluate both verbal and visual elements used to create an authentic sense of these representations. To trace the dynamics and tendencies in the usage of verbal and visual instruments, I have organized the picturebooks chronologically, enabling a systematic comparison of identical elements throughout the corpus.

Corpus of the Texts

This study uses critical content analysis of visual images, social semiotics, and word-picture interaction analysis to discern cultural messages about how Latina American and Caribbean single mothers are valued in Mama Does the Mambo written by Katherine Leiner and illustrated by Edel Rodriguez (2001), A Shelter in Our Car written by Monica Gunning and illustrated by Elaine Pedlar (2004), Sonia Sotomayor written by Jonah Winter and illustrated by Edel Rodriguez (2009), and Dreamers written and illustrated by Yuyi Morales (2018).

Mama Does the Mambo portrays Sofia, a Cuban girl, who narrates her mother’s story. Her mama, a big lover of the Mambo, has developed an aversion to the dance after her husband died. This dance is a painful memory of her previous happily married life. From a long line of suitors who are willing to dance with Sofia’s mother, Eduardo is the only one who forms a strong bond with Sofia and her mother and happens to be a clumsy dancer. The cathartic final scene depicts the happy mom choosing her jubilant daughter as a dance partner.

A Shelter in Our Car shares an eight-year-old girl’s story. After her father’s death, Zettie and her mother left Jamaica for America and now live in a car. In the morning, they use the bathroom in a public park to wash themselves with cold water and then have breakfast on a bench. Zettie sets off to school and her mother goes in search of a job. At night, her mother reads a book to Zettie in the back of their car. A group of boys harass Zettie at school and nickname her “Junk Car Zettie”. The ending raises hopes that the characters will find a permanent place to live and the mother a new job.

Sonia Sotomayor, a picturebook with both English and Spanish text, reiterates the biography of the first Latina Supreme Court justice in US history. Sonia was born and raised in a poor district of the South Bronx. In early childhood the girl developed a taste for reading that inspired her imagination and helped to deal with diabetes. Despite her illness, Sotomayor graduated at the top of her high-school class and then again at the top of her Princeton class. The storyline spotlights the importance of Sonia’s mother in her achievements and relays the hard life of widowed mother who had to juggle work, raising two children and nursing education.

In Dreamers, Morales shares her personal experience of immigration to the US. The author-illustrator includes her poignant feeling when she left home and crossed the Mexico-American border. Unable to communicate with people around her, she faced many difficulties in the unfamiliar environment of San-Francisco. In her wanderings with a baby in a pram she happened on the San Francisco Public Library with its wealth of books. This was the place where she finally found her voice and rediscovered creativity.

Whereas Mama Does the Mambo, A Shelter in Our Car, and Sonia Sotomayor clearly state that the depicted mothers are widows, Dreamers presents the story of the mother and never mentions a father figure. The blend of implemented research methods, conventional straightforwardness of children’s picturebooks, and the absence of a father figure throughout the biographical book theoretically justifies the reader’s right to think of the heroine as a single mother.

Two authors of the analysed picturebooks cannot relate to an ethnic minority experience, namely, Leiner and Winter, as White American writers. Their partnership with a Latino illustrator, the Cuban-born American artist Rodriguez, has proven wisely strategic to validate their approach to Latinx American material. Winter implements a “ready-made” narrative strategy, that of dealing with foreign materials by adapting the biography of Sonia Sotomayor who was born in the Bronx, New York City, to Puerto Rican-born parents. He therefore shields himself from possible critique of being a cultural outsider. Leiner adapts another strategy and locates the story in Cuba, a country politically and culturally distanced from American-English-speaking readers’ knowledge by sanctions and embargos.

Morales is one of the most praised Latina authors and illustrators, awarded several prizes. In Dreamers (2018), which won the Pura Belpré Award for its illustrations, her voice of a first-hand experience of moving to the US is unique in representing a Latina, immigrant single mother.

Gunning and Pedlar set up a creative collaboration to work on A Shelter in Our Car. Although both writer and illustrator belong to ethnic minority groups of the US, only Gunning could relate to her experience as a Jamaican-born American.

Methodology

Throughout this research, I use Wolfenbarger’s and Sipe’s compound notion of the picturebook to recognize “the union of text and art” (Wolfenbarger and Sipe, 2007, p. 273). In this paper I apply a combination of critical content analysis of the visual images (Short, 2019), social semiotics (Painter, 2019; Painter, et al., 2014), and word-picture interaction analysis (Nikolajeva and Scott, 2013).

Critical content analysis augmented with ‘a specific critical theory’ (Short, 2019, p. 5) accounts for the exploration of underlying messages in the analysed picturebooks, particularly as related to value-laden issues of family, marriage and mother-child interactions. This approach guides research as a way to decode taken-for-granted values and stereotypes hidden behind the usage of artistic elements. Detecting the most common visual elements and their combination in images is a key content analysis procedure to assess a culturally specific representation of single motherhood.

Social semiotics is ‘the over-arching and integrating theory’ within a set of questions ‘about meaning and meaning-making, about the resources for making meaning, about social agents as meaning-makers, and about the characteristics of the environments in which they act’ (Kress, 2015, p. 55). Social semiotics in children’s picturebook studies seeks to reconstruct ‘a semantically oriented visual grammar that allows for a systemic analysis of the meanings carried within images’ (Painter, 2019, p. 24). I apply the social semiotics approach (Painter, et al., 2014) to distinguish differences in authors’ strategies in dealing with cultural material relating to their insider or outsider position within Latin American or Caribbean culture inside Anglophone children’s narratives. To present the results of my findings, social semiotics equips this study with a set of notions such as visual grammar, visual language, idiolect, symbolism, and repertoire.

Finally, the word-picture interaction analysis -with its focus on dynamics between verbal narratives and images- offers the analytical tools to investigate themes and artistic styles. This line of research allows me to discern themes around which the storylines and their illustrations unfold. An alternating attention to interplays between words and images resulted in an optimized list of themes discussed in the texts such as immigration, homelessness, poverty, and widowhood.

This array of methods offers instruments to differentiate the artistic, cultural, meaningful, and semiotic implications of single motherhood’s representations. The combined methodology serves as an analytical tool to identify and regroup a variety of artistic and stylistic means involved in depictions of Latina American and Caribbean single mothers. I also use my role of a cultural and gender outsider to bring awareness in the discussion of analysed picturebooks and related topics.

I argue that a marginalised position in the semiosis of Anglophone children’s picturebooks could have at least one silver lining: that authors and illustrators are prone to extend the boundaries of creativity. ‘Minority mamas’, in Gilmore’s opinion, ‘do not fit with the ideal of motherhood depicted in mainstream picturebooks and could enable that representation with ‘maternal resilience, confidence, strength, creativity, ambition, compassion for their communities, and their ability to equip their children to survive racial oppression’ (2016, p. 99). The marginalised position of Latinx American and Caribbean authors could be exploited in many ways. I will focus on how theme, artistic style and visual language convey cultural values.

Theme, Style, Visual Language, Values

In terms of themes, the authors confidently discuss issues related to single motherhood such as immigration, homelessness, poverty, widowhood. They are poignant storylines for exploring social (external) and psychological (internal) dimensions of picturebook’s characters. The authors marginalise the picturebook’s characters by putting them in difficult situations in order to portray single mothers with more vivid and rich personality. To emphasize their multidimensionality, the authors commonly bring together themes and add new challenges within one story, namely widowhood and poverty in Sonia Sotomayor, immigration and deprivation in Dreamers, widowhood and depression in Mama Does the Mambo, or immigration, homelessness, poverty and widowhood in A Shelter in Our Car.

Despite Marilisa Jiménez García’s indignation against ‘the emphasis on immigration’ in Anglophone children’s fiction with Latinx American characters (2017, p. 115), I see this topic repeatedly exploited in such stories. Three out of four books under consideration refer to this politically galvanised theme. Dreamers becomes Morales’ artistic mouthpiece for articulating the hardships of adjustments to a new place. This is the rare case where a picturebook single mother has finally found her voice to speak for herself. She involves cultural and emotional dimensions to depict the embarrassment and clumsiness she felt every time she behaved awkwardly in unfamiliar environments after immigrating from Mexico to the United States.

Gunning and Pedlar’s A Shelter in Our Car discusses homelessness and poverty as the repercussions of immigration in portraying the everyday life of an immigrant widow from Jamaica. This is a story about a girl and her mother who suffer malnutrition and social deprivation, forced to use public water and sanitation facilities. On top of that, the girl is constantly bullied at school. She spirals in distress to the extent that an encounter with a protective policeman makes her feel desperate.

Poverty as a consequence associated with a single parent family is also discussed in Winter and Rodriguez’s Sonia Sotomayor. This topic serves as a background against which a clash of values unfolds. Arguably, Winter adjusts a stereotypical representation of Latina American single motherhood and creates a cross-national version to reconcile values of single motherhood from two different cultures. Overall, his picturebook is likely to confirm the values of US society. He tells a typical “American dream” story about a self-made woman who overcomes social barriers and cultural prejudices. The single mother achieves her goal to provide her children with a decent quality of life by working hard and silently making her way through daily hardships. Her persistence results in her daughter’s success to get one of the highest posts in the American political system. Unawareness of the distinctions between cultural stereotypes of a catholic Latin American passiveness, acceptance of destiny and the protestant work ethic, is a narrative strategy to describe single motherhood in a culturally non-contradictory way. This story with a typical American happy ending is in stark contrast to A Shelter in Our Car, with its also promising but more realist? ending.

Latinx American and Caribbean authors exhibit a resolute commitment to shaping their artistic styles, reflecting their determination to forge a distinct professional identity. In doing so, artists from ethnic minority backgrounds, particularly cultural insiders, challenge established conventions in illustrated children’s literature, often rooted in Western traditions (Nodelman, 1988). They willingly pioneer new symbolism and narratives, finding themselves in a position ‘at the fringes of mainstream culture,’ which liberates them from conforming to prevailing expectations (Gilmore, 2016, p. 109). Conversely, White North American writers, while unable to fully relate to this experience, strategically leverage this cultural diversity as an asset. They employ it to justify their participation in discussions surrounding pressing social and political issues. This juxtaposition highlights how authors from different backgrounds navigate the literary landscape, with cultural insiders reshaping narratives from within, while White authors utilize their outsider status to engage meaningfully with important topics. The artists extensively utilize previously introduced unconventional visual language and experiment with various artistic techniques. These enhance the illustrators’ symbolic flexibility and recognizable voice. Rodriguez delves into the iconography of widowhood, adjusting an existing visual grammar found in children’s picturebooks (Painter, 2019, p. 18–30). He renders the feelings of a grieving woman by positioning the character with her back to the viewer and her head down. The reader does not see her face and is invited to guess her state of mind. The heroine adopts a similar posture when she is leaving the festivities. The illustrator repeats this trope to present the character’s emotional turmoil without revealing facial expressions and hiding her vulnerability. The reader is consequently provided with space to create meanings and further interpretation. This is a careful and humanised relationship between the artist, the reader, and the character.

Morales creatively combines artistic techniques to tell her own story of an immigrant in an unfamiliar environment. In search of her individual voice, the author persists in exploring her ethnic identity. Her artistic style, in her own words, stems from the compound of celebrating, experimenting, and discovering (Aldama, 2018, p. 154, 156). In a brief description of how she made Dreamers, she speaks of collage as the major technique in the book; mixing acrylic and pen drawings with scanned photographs. She also carefully adds cultural material by hinting at Mexican elements of traditional ornaments and crafts such as traditional Mexican embroidery.

Among the analysed books, A Shelter in Our Car stands out because of its unique stylistics. Pedlar destroys any stereotypical expectations of cheerfulness and brightness from much children’s fiction. The intense emotions of grieving, homeless, poor people are conveyed through exaggerated facial expressions and body language. All characters in the story are defined with strong black lines, creating an ominous, depressing tone, using colours in an expressionistic way to intensify the atmosphere and lay bare the family’s suffering.

Pedlar appropriates a recognisable visual language and creates her own pictorial idiolect to present single motherhood and mother-child interactions. The artist further experiments with the depiction of her characters’ body language in a closed space. This is a rather radical approach: to place children’s literature characters in the restricted environment of a car. The illustrator departs from the conventional posture of face-to-face friendly interactions by putting the girl and her mother side by side. Even if the characters sit next to each other, they express the whole gamut of behavioural patterns, interactions, and emotions. They reveal varied types of bonding through their gaze and facial expressions. The similarity of their mood is communicated by mirroring each other’s emotions and by looking at the same objects, such as a police car, an apartment house sign or trees in a park. The characters establish eye contact by looking in the rear-view mirror. Pedlar adds new meanings to side-by-side positionlaity in that the heroines are not emotionally connected, if they sit next to each other but look in opposite directions.

Another semiotic tool to make Latinx American culture stereotypically identifiable is usage of the Spanish language in the texts. Whereas Rosalinda B. Barrera and Ruth E. Quiroa recognized the use of the Spanish language within English texts as a tool to lend a narrative a sense of authenticity (2003), Martínez-Roldán discusses the harm of “Mock Spanish” (2013), which refers to the use of elements of the Spanish language in English speech, often in a mocking or trivializing manner. In my corpus I identify two strategies – a text parallelly written in English and Spanish and the incorporation of Spanish words within an English text.

Winter and Rodriguez’s Sonia Sotomayor adopt the first strategy as in their bilingual book the English original text and Spanish translation appear next to each other. In Frederick Luis Aldama’s opinion, this juxtaposition ‘deploys new narrative and rhetorical strategies to engage the readers’ (2018, p. 18). Leiner and Morales apply the subtle second strategy to point at characters’ cultural background by inserting Spanish words and expressions in characters’ speech and dialogues. Additionally, Leiner compiles a glossary on the last page of her book in an obvious attempt to help her non-Spanish speaking readers. Aldama calls this strategy ‘translanguaging’ and argues that it aids ‘not only to anchor characters in their Latino identities but also to give rhythm and shape to the narratives’ (2018, p. 15).

Single Mothers, their Children and Normativity

The analysed books are also exceptional because the stories pay as much attention to single mothers as to children’s characters. In Sonia Sotomayor and A Shelter in Our Car, the motherly characters share the same amount of writers and artists’ attention with their daughters who act as the principal characters. A single mother plays a leading role in Mama Does the Mambo storyline. This book stands out as the authors acknowledge the possibility of single mothers entering into new partnership. Thus, Leiner and Rodriguez depict the single mother in a profound manner as a complex personality. On the one hand, she is introduced as a deeply depressed person who has lost the taste for simple joy. On the other hand, she manages to move on, meet a loving man and take care of her daughter. In Gilmore’s opinion, ‘she is at once a confident and “sexy mama” while still connected to her child’ (2016, p. 100).

Another feature is a focus on mother–daughter relationships. The majority of the books answer the call for more narratives with girls and women as a protagonist (Hamilton, 2006). In Mama Does the Mambo and A Shelter in Our Car the daughters tell the story instead of their mothers. In Dreamers, Morales takes the stage as the leading character. Interestingly, Dreamers’s second character is a toddler, remaining speechless and docile. In the beginning of the story, the reader has no clue about the child’s gender because the mother calls them ‘baby’ throughout the text. Whilst the reader might refer to cultural stereotypes and assume that the child is a boy as we see him in a helmet with a guitar or a space rocket, an unarticulated gender of this character opens further interpretation and allows for this character as a little girl in the middle of her own gender exploration.

Despite the experiments, writers and illustrators cannot completely disrupt the tradition of children’s illustrated literature. Not only are their exercises balanced by recognizable conventions of word-picture interactions in children’s picturebooks, but they are also grounded on the involvement of cultural stereotypes. Leiner explores the passionate side of her character by amplifying clichés about the Latin American culture. As Martínez-Roldán noticed, ‘[a]lthough the presence of blatant stereotypes in children’s literature in general has decreased in recent decades, problematic representations of Latinos still find their way into these books, especially those written by cultural outsiders’ (2013, p. 6). Leiner involves not only a conception about the emotional exaltation of Latina American women but a widespread belief about a deeply stemmed dancing culture in Latin American countries. Additionally, Rodriguez, who left Cuba as a 9-year-old boy, reinforces arguably stereotypical imagery with vibrant colours and illustrations of a woman in Latin American dancing attire; the same colours the reader sees in Sonia Sotomayor’s biography. Mary Pat Brady criticises the repetition of ‘a cheerful, bright palette of complementary colours’ which promotes the pictorial fallacy of picturebooks with Latinx American content and produces an inaccurate impression of ‘authenticity’ (2012, p. 380). Here, brightness of colours in picturebooks with foreign characters serves as an implicit connection to their native culture and visibly embodies the feeling of exoticism.

Despite impressive changes and adjustments, the analysed authors retranslate social normativity which is likely to stem from the desire to support this literary tradition and justifies still-present idealization ‘as a nonprescriptive guide for the young child’s imagination’ (Aldama, 2018, p. 17). Thus, the representations of single motherhood in the picturebooks under discussion implicitly align with traditional social institutions, family values, and mothering strategies. The picturebooks conform to hidden values of two parent family and mothering functions. Three picturebooks narrate the stories of widowed single mothers. A deceased father is present as a photo on a wall (Sonia Sotomayor; Mama Does the Mambo), as a living man in character’s memory (Mama Does the Mambo), or as a description in texts (Mama Does the Mambo, A Shelter in Our Car). The presence of a male figure in the stories refers to an unspoken hierarchy among single mothers where widows might feel privileged because previously widowhood was the only socially acceptable path to single motherhood.

Morales’s character is the only non-widowed single mother in these texts. The story does not explain the reasons of her single motherhood. If the author affirms a strong identity between the portrayed heroine and herself, the reader could refer to the author’s biography to interpret the character’s behaviour. Morales confirms that she immigrated to the US with her son and then fiancé (Aldama, 2018, p. 149). Thus, through paratexts of the story Morales’s character ends up complying with a traditional family value which requires a partner.

A second observation is that unproblematized relationships between two generations set single motherhood within traditional roles of motherliness. The subtle and implicit compromise between picturebook’s motherly characters and a traditional image of family buttresses the fact that ‘Latin American cultural constructions of femininity are strongly identified with motherhood and serving the needs of children and household’ (Molyneux, 2006, p. 438).

Finally, the single mothers are depicted performing their traditional mothering duties of a housewife and a caregiver. Mama Does the Mambo contains illustrations with the woman cooking dinner, hanging laundry, sweeping the courtyard and doing the shopping. Similarly mothering behaviours are represented in Sonia Sotomayor with an additional scene of a visit to the doctor. Despite extraordinary challenges, the single mother in A Shelter in Our Car does not desert her role as the sole breadwinner, provider of food, and caregiver. She also physically protects her daughter, comforts her in distress and educates her. The portrayed duties could be considered as typical mothering functions and support the contemporary myth of ‘the good mothering’ that Shari Thurer characterises as contradictory and unattainable (1994, p. xvi).

Morales, whose book is a recently published work, disrupts this circle of traditional mothering functions. She portrays herself as an artist in pursuit of rediscovering her talent and developing a passion for making children’s picturebooks. Eventually, the book tells the story about the mother who spends time out of traditional housework with her baby in the city and at the library.

Conclusion

Latinx American and Caribbean literatures occupy a marginalized position within the realm of Anglophone literature, yet I have argued that this very marginalization can become a source of authors’ and artists’ empowerment. It grants them the freedom to explore themes, experiment with styles, and employ cultural symbolism in a manner that reimagines idealized fictional motherhood, with single motherhood being an avenue they use for this reimagination. These authors skilfully leverage this vantage point to engage in authentic storytelling rooted in their personal experiences. Positioned on the verge of mainstream literature, they wield the power to challenge established conventions, artfully adapt existing social semiotics, and craft their unique symbolism.

In contrast, White American authors often employ foreign cultures as assets, using them to enter into marginalized groups and speak on their behalf. For them, the cultures they incorporate serve as a justification for their artistry. Collaborating with Latinx American artists becomes a legitimizing strategy to approach foreign materials. However, this strategy can lead cultural outsiders to import their own values and stereotypes into the narratives.

To navigate the delicate balance between the perspectives of outsiders and insiders, artists and writers can develop a toolkit that operates on meaningful and symbolic levels, boldly exploring the semantics of socially relevant topics such as homelessness, immigration, widowhood, poverty, deprivation, grief, and depression. Through vivid portraits, these authors make their single mothers’ inner worlds come to life, rendering their literary heroines vivid, palpable, and believable. The heightened otherness of these characters, often portrayed as widowed single mothers with diverse ethnic backgrounds and immigrant experiences, underscores their representation within socially extraordinary contexts. The authors navigate these social phenomena by drawing from their deep personal experiences and channelling them into their fictional female heroines.

An attempt to delve into the subtle psychology of motherly characters in extreme situations necessitates adjustments in individual artistic styles and symbolic conventions. While the language employed at times aligns with stereotypically vibrant and cheerful imagery to meet readers’ expectations of authenticity, the illustrators exhibit innovations in colour palettes and artistic techniques. These symbolic conventions encompass depictions of women with their backs turned to the reader, side-by-side portrayals of mother-daughter interactions, occasionally mediated through objects, and the integration of the Spanish language. Despite cultural insiders’ efforts to challenge negative stereotypes, their picturebook heroines are often confined to traditional roles as caregivers and conformity with the institution of marriage. However, even within these constraints, these fictional single mothers exude agency, expressed on cultural, behavioural, symbolic, and psychological levels.