I am happy to present my interview with Mexican creator Jaque Jours! We're talking about her debut picture book The Muéganos, which she received a FONCA fellowship to write and illustrate in 2023. Learn more about this "sweet" and personal book with me!
About the book:
Muégano [ moo - egano ]: Candy made with square pieces of wheat flour fried and glued together with honey.
Meet the Muéganos: a family so close they're stuck together like the traditional Mexican candy. Papá Muégano says it's honey that holds them. Mamá says it's love. The oldest, Julia, wouldn't have it any other way.
Sure, swimming isn't always easy, and it wouldn't hurt to have a little privacy, but there's always someone close by to help with homework, and there's nothing like cuddling up with your parents. Until the day the Muéganos take a trip to the museum, and Julia's irrepressible curiosity causes an unexpected crack...
Mamá wants to fix it. Papá tries to be more careful. But some things are just inevitable.
Check out the endpapers!
Let's talk Jaque Jours!
LTPB: Congrats on your debut! Where did the idea for The Muéganos come from?
JJ: I think it goes without saying that this idea came from a personal experience. I grew up in a very close-knit family. We were always together. But I had never thought to visualize it or portray it, it was just my everyday life, until one day, I came across a sculpture by Venezuelan-American artist Marisol Escobar, where heads and legs sprout from a single square body. The stiffness and horizontal plainness of the work immediately made me think: that’s exactly what being in a muégano family feels like.
So I began sketching a family, imagining how they would manage to live like that. It was so fun to think through and draw. At first they were humans, but they looked very creepy, and I also wanted to suggest they were a big big family, so I changed them to rabbits (I don’t think they look like rabbits anymore, though). And now that I look at them, their square-ish shape actually resembles the muégano candy itself. So it really all came together.
LTPB: What did you find most difficult in creating this book? What did you find most rewarding?
JJ: The most difficult thing was deciding what to leave out and what to keep. Being a muégano is a whole concept in Mexico. You can even be a muégano with your own book and your drawings, as I am. So it was really hard to let go and take just a tiny piece of this huge idea and make a story out of it.
The most rewarding thing is seeing the book out in the world and watching readers connect with it. Sharing a personal story always makes you feel vulnerable, but when you see people enjoying it, it makes it all worth it.
LTPB: What did you use to create the illustrations in this book? Is this your preferred medium?
JJ: I usually work with gouache and watercolor, so those were my base for this book, but I also incorporated colored pencils, oil pastels, and I even bought a tile just to break it, which helped me work out the composition for the broken pieces spread (spoiler alert!).
LTPB: How does your process change from book to book?
JJ: I think it depends on the kind of book and whether I’m creating it myself or illustrating someone else’s story. When I’m also writing, it’s a whole different thing, ideas come in so many ways, that each one of them should be treat it like what it has to say.
When I’m illustrating someone else’s text, the process is more consistent: I read the story closely, try to connect with it (which is very important to me) and then imagine how I would want to experience it as a reader, and what I can bring to it.
LTPB: What are you working on now? Anything you can show us?
JJ: I’m working on a new picture book, I’m still working on it, so I can’t share much yet. But I can tell you this: the main character is always blurred, you can never quite see them clearly. Here are some early sketches:
I’m also exploring something around water. I recently moved back to Mexico City from New York, and the building I live in shakes every time a bus passes by because of its watery foundations—this city was built on water. Before the conquest, the city was built around, over, and between bodies of water, after, it was built against them. And I think that tension between humans and water is still here in some way. I live next to a big avenue that used to be a canal (paths that were traced by water, now completely dried), with cars passing through where the water once flowed. So I’m just painting it for now, waiting to discover what story is hiding behind it.
LTPB: If you got the chance to write your own picture book autobiography, who (dead or alive!) would you want to illustrate it, and why?
JJ: It’s hard to choose just one, but if we’re talking living illustrators, I’d say Victoria Semykina, there’s so much she finds in the ordinary that most people walk right past, and every illustration takes you to a completely different way of looking at the world. And if we’re talking dead, I’d choose M. Sasek or Štěpán Zavřel. My life is very much shaped by the context I grew up in, and I think they would know exactly how to portray that.
Thank you to Jaque for talking to me about this book! The Muéganos publishes today from Transit Children's Editions!
Special thanks to Jaque and Transit for use of these images!
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