“One Day We Will Fly Back Home”: Posthumanism in Aida Salazar’s Land of the Cranes

Abstract: Aida Salazar’s novel in verse, Land of the Cranes , tells the story of fourth grader Betita Quintero, her father’s deportation, her and her mother’s arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and imprisonment in a detention center in Southern California. In the first part of this article, I discuss Betita’s use of “picture poems,” poems accompanied by pictures, as part of a process that allows for self and community healing and empowerment in the face of systemic oppression. I focus on the words of the picture poems and how those words allow Betita to shapeshift in mind and body in order to find agency despite the state violence she faces. In the second part of this article, I focus on the symbolic use of the crane, an important figure in Mexica folklore, to investigate the connection between immigrants and the use of animals in posthumanist ways in immigrant narratives in Latine children’s literature. I pay special attention to the picture poems to demonstrate how Betita’s shapeshifting ability creates a possibility for a posthumanist healing process. I argue for the importance of healing processes in immigrant narratives within Latine children’s literature that promote a shift from oppression to liberation and from human to animal, and everything in between. Through Land of the Cranes , I trace the ways in which healing, particularly healing through art and imagination, includes a posthumanist shift. This pattern of connecting words and pictures and immigrants with animals in Latine children’s literature, whether through myth or folklore, metaphorical or literal, is an exciting opportunity to discuss the future of immigrants as going beyond humanity and possibly being something more.