No hay tiempo para jugar (No Time to Play)

Sandra Arenal
Illustrations by Mariana Chiesa
Text about Sandra Arenal: Sandra Maldonado Arenal
Commentaries by Mariana Chiesa and Abraham Hidalgo

ISBN: 978-84-932004-6-8
Late Reading Collection, number 4 / Spanish edition / 1st edition: August 2004 / 18,5 x 23 cm / 120 pages / 23 bicoulored illustrations + portraits of the authors / it includes a glossary of mexican expressions and the declaration of children´s rights / hardcover with dust jacket / printed at Brizzolis, Madrid, Spain

These short stories about working children from the Mexican city of Monterrey were collected by the sociologist Sandra Arenal. Children of eleven, twelve, and thirteen years of age (street sellers, builders, maquila workers and garbage collectors) narrate in first person what their lives are like. Mariana Chiesa has given them a face.

No Time To Play includes 50 short stories about the lives of children working in the Mexican city of Monterrey. Sociologist Sandra Arenal has interviewed many children, and in a book -which this edition is based on-, she compiled some of the testimonies which show the world’s ugliest side, the one we never want to see: children deprived of their childhood, forced to carry out hard tasks in exchange for a meagre pay in order to take care of their families, finance their studies, or merely to survive.

Maquila workers, street sellers, prostitutes, builders, maids, waste collectors… To ensure we do not forget we are reading stories about people who are at times no older than eleven or twelve, we wanted to include the portraits of these children; based on photographs and sketches taken in the street, Mariana Chiesa’s engravings bring to life the faces of our young protagonists.

VAT included

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