‘Larry and Friends’ — A Celebration of Immigration and Diversity
By Rajul Punjabi
Carla Torres wonders about a world where being in the margins is both a comfortable and celebrated space to revel in. Her drawings are ripe with vibrant color, texture and movement. They are expressions of personal freedom. At the end of 2008, when she began to envision the book Larry and Friends, (see the successful Kickstarter campaign) a story about embracing friends from different places in the world, she brought on author Nathalie Jaspar to add just the right words to her images.
Torres, who hails from Ecuador, and Jaspar, who is of Belgian and Venezuelan heritage, rely on their current city, New York, for inspiration. While much of art, literature, and media often focus on larger struggles of immigrant life, Larry and Friends brings awareness to the mini triumphs that resonate in our day-to-day. It is a product of the illustrator’s and author’s experiences of living in New York, where they both admit to feeling more like themselves than anywhere else. As a portal for émigrés or even those who are attracted to the American Dream 2.0, the city is often both tough and enlightening.
For them, the city is also is a microcosm of tolerance — where being unique is to be celebrated. This sentiment is infused into Larry and Friends, which revolves around an American dog named Larry who celebrates his birthday with friends who possess quirky and engaging stories about where they come from and what experiences have both blessed and stressed their journeys to “The Big Apple.” The book moves from character to character, succinctly addressing various aspects of their immigration journey by explaining how they traveled from their native country to New York City, what drove them to move, and the elements of their culture they brought with them.
The charming characters of the book, largely inspired by Torres’s and Jaspar’s friends and family, include an Irish hare named Henrik with a penchant for poetry and a Polish pig named Magda who eschews the office life that was expected of her to walk tightropes. They and their cohort have lighthearted yet uplifting stories. One example is Coqui, a violin-playing frog from Puerto Rico. Coqui — an artist through and through — worries about leaving Puerto Rico to pursue a new home and fears that he wouldn’t be able to express himself culturally and musically. Instead, he finds that he carries his culture’s music in his heart and ends up bringing his sounds to a pond in the Bronx, adding a new flavor to the borough’s melting pot.
