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One thing BIPOC folks are going to do is storytell to survive, to thrive, to sustain, to rememory. Despite the ways the publishing world continues to give us the bare minimum, our craft is being perfected in community — and we take every chance to take up space amongst ourselves.
Little has changed in the traditional publishing world over the years, even accounting for all the initiatives and big pushes towards inclusivity. Only 11% of books in 2018 were written by writers of color, according to The New York Times. Still, this fall (and this year) there are major debuts across genres written by folks with roots in Latin America, and each one approaches identity and the publishing industry in distinctive, inspiring ways. Teen Vogue spoke to a collection of these authors about their new works: Saraciea Fennell’s Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed, Ariana Brown’s We Are Owed, Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez’s For Brown Girls, Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s Dreaming of You, Elisabet Velasquez’s When We Make It, Sharon Lee De La Cruz’s I’m A Wild Seed, and Alejandro Heredia’s You’re the Only Friend I Need.
Their writing covers a range of storytelling, from a thorough meditation for Brown girls navigating spaces not built with them in mind, to short stories centering friendship and queerness, to a collection of poetry that unpacks Mexican identity and uplifts Black consciousness. Below, these authors with roots in Latin America give us a deep dive into their work and process, sharing insight into the publishing process today and their dreams for the future.
On Finding Purpose, & Facing Fears
Lorraine Avila for Teen Vogue: How did you become the writer who was ready to tell your truth in the story you wrote for the collection, "Half In, Half Out"? What ideas did you have to shed before you wrote this?
Saraciea Fennell, Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed: I’ve written a ton of nonfiction and memoir — mostly for myself. So preparing to share something from my life made me feel so vulnerable. I thought a lot about how much of my past I was cool sharing and how much of my own pain and trauma I’m still working through. I had to remind myself that I was in control of the essay I was writing, that I am allowed to share as much or as little of my life with the world that I want to. I also had to shed the notion that other people would be upset about the way they are mentioned in my essay. It was something I struggled with, but then decided that it’s my truth, so how other people feel about my past has nothing to do with me, that’s on them.
LA: Poet Aracelis Girmay says your book "We Are Owed" is “recovery work.” What are you recovering for yourself in the collection?
Ariana Brown, We Are Owed: We Are Owed is a project about recovering from anti-Blackness, as much as it can be recovered from, by uncovering histories of enslaved Africans in Texas and Mexico. This process of unearthing stories, writing into them, and having conversations with these historical figures about the structures that govern our lives, is a kind of recovery work. It foregrounds the legacy of slavery in the Americas and provides context for my own life. Poems are a method I use to understand and speak back to my own life experiences. But I am never alone. Writing this collection helped me deepen my relationships with Black elders who came before me, whose lives are intimately intertwined with the same systems that persist today.
LA: Decoloniality was such a big theme in For Brown Girls. Break it down.
Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez*, For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts*: Decoloniality is such a big concept, but when you understand it in a visceral way, I hope it feels manageable. It could feel like just claiming yourself back to yourself because that's what coloniality has done: it has detached us, disembodied us so we become the army of white supremacy, we are born in activation, in service of it. So I hope I am explaining decoloniality as: to re-exist. Re-imagine yourself. Dare to even imagine. Whiteness has robbed us of creativity, it has robbed us of the imagination of thinking of ourselves outside of whiteness.
LA: Dreaming of You sets Selena Quintanilla’s life and death as a sort of backdrop to Melissa’s journey. Speak to us about the pressure of writing about one of the most tragic deaths in Latine pop culture.
Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Dreaming of You: I mean, the biggest thing I was scared about (and still scared about to be honest) is not respecting the life and legacy of Selena Quintanilla-Perez. This author came to visit a class I was in once, and he said that he didn’t know why people who wrote persona poems think they don’t need to be historically accurate, because history is always so much more interesting than what’s going on in your head. And yes: Selena was talented, magnetic, beautiful, a star that can never be replicated. You watch these old videos of her and you burst into tears because how is it that that person with her giant smile and contagious laugh and her out-of-this-world voice is just dead? Selena’s life and interior is much more interesting than mine, but in order to respect it, I kind of feel like I should have nothing to do with it.
So I fully leaned into absurdity and fiction and that let me explore more things about myself. It is also outrightly disrespectful to bring people back from the dead; there are countless tv shows, films, Stephen King novels about this. You shouldn’t do it. It’s WRONG! I’m scared of this because I love Selena, but also I really only love the idea of Selena, and the idea of Selena is wrapped up in my memories from childhood with my sisters listening to her songs on a stereo, with JLO’s interpretation of her life, with the way I feel when I watch her singing live at the Astrodome.
This is all to say exploring Selena complicatedly meant exploring myself complicatedly and that is scary. But also? Sometimes closure isn’t linear. Maybe you have to be f*cking messy to know what the fuck is going on. Like, what happens if we let ourselves f*ck up? And what does it mean for me, a Colombian-Guatemalan-American writer and woman, to let herself be f*cked up and messy? Loving Selena means making room for Selena to no longer be this martyr of Latine Pop Culture, this forever shining young gorgeous talented beacon who was taken from us too soon. It means recognizing that my love for this pop star was also somehow wrapped up in this myth of Latinidad, which, the longer you look at it and interrogate it, doesn’t really make sense. Do I still feel endless love and comradery with people who grew up with parents like mine? Who know Selena’s songs by heart like I do? Of course!! But maybe that’s the thing about myths. It’s like, does this really define me? Or was it the people I was in the audience with while I was worshipping the myth? The connections? The knowing glances we gave each other at parties? And do I actually need a definition at all?
I think I also felt pressure as a Latine writer to be political in my writing, but political in the way that corporations want us to be political. Like, I am not explicitly writing about social justice; I am writing about love, obsession and celebrity. And I’m sorry but, I think and actually I KNOW that that is political! Because the way you love and the things you love says everything about your capacity in this disgusting gorgeous dying flourishing little world.
LA: So many stories about coming into one’s queerness are directed towards young adults. Why did writing this story from the perspective of a 29-year-old feel important?
Sharon Lee De La Cruz, I’m a Wild Seed: My whole life I've felt as if I learned things "too late," and although I now know it's never too late, I do recognize how intentional and malicious our systems of education are, especially when it comes to intersectionality in Black and women's history. It's important for me to share as much of what I know, especially rooted in historical context, in order to dismantle systems of oppression. I wanted to share the nuances of coming into your queerness as an adult because it is different from coming out in High School; it's about constant growth and a search for freedom. It's an evolutionary process and doesn't look one way.
LA: Your short story collection centers Blackness and queerness and speaks to how valuable friendships are. What about these stories felt urgent enough to push you to publish right now?
Alejandro Heredia, You’re the Only Friend I Need: I've been working on some of these stories for about five years, so a part of it was me saying to myself, "Alright Alejandro, you've done the work. It's okay to let it go into the world." I understand that part of the project is, yes, centering an underrepresented group, queer Dominicans, in literary fiction. But I also hope it's a small intervention in a contemporary culture that privileges political identity over interiority. When one imagines, for example, a queer person exploring their relationship to gender, before they change their pronouns on their twitter bio, or they arrive at saying "I am ___" there's a tempest of emotions, thoughts, and lived experience before one experiences before arriving at something we call "identity." I feel urgently that the interior world is more complex, and more interesting, than whatever word we might ultimately come up with to reflect and represent said interiority. My work is an attempt at this.
On Process and Getting to Work
LA: What was the process of birthing a collection that speaks to Black consciousness within Latine spaces?
Ariana Brown: It’s been six years in the making. I didn’t know exactly what the book would be about until two years ago. I was just writing. I knew I wanted to write about history, incorporating what I’d learned about the founding of Mexico and Texas from my ethnic studies classes in undergrad. I wanted to place those histories alongside poems about my life growing up in San Antonio, my parents meeting in Wichita Falls, my undergrad in Austin, my great granny in Galveston. I knew there were so many intimacies and violences between Indigenous, Spanish, Tejano, Mexican, Mexican American, African, and African American people in all of these spaces. The writing asked me to confront the histories of colonization and slavery that brought all these people together and formed the societies I was born into.
LA: Your anthology combines Latine voices across identities — how was the curation process? What stories did you imagine existing in unison? What/who was most important for you to include? What were the difficulties?
Saraciea Fennell: It was so much fun curating the list of voices to include in this anthology. I wish I could’ve included so many more, because there are so many wonderful writers from the Latinx diaspora who would’ve had wonderful essays to contribute. But, I did want to make sure that contributors were paid fairly for their piece, and that certain voices were highlighted. It’s no secret to the world that there’s a lack of Central American writers being published today, especially when it comes to Honduran writers. So it was immensely important for me to include writers from those countries. There’s also an extreme lack of Black Latinx voices and so that was a major priority for me to include. There’s nothing like this collection out in the market right now ± a book that highlights diverse voices and experiences from the diaspora — aah, it’s something I’ve craved for a very long time. I imagined the stories being in conversation with each other, how there are similarities in our cultures and experiences, like a white latinx and a Black latinx person both feeling like they aren’t “Latinx enough” for different reasons. The most challenging thing was writing during a global pandemic, I wanted to make sure that we all had time to figure out life, while still devoting time and energy to this project. Shoutout to all of the contributors for balancing writing during such a tough time.
On Writing With Compassion
LA: So many of us demonized Yolanda for taking Selena’s life. In Dreaming of You there is some level of compassion being extended to Yolanda’s character. How did that come to be?
Melissa Lozada-Oliva: I am a little scared of how people will react to the way I am depicting Yolanda because she is uh, literally a murderer and a murderer of one of the most beloved pop stars of all time and I am making us see her as a little tender, and a little wounded, and a little like all of us. But the conversation around Yolanda still lacks nuance, especially in a day and age when people are talking about restorative justice, abolition, and honestly, homophobia. It’s really been too common how much I’ve heard people say how happy they are that that “crazy lesbian is in jail.” I don’t believe in jail because I don’t believe that people are the worst things that they have ever done. I think it’s really easy for us to make people into monsters when they’ve done monstrous things. It’s harder for us to imagine them as whole, because when we do then we have think more complicatedly about how we approach justice. For example, I have a poem called “Remember that Yolanda Was A Little Girl Once,” and it’s a poem about her masturbating as a young girl, not knowing that that’s what she’s doing because she’s full of shame about her sexuality and what it is she really wants, which is what all of us really want: to be wanted endlessly and to feel whole. I remember the first time I realized that everybody masturbated and it made me feel so relieved, like I wasn’t this pervert anymore, I was just like everybody else. This is so random but I literally thought of that poem because of the Diary of Anne Frank. There’s an unedited version where she is talking about masturbating and then later after she died her dad like, took that out? Because he didn’t want people to see that. Which I guess I understand but what! We’re taking away a part of Anne that was always there and that makes her less of a person.
Anyway, I am not trying to give Yolanda a platform, but thinking about Yolanda in this more complicated way allowed me to explore things about Latine women's desire, about friendship between women, and what happens when you love somebody so much that they stop being real. Yolanda was also Selena’s best friend but also the … manager of her fan club? I’m sorry, how could that ever not have been weird? She made her money off of being a friend? Who was maybe in love with her friend? Like what it is UP with that!
LA: While Mami and Sarai’s relationship feels complex, there is also a level of compassion being rendered to Mami. Speak about the process of extending compassion to layered characters.
Elisabet Velsaquez, When We Make It: I wanted to make sure every character in their book kept their humanity. Puerto Rican’s historically have had our humanity questioned, analyzed, and have had to survive under systems that neglected who we are as people both individually and as a community. And in that survival process sometimes choices are made, in Mami’s case she wasn’t the most supportive mom. The compassion rendered to Mami and some of the other characters comes from empathy and empathy is not an excuse to detract from accountability but it is a lens that allows us to see a person fully and not just for their faults.
On Navigating Identity
LA: Ibi Zoboi, in her piece, writes, “…if anyone asks me now if I am an Afro-Latina, I will proudly say no, I am not.” It is a stance many folks who identified with Afro-Latine at one point now take in order to divest from the white supremacy within Latinidad. Where do you stand?
Saraciea Fennell: For me, I think it’s important for us to really think about how we use some of these terms when it comes to our identity. Anything can be weaponized against us, especially against Black people. For me, I’m fine with folks identifying me as afro-latina, but I myself identify as a Black Honduran. I’m working on trying not to use catchall terms when they aren’t necessary, and I especially want and need people to know that Black Hondurans exist, that we are writers too, because I’ve been eagerly craving to read Honduran writers that are traditionally published and we continue to be nonexistent on the shelf. I’m hoping to help change that.
What keeps me going when I want to quit or give up, is that my literary activism isn’t just for me, I’m advocating for underrepresented voices like Honduran, Garifuna, and Central American writers, in the workplace, I’m constantly advocating for authors and calling out inequities and inequalities in campaigns and acquisitions as I spot them. The work is hard, but I’m happy to use my voice for change, to help offer a counter solution, to help be the conversation starter for the executives who have to work on fixing the problems and offering solutions.
LA: How did the experience of writing Dreaming of You differ from Peluda, your initial collection of poems? What felt the same?
Melissa Lozada-Oliva*:* [In these projects] I was exploring the myth of Latine identity, wanting to be loved in a world that is dying because you think it’ll save you, wanting to be really seen and known. In Dreaming of You, the “Melissa” character wants so very badly to be seen that she goes too far and almost becomes her own voyeur. Peluda is like, “Hey, what … ARE we????” And Dreaming Of You is like, “Bitch, do you really want to know? Because it’s not that pretty and it might not last.”
I realized that while I’ve never seen a ghost, I am a pretty haunted person. I’m scared all of the time. I hold intergenerational trauma and have anxiety that can really freeze up my entire day or month. I come from a death-obsessed household and a death-obsessed culture, especially as a woman. And when I fall in love I feel like I can hear the Hereditary soundtrack blasting through my body. So taking into account all of those things let me write this beast. Also all of those college towns are haunted as hell and I actually could never sleep in those hotel rooms. That probably had something to do with it.
LA: What was your experience writing this book in a voice that felt right to you and your intended audience?
Elisabet Velasquez: I wanted to honor the code switch as well as highlight the privilege in it too. In my twenties, I got a job where my supervisor was very condescending. She would intentionally weaponize language against me and laugh whenever I didn't understand a word. It made me feel very small.
My experience was similar to Sarai’s. I bought a notebook to write down every word she said that I didn’t understand. I would look up the definition and use it in a sentence the next day. When I got older I realized this was assimilating & in writing these poems I wanted to challenge the narrative that there are “good ways” and “bad ways” to speak. Language discrimination is real and it especially affects BIPOC folks.
On Advice and What Comes Next
LA: What is something you hope young adult readers take away from Dreaming of You?
Melissa Lozada-Oliva: I want young adult readers to come away loving and embracing nuance, that fugly little beast that makes everything a little complicated. I would also love it if a teen took a photo of a poem in this book and sent it to her spiraling BFF and was like, “Okay, b*itch... is this not you?”
LA: Sarai has so many questions. So many. And the world around her answers them in very soft and also difficult ways. Where/how do you encourage young adults engaging with your work to go for their own answers? How did questioning your own world as an adolescent lead you towards the life you’ve created for yourself?
Elisabet Velasquez: The most common advice I hear educators give young folks is to read. That the answers to our history and all of life’s circumstances can be found in books. While there is some truth to that and books are such an important part of my life now, I remember a time when I couldn’t afford books and as a teen mom, I didn’t have the time or the energy to access the library. What kept me alive as a young adult were the questions I asked myself about myself and about the people and the world around me. What did I want for myself? Who told me it was out of reach? Why do I believe them? Why are they wrong? Who am I today? Who do I want to be tomorrow? The best part about these questions is that the answers are not static. They evolve as you grow. They change as your situations change. Some answers are also not really answers. They are portals to worlds that you can create even if only in your imagination. I want young folks who are searching for answers to know that they are powerful because power is daring to create and believe in something that only you can see.
LA: List three major understandings you want your readers, women of color, to walk away with.
Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez: A big [takeaway] is: the book has no genre. My editor was like where do we put this? And I was like I don’t know. Figure it out, but it deserves to exist. I wrote this book putting into practice Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I wrote this putting into practice his theory it: how do we help people become free? I wanted to be like, “No, I don't know more than you, but I have a lot of scars that I hope can help you find answers for some of your scars. Hopefully that makes you reflect on your experiences and then you become free.” I hope this book allows people find new strategies to help our families talk about these things. Because too many of us act like our oppressors. We get these tools then go back and that is precisely why our families aren’t listening. Next, I hope that people figure out that individualism and meritocracy are not going to save us. That we can relieve ourselves of the pressure all that puts on us. Lastly, I hope it inspires better writing than mine. It creates a whole new genre of doing this that surpasses my wildest dreams
LA: What is some advice you’d give to young readers trying to stay true to their multiple intersections?
Sharon Lee De La Cruz: To stay true to your multiple intersections is to understand that you are many things, in fact, you and the universe are composed of millions of atoms so it's silly to box yourself into just ONE thing. To stay true to your intersections means that you may live in conflicting truths and that's beautiful and ok. To stay true to your multiple intersections is to be aware when you are preferencing one over the other, to learn to balance them, to be playful with them.
LA: How do you want this collection to move your readers?
Alejandro Heredia: I am particularly excited for Black Queer folks across the diaspora to read it. So many narratives focusing on queer and trans Black life centers trauma. Which is fine sometimes, but being presented only as the victim of some interpersonal, political, or societal force is reductive and dehumanizing. I hope to explore a queer Black universe that is nuanced and full of joy just as much as pain. I am less interested in representation, and hope instead that my work will expand the possibilities of the queer Black imagination, in fiction and in the real world. If one queer Black person in Santo Domingo or Atlanta or The Bronx reads this book and thinks, "Oh, I didn't know that was possible," then I've done my job.
Buy Their Books
Saraciea Fennell, Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed. Out 11.2.21. Pre-order
Elisabet Velasquez, When We Make It. Order Now
Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Dreaming of You. Out 10.26.21. Pre-order
Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez, For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts. Order Now
Alejandro Heredia, You’re the Only Friend I Need. Order Now
Ariana Brown, We Are Owed. Order Now
Sharon De La Cruz, I’m a Wild Seed. Order Now
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Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: On “In the Heights,” Imagination, and When “Latinidad” Falls Apart
