Book Analysis
The Princess and the Warrior: A Tale of Two Volcanoes by Duncan Tonatiuh (Abrams Books for Young Readers: New York, 2016)
The Nahua story of the origin of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl volcanoes is a cherished legend in contemporary Mexico. In The Princess and the Warrior, author–illustrator Duncan Tonatiuh offers a sensitive and vibrantly depicted retelling of the legend for elementary-age readers. Using a powerful technique of translanguaging between English and Nahuatl and drawing on Mixtec codices to inform his visual imagery, Tonatiuh bridges the worlds of Indigenous Mesoamerica and English-language education.
Outside Mexico City, Popocatépetl volcano rises to nearly 18,000 feet, gently smokes, and occasionally spews molten debris. Just east of it, Iztaccíhuatl, characterized by four distinct peaks, lies dormant. In both the Nahua legend and Tonatiuh’s telling of it, the volcanoes are depicted as people — Popoca, “the best and bravest warrior in the kingdom,” and Izta, “a kind and beautiful princess.” After rejecting many suitors, Izta falls in love with Popoca. The emperor will only allow the earnest warrior to marry his daughter if Popoca defeats the kingdom’s enemy, Jaguar Claw, in battle. Before being vanquished, Jaguar Claw corrupts one of Popoca’s messengers and sends false word to Izta that Popoca has been killed. Overcome with grief, Izta takes to her quarters and drinks a sleeping potion offered by the deceitful messenger. Popoca returns victorious, only to find Izta in deep sleep from which she will not wake. He bears her slumbering body to the top of a mountain and kneels beside her to await her return. Snow falls and covers the still lovers, and they are memorialized in the forms of the two volcanoes.
Augmenting a universal story of love and loss, Tonatiuh generates striking original illustrations through digital collage. He renders the setting for the story and a history of Nahua culture itself visually through images of milpas, temples, high desert cacti, and snow-covered mountains. Representations of water-vessel gourds, conch shell horns, woven mats, atlatls, jaguar skins, decorated shields, and turquoise jewelry convey the material culture of Izta and Popoca’s society. Photographic elements within the collage lend textural realism and invoke the senses, bringing Nahua culture to life for modern readers. The Princess and the Warrior received a Pura Belpré Honor for illustration in 2017. Pura Belpré awards are given to writers who best depict the Latinx cultural experience through children’s books.
The Princess and the Warrior is in keeping with Tonatiuh’s corpus. As a Mexican-American cultural activist, he takes up themes of Latinx history, communities, and contributions. Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote: A Migrant’s Tale (2013) is “an allegory of the terrible journey that undocumented immigrants go through to reach the U.S.” (Tonatiuh, n.d., Blog). Tonatiuh often highlights roles that lesser-known individuals have played in the fight for social justice, as in Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family’s Fight for Desegregation (2014), Undocumented: A Worker’s Fight (2018), and Soldier for Equality: José de la Luz Sáenz and the Great War (2019). He has also created biographies of well-known cultural luminaries like Diego Rivera: His World and Ours (2011) and Danza: Amalia Hernández and Mexico’s Folkloric Ballet (2017). Each of his books feature his signature digital collage.
Tonatiuh states that his aim is “to create images and stories that honor the past, but that are relevant to people, specially [sic] children, nowadays” (n.d., About). If Tonatiuh’s books are employed in classrooms with Indigenous or Mexican-American students, his work becomes a force for cultural congruity — a concept related to what Sylvan and Romero (2002) called linguistic congruity, in which students see and hear their primary language represented in an educational setting. The Princess and the Warrior, as well as Tonatiuh’s other titles, could be an integral part of a culturally relevant curriculum for Native and Latinx students. The inclusion of pre-Columbian history and folklore in traditionally Eurocentric curricula enfranchises minoritized learners and allows them to see themselves in classroom materials. It also exposes majority students to world cultures and sensitizes them to the experience of students they are sharing an education with. Texts like Tonatiuh’s would be at home in ethnic or raza studies programs, in which education takes place through the lens of students’ own cultures and heritage.
Tonatiuh includes several elements in The Princess and the Warrior that make it an educational book rather than a simple storytelling. In a full-page author’s note, Tonatiuh offers information about the natural history of the volcanoes, the folklore that has grown around them, and his own process as an artist in creating the book. Any of these elements could be used to frame a related classroom activity. Tonatiuh includes a bibliography of materials he consulted to maintain historical accuracy in the book’s language and imagery. It is a rich list that includes primary sources students could explore in group or independent projects. Importantly, Tonatiuh also offers a Nahuatl–English glossary to accompany the text.
Translanguaging, defined by de Jong (2011) as “dynamic language use across languages” (p. 61), is capable of producing special meaning beyond that available in a single language. In The Princess and the Warrior, Tonatiuh includes Nahuatl words without describing them in English or translating them directly. When he writes, “before night fell and the first citlalli appeared in the sky,” it is not necessary to include the word estrella or star; the meaning is easily understood from the context. Further, the use of citlalli instead of estrella or star evokes the Nahua world and a time before conquering European languages arrived in the Americas. In the header of his glossary, Tonatiuh writes of this choice, “I used Nahuatl, since that’s the language Popoca and Izta would have spoken.” Not only is translanguaging consistent with the author’s championing of Indigenous history, it is also a recognized aspect of the linguistic competency of bilinguals. Grosjean (1985) advanced the idea that bilingual people cognitively engage two (or more) languages simultaneously, no matter which language they are communicating in at any given moment. Many Nahuatl words have been absorbed into Mexican Spanish. Spanish speakers in Mexico or who have emigrated from Mexico are familiar with a great many Nahuatl object and place names. From an asset perspective, it is only natural for learners to see in printed text the translanguaging that is already happening in their minds.
Tonatiuh’s decision to include Nahuatl is a coup against what Skutnabb-Kangas (1995) termed cultural linguicism. Had the book been written in Spanish or English, it would have been written in a colonizing language. Invoking the language of the colonized provides a counterbalance that is needed, should we see multilingualism as “the linguistic goal in the education of all children” (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1995, p. 42). Had Tonatiuh decided to leave the Nahuatl out or translate it in the text, he would have run the risk of using a dominant language to tell an Indigenous story and obliterated the very aspects of culture he wished to express. There is no translation for milpa, macuahuitl, or octli. These are cultural settings and ritual objects that exist in their own millieu and have the right to bear their own names.
The Princess and the Warrior could also be used to teach English to Spanish-speaking students in Mexico, who would be familiar with the Nahuatl words and the legend. For students around Mexico City, the volcanoes are part of the daily natural environment. In this setting, the book would connect the classroom through the senses to the surrounding world. Likewise, it could serve as an English teaching tool for Mexican students who have immigrated to the United States. Nahuatl words would ground them in their first language and prior cultural experience — a native-language enhancement practice which has been demonstrated to benefit the acquisition of subsequent languages (Sylvan & Romero, 2002). For U.S. students of Latinx descent, The Princess and the Warrior might add to their understanding of their heritage, and for non-Latinx students, it would constitute an important exposure to the histories and lifeways of a significant civilization that lives on in the identities of many North Americans.
While tales of female princesses and male warriors do not necessarily provide lessons in the arbitrariness of gender roles, Tonatiuh has avoided some of the pitfalls that can make traditional fables and folktales alienating to modern audiences. Throughout the book, the male and female protagonists are depicted equal in size. The book’s title and subtitle create parity between the main characters by giving them equal status. In the end, love does not conquer all; rather, fidelity hangs suspended, awaiting an uncertain future, and unconsummated lovers are cast into perpetual, companionate distance. It is rewarding that the female protagonist is not completed by a male counterpart, and that the male protagonist is never shown possessing a female. Employing a lens of cultural and historical relativism, the gender roles depicted in The Princess and the Warrior reflect roles some women and men played in Nahua society. The book is not meant to be an object lesson in or critique of traditional gender roles, though its depiction of such might make non-normative modern readers uncomfortable.
The transcending virtue of this book lies in the life and honorific it gives an Indigenous folktale and its combination of Indigenous and dominant languages to do so. The Princess and the Warrior offers a novel depiction of Nahua society, developed through culturally authentic artifacts and the inclusion of Native language. By foregrounding Mixtec imagery and casting Nahuatl in a place of prominence, Tonatiuh prioritizes Native culture and the real origins of the legend. The English language that the story is told in is perhaps the least significant of all the book’s creative elements, chosen to allow Tonatiuh’s telling to reach audiences in the post-colonial, English-speaking world and to remind us of heritage cultures that infuse and predate our own.
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References
de Jong, E. J. (2011). Foundations for multilingualism in education: From principles to practice. Caslon Publishing.
Grosjean, F. (1985). The bilingual as a competent but specific speaker-hearer. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 6(6), 467−477.
Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (1995). Multilingualism and the education of minority children. In T. Skutnabb-Kangas (Ed.), Multilingualism for all (pp. 40–59). Swets & Zeitlinger.
Sylvan, C., & Romero, M. (2002). Reversing language loss in a multilingual setting: A native language enhancement program and its impact. In Osborn, T. A. (Ed.), The future of foreign language education in the United States (pp. 139–166). Bergin & Garvey.
Tonatiuh, D. (n.d.) Duncan Tonatiuh. Retrieved October 21, 2019, from http://www.duncantonatiuh.com/about.html
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