The Story Behind the Story
Before there was Book of Dog: Penny’s Tail, there was a journey… my journey.
My journey began long before I understood what a journey even was. I was born in 1978 into a war in El Salvador, but as a baby, I had no concept of danger, politics, or the forces shaping my family’s life. Even now, as an adult, I’m still learning the history of that conflict. I’ll leave the full story of that war to the historians who can do it justice.
What I do know is what my family lived through.
I’ve learned bits and pieces over the years—small revelations that both sides of the war left their mark on us. Before I was born, while my mom was pregnant with me, she and my sister were used as shields by a guerrilla fighter trying to get through a checkpoint. They were caught in a firefight. I only learned about that recently, and it still sits heavily in my heart.
My dad left first. He went straight to Mexico City to find work and a place for us to land. A week later, when I was about a year old, my grandpa learned there would be an attack on the rebels on a Wednesday. Afraid for our safety, he gathered what money he could and sent my mom, sister and me— both of us still toddlers—on a plane to catch up with my dad. They almost missed him; he had just been offered a job in Chetumal.
We stayed in Mexico City with my mom for a couple of weeks before following him to Chetumal.
My first children’s book doesn’t start like that. I took artistic license and had us all leave together. But the truth is messier, lonelier, and braver.
“The land we left behind — the first horizon I ever knew.”
What follows are fragments of memory—some mine, some borrowed from my parents’ retellings.
“Me, around the age when memory becomes feeling.”
My uncles joined us in Chetumal not long after. They were about to be conscripted to fight in the war, so my grandpa gathered more money and sent them through the jungles of Belize and Guatemala until they reached us. For a while, we were all together.
Chetumal was a small coastal village then. My memories of it aren’t clear images, more like sensations: the warmth of the sun, the feeling of running barefoot in sand, the ocean as something that lived in my bones. It feels idyllic when I look back, but the truth is we were very poor. Some days there was only enough food for my sister and me. Still, we found joy in daily life and in the ocean.
My dad found his calling as a pastor there, and we helped build a church. We stayed about a year and a half. Despite all his hard work, we were struggling, and eventually my dad made the decision to go ahead to Mexico City again to look for a better job.
“The church we built with our hands — faith made from sweat and borrowed hope.”
About a month later, we followed him—and that’s when the bus incident happened. I was around two and a half or three years old. My mom had packed a ceramic pitcher, a family heirloom. On the bus, she tucked it into the overhead rack. A bad bump sent it crashing down onto my head. The pitcher shattered; I was left with a scar.
We had no money. We were technically in Mexico illegally. But the bus driver took pity on us and helped my mom get me medical care. Once I was bandaged up, we kept going until we caught up with my dad.
“Music and mischief — the parts of childhood that survived everything.”
That part of my life never made it into Book of Dog: Penny’s Tail. But it’s there all the same—in the silences, in the choices I made about what to soften and what to leave unsaid. Its shadow follows the story, quietly shaping what I was ready to tell then, and what I’m only now learning how to say.
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