“ … the odyssey that thousands of boys, girls and young people from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico undertake when they flee their countries because of extreme poverty and fear of violence” is the subject of this powerful, bilingual collection of poems. The opening, title poem compares children and their dreams to clouds. Then the voice of a child in El Salvador offers warm images of neighborhood life, followed by references to gang members and violence. “Hit this one, hit that one. / I don’t want to be this one or that / one.” The journey poems speak through and to the experiences of many children, chronicling endless walking, the frightening bestia (train), the desert crossing. “My father says / if we keep singing, / we’ll scare away all the tiredness / and the fear / and become a song.” These migrants are individual children, with their own names and histories and hopes and dreams, a message eloquently reinforced in “We Introduce Ourselves to the Border Patrol.” And the idea that “We Are Like the Clouds” is irony, and perhaps necessity, in the face of the unwelcoming fence at the border. The two final poems can be interpreted as a literal dream, or as safety and happiness: an arrival. Author Jorge Argueta fled from El Salvador to the United States during that country’s war in the 1980s. His poems are set against paintings by Alfonso Ruano both realistic and symbolic. (Age 9 and older)

Based on his personal history, the author has created poems in first person of young people leaving desperate situations in Central America and traveling to the United States. In both Spanish and English, poems of children from El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Mexico express thoughts and experiences of leaving homelands, crossing borders, rivers, and deserts, encountering border guards, and finally living in Los Angeles, with the statement “We are like the clouds” repeated in the first and last poems as well as two additional poems. Illustrations on each page or spread set the tone of environments and situations along the way.

Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, 2017 USBBY Outstanding International Books, ALA Notable Children's Books, Cooperative Children's Book Center Choices, Américas Award Commended Title, A Bank Street College of Education Best Children's Book of the Year, Malka Penn Award for Human Rights in Children's Literature Honor Book.

Author from El Salvador and lives in San Francisco. Illustrator lives in Madrid.

Toronto, Canada; Spanish. Originally published in Toronto, Canada by Groundwood Books in 2016.