Guadalupe Garcia Mccall The World Belongs To The Dreamers

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Nov 2, 2025, 2:50 PM

guadalupe garcia mccall the world belongs to the dreamers

My name is Guadalupe García McCall and I like to sit on the porch, listen to the sounds of nature, and write stories about the complexities of our world and our place in it. When I write, I think about how important and valuable life and all of its experiences are, so I try to write stories that give meaning to those experiences. My most recent book for older readers, ECHOES OF GRACE, from Tu Books, is a YA Borderlands Gothic novel featuring Grace, who is plagued by the ability to see, feel, even smell the past... After a horrible tragedy involving her sister, Mercy’s 2 year-old son, Alexander, Grace’s echoes shed light on a time three years before when she fled to Mexico and lost a whole week of her... Though the plot features magical realism and gothic elements like ghosts, a mystery, and haunted places, at the root of it the book is about the capacity of love and truth to help us... I hope this book helps us begin talking, healing, and taking action to promote real change in the world.

Guadalupe Garcia McCall is an author, poet, and educator. She was born in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico.[1] She is the recipient of the 2012 Pura Belpré Medal[2] for narrative. Guadalupe Garcia McCall was born in Coauhila, a Mexican state adjacent to Texas. She immigrated to the United States with her family when she was six years old, and grew up in Eagle Pass, a small border town in South Texas.[3] When McCall was 17 years old,... She holds a B.A. in Theatre and English from Sul Ross State University in Alpine and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso.

McCall currently serves as an assistant professor of English at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon.[5] Her first novel, Under the Mesquite, debuted in October 2011 and received the prestigious Pura Belpré Award for... This Q&A with author and former teacher Guadalupe García McCall and Lee & Low Literacy Specialist Michelle Fuentes originally appeared in the CABE 2023 Edition of Multilingual Educator. Guadalupe’s latest novel, Echoes of Grace, is available wherever books are sold! Guadalupe García McCall is the award-winning author of Summer of the Mariposas (El verano de las mariposas) and won the Pura Belpré Award for her first novel, Under the Mesquite. She was born in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, México, and moved to Eagle Pass, Texas as a young girl, keeping close ties with family on both sides of the border. She taught secondary students from grades six through ten for twenty-four years in San Antonio, Texas.

She recently retired as an assistant professor at George Fox University in Oregon. She is a full-time author and abuelita. Find her online at ggmccall.com. In this conversation with Michelle Fuentes, former English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) middle school educator and current Literacy Specialist at Lee & Low Books, Guadalupe shares her experiences and strategies working with... This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What strategies work well with students to support bilingualism, biculturalism, and biliteracy?

Michelle Fuentes: As a Spanish and ESOL teacher, I learned many strategies to help students acquire language. I consistently used real-life examples to help students connect with the content, which helped increase student engagement and understanding. As an ESOL educator, it is also important to break down barriers that English Language Learner (ELL) students may feel when learning English. You must reinforce and educate students that their native language is a tool that has put them ahead of others because they already know another language. It is a lot of work changing some students’ mindsets about their limited English proficiency. I did a lot of work with my students to teach them that their language is an asset and to use it.

I taught students how to use cognates in their learning, as well as how to convey language through body movements and cues. Guadalupe García McCall is an award-winning young adult novelist, educator, poet, and speaker. Born in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico, she immigrated with her close-knit family to Eagle Pass, Texas (the setting for most of her poems and some of her novels) when she was six years old. Ms. Garcia McCall travels all over the country speaking to students and adults on topics of importance to the Latine community. She is an advocate for literacy and diverse books.

Though she keeps a home in Texas, she is currently an Assistant Professor of English at George Fox University and lives with her husband in the Pacific Northwest most of the year. In the heart of the Great Depression, Rancho Las Moras, like everywhere else in Texas, is gripped by the drought of the Dust Bowl, and resentment is building among white farmers against Mexican Americans. All around town, signs go up proclaiming No Dogs or Mexicans and No Mexicans Allowed. When Estrella organizes a protest against the treatment of tejanos in their town of Monteseco, Texas, her whole family becomes a target of repatriation efforts to send Mexicans back to Mexico whether they were... In Eagle Pass, Texas, Grace struggles to understand the echoes she inherited from her mother — visions which often distort her reality. One morning, as her sister, Mercy, rushes off to work, a disturbing echo takes hold of Grace, and within moments, tragedy strikes.

Attending community college for the first time, talking to the boy next door, and working toward her goals all help Grace recover, but her estrangement from Mercy takes a deep toll. From Pura Belpré Award-winning author Guadalupe García McCall comes the first in the Seasons of Sisterhood trilogy: a reimagining of Sophocles' Antigone set in the world of her bestselling Summer of the Mariposas. Eighteen-year-old Joaquín del Toro’s future looks bright. With his older brother in the priesthood, he’s set to inherit his family’s Texas ranch. He’s in love with Dulceña — and she’s in love with him. But it’s 1915, and trouble has been brewing along the US-Mexico border.

On one side, the Mexican Revolution is taking hold; on the other, Texas Rangers fight Tejano insurgents, and ordinary citizens are caught in the middle. Guadalupe Garcia McCall is an award-winning author known for her young adult novels that often explore themes of identity, culture, and family. Her works are celebrated for their rich storytelling and cultural authenticity. This list of books are ONLY the books that have been ranked on the lists that are aggregated on this site. This is not a comprehensive list of all books by this author. Welcome back.

Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. Born in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico and raised in Eagle Pass, Texas, Guadalupe García McCall is the award-winning author of several young adult novels, some short stories for adults, and many children’s poems. Guadalupe has received the Prestigious Pura Belpre Award, a Westchester Young Adult Fiction Award, the Tomás Rivera Mexican-American Children’s Book Award, and was a finalist for the William C. Morris Award and the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy, among many other accolades. Fluent in both English and Spanish, Guadalupe is a compelling speaker who has visited many middle schools, high schools, universities, festivals, conferences, and organizations all over the country. In 2016, she was invited to give a writing workshop and a keynote address at the Sirens Women In Fantasy Conference.

In the spring of 2017, Guadalupe was selected as the Inaugural Artist in Residence by the Arne Nixon Center where she visited local high schools and taught courses at California State University Fresno. Also in 2017, Guadalupe gave the keynote for the National Latino Children’s Literature Conference in San Antonio, Texas. In 2018, she gave the keynote at the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts Conference in Galveston, Texas. In 2021, Guadalupe had the honor of moderating the panel, Hispanic Heritage Month Authors Series, Celebrating Latino Experience, History, People, & Cultures, US Department of Education’s Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA with the... However, her proudest distinction came when her alma mater, Sul Ross State University (SRSU), selected to feature her image and biography on their Living the Dream II – Cultural Pride on Campus mural outside... As an educator, Guadalupe taught K-12 in San Antonio Texas for decades before she moved to the Pacific Northwest to teach undergraduate courses in literature, women’s studies, and creative writing at George Fox University...

She is currently a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing in the low residency MFA Creative Writing program at Antioch University in Los Angeles, CA, where she teaches graduate courses. As an educator, author, poet, and speaker, Guadalupe is an advocate for literacy, diverse books, and Own Voices. She is now a full-time author/part time educator and lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband, Jim, where she is working on two more books, Secret of the Moon Conch and Hearts of... Award-winning Latina Young Adult author Guadalupe Garcia McCall’s fourth book, All the Stars Denied, will be published in May 2018, making spring quite busy for the San Antonio–area author — as she’ll also be... Born in Mexico, McCall immigrated to the U.S. with her family when she was six and grew up in Eagle Pass, Texas.

Lone Star Lit caught up with McCall over the weekend via email and learned about her life of two cultures, her path to publishing, and the joy of being honored for her work. LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: You were born in Mexico, and then your family moved to Eagle Pass, Texas, when you were six. How would you describe those early days, and what was it like growing up in Eagle Pass? GUADALUPE GARCIA McCALL: Those early days were filled with all kinds of sensory images; they echoed my emotions. En los estados unidos, the sights and sounds of children wearing such nice clothes and speaking in a crisp, clear language blended in with the smell of fried chicken, an unknown yet intriguing aroma... That scent filtered into the bus and mingled with the sound of my sweaty legs slipping around on the plastic seats on hot summer days.

I was so young, that my little heart ached with fear and hope and love and hate. I was afraid of not learning “the English,” as my father called it, but I was also full of the hope that I saw in my mother’s eyes when she registered my sister Alicia... I loved my parents and siblings, but I hated being separated from my guelita and in Mexico. At first, I had a hard time in school because I was mistakenly put in a monolingual class. After a few weeks, the school called a meeting with my parents and it was discovered that I was a Spanish speaker and a recent immigrant, and I needed to go to Ms. Nuñez’s class.

Everything was good after that. The bilingual program was so strong and I was very studious, so I flourished in school. My father introduced me to writing when we still lived in Mexico, but he didn’t do it in the traditional way. He sat me on his lap every weekend and made drawings out of letters and numbers. Every curl, every swirl of a letter became a part of a little animalito or caricatura that jumped off the pages as he drew them. In his carpenter’s hands, numbers and letters became little creatures with attitude and voices and snarls and growls.

I was at once astonished and delighted by them. “The S is a serpiente, sitting up on its tail,” he said, and he gave her a tiny forked tongue to smell out mice in the field. The C became a tiny cochineal bug, all curled up in her cocoon for the winter, asleep on a cactus pad. The number 2 became a beautiful swan with a long elegant neck, and all my tiny 2’s became her babies on the ocean that was my cuaderno—the journal he left with me so that... I have been in love with writing ever since. It is an art form, a gift from my father, his legacy to me.

Guadalupe Garcia Mccall The World Belongs To The Dreamers

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