When Dr. Toni Viva Muñoz left the U.S.-Mexico border for college, people started asking her to make her name easier. Shorten it to Toni M. Drop the tilde over the n. Or change it to something more American — Smith, maybe, or Taylor.
Her grandmother had taught her to write that name at a kitchen table in La Unión, New Mexico, hand over hand. Her grandmother had also been a left-handed girl in a Southwest classroom where teachers tied left hands behind students’ backs, and where children were not allowed to speak Spanish.
“My Name in Brown” (TCU Press, October 13, 2026) is a nonfiction picture book for ages 7 to 11 about what a family keeps and what gets taken from it. Illustrated by Susie Cortez with archival family photography by Simon Lopez, it follows a road trip Muñoz took with her grandmother — nominally to see a doctor, actually to collect the family history before it was gone.
Four generations come out over those miles. Mamá Juliana, whose name survives in a Spanish baptismal record, because that is what survives when Indigenous children in the colonial Southwest are renamed. The El Refugio Land Grant, which became the town of La Unión. Apache families hidden, renamed, or left behind. A house built from la tierra, standing on the ground where the family’s dead are buried.
Muñoz writes in the book that she is “a member of the Chihene Nde Nation of New Mexico, also known as the Gila/Mimbres Apache,” and frames the work as part of a larger argument: “We cannot speak about US-Mexico Border identity and Mexican American identity without speaking about Indigeneity. Our histories are intertwined.”
The grandmother, Maria “Cuca” Refugio Muñoz, did not die on that trip. She got two new knees, lived to meet her great-granddaughters, and saw her granddaughter finish a doctorate. She died in November 2022. Written for grades 4 through 6, the book assumes no prior history and asks a question most children carry around: where does my story start?
Dr. Toni Viva Muñoz was born in El Paso and lives in Dallas with her daughters, Darlington and Tennyson. She holds a PhD in literature and won the Blue Mesa Review nonfiction prize in 2020. Her first children’s book, El Bowie Bakery, was published by TCU Press in 2025.
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