Writing Latinos

If you liked American Fiction, you’ll love Andrew Boryga’s debut novel Victim, from Doubleday. It follows the career of Javier Perez, who learns at an early age thebenefits—and devastating consequences—of writing about one’s traumas and victimization.High school teachers encourage “Javi” to write about how tough things are for him, so he could get into college. It worked. At Cornell, he wrote stories about race on campus, and his personal experience with race. After graduation, his blossoming career asa writer was based on telling the gritty stories his editors found compelling. The problem was that much of what he wrote was untrue. His family, friends, and an old lover don’t understand why he opted fort hese false accounts of his life. But you’re just going to have to read Victim in order to find out how it all blows up in his face, and what lessons he has learned, if any.

In this second episode of Writing Latinos, Boryga describes how he arrived at the idea to write Victim, his thoughts about the relationship between his life and the characters he invented, and speculation about how Victim might be read in the post-affirmativeaction era. Boryga is a Miami-based writer who grew up in the Bronx, where muchof the action inVictimtakes place

Melissa Lozada-Oliva is a New York-based author who grew up in Boston and calls herself a “Guatelombian” writer—half Guatemalan, half Colombian. We had a lively conversation about her second novel, Candelaria—an intergenerational family drama set during the apocalypse. Lozada-Oliva’s book explores the fraught but loving relationships between three sisters, their mother, their grandmother, and their connections, both real and imagined, with their Guatemalan homeland. It offers deep insights into Latina/o/x/e family dynamics, and is laugh-out-loud funny. Candelaria and Lozada-Oliva’s first novel, Dreaming of You: A Novel in Verse, were both published by Astra House. A former slam poetry performer, she has also written a collection of poems called Peluda. Look out for Candelaria’s paperback publicationthis fall.

Writing Latinos, from Public Books, features interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad.

In our final episode of Season One, we talk with Ingrid Rojas Contreras about her book, The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir, published last year by Doubleday. The Man Who Could Move Clouds was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named a best book of the year by Time, NPR, Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and more. Her first book, Fruit of the Drunken Tree: A Novel, was a national bestseller. 

There was so much to discuss! We covered the bicycle accident that left Ingrid with amnesia and led her to write her family’s story, including their supernatural abilities. We talked about a doctor’s impulse to come up with a scientific rationale for phenomena that might also be explained narratively, in the context of a particular family dynamic. We discussed the genre of memoir, and the yogurt Ingrid used to eat in Colombia and now seeks out every time she returns home.

Writing Latinos, from Public Books, features interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad.

In this episode, Geraldo Cadava and Tasha Sandoval talk with Raquel Gutiérrez about their critically-acclaimed book, Brown Neon: Essays, published by Coffee House Press. Brown Neon won the 2023 Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir/Biography and the 2023 Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction. It has received praise from The New Yorker, Vogue, Oprah Daily, SPIN, Ms. Magazine, and so many other publications. 

Gutiérrez, Cadava, and Sandoval discuss the legendary activist Jeanne Cordova, Leslie Marmon Silko, gentrification, belonging, performance, border walls, the Sonoran Desert, the drive on I-10 through Arizona and California, and Tucson. Really, it was a lot about Tucson, and you can thank Sandoval for editing that part down to a reasonable length. On the other hand, if you’re from the desert, or just a fan of the “Dirty T,” as Gutiérrez called it, then you’re welcome!

A critic, essayist, poet, performer, and educator, Gutiérrez was born and raised in Los Angeles, and is today based in Tucson. They teach in the low residency creative writing MFA programs at Oregon State University-Cascades and the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). 

Writing Latinos, from Public Books, features interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors. We discuss their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad.

We recently caught up with Héctor Tobar to discuss his new book, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”. Our conversation included mention of the pathbreaking historian Vicki Ruiz, to whom Tobar dedicated Our Migrant Souls, as well as discussions on the literary influence of James Baldwin, That was just the beginning the need for a revolution in how we talk about immigrants and immigration, Latino racial identity, and Tobar’s own life and travels.

Tobar is a writer based in Los Angeles and is a professor of Literary Journalism and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the winner of a Pulitzer Prize, a frequent contributor to The New York Times, and the author of many other books, including The Last Great Road Bum, Deep Down Dark, and The Tattooed Soldier.

Writing Latinos, from Public Books, features interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad.

In this episode, you’ll hear our interview with Alejandro Varela about his books The Town of Babylon and The People Who Report More Stress, both published by Astra House. The Town of Babylon was a finalist for the National Book Award, and The People Who Report More Stress will earn similar accolades. We discussed stress as a silent killer in Latinx communities, the challenges of interethnic and interracial relationships, whether it’s possible to partner with someone who doesn’t share your politics, suburbs and cities, the meanings of Latinx literature as a genre, and so much more. 

Varela is a writer based in New York City. He has a background in Public Health, which is evident in his writing. His writing has appeared in The Point Magazine, Georgia Review, Boston Review, Harper’s, The Offing, and other places. 

Writing Latinos, from Public Books, features interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad.

In this episode, you’ll hear our interview with Sarah Margarita Quesada about her new book The African Heritage of Caribbean and Latinx Literature, published by Cambridge University Press. We discussed how the writing of Caribbean and Latinx authors–especially Junot Díaz, Achy Obejas, Rudolfo Anaya, and Tomas Rivera–was shaped by their thinking about what Quesada describes as “Latin Africa,” Unlike other Latinx writers I know, Quesada is also trained in African Studies. She argues that we can’t talk about blackness here in the United States without also taking Africans and Africa–as a place and as an idea–seriously. 

Quesada is an Assistant Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University. The African Heritage of Caribbean and Latinx Literature is her first book.

Writing Latinos, from Public Books, is a new podcast featuring interviews with Latino (a/x/e)
authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing
conversation about the meanings of latinidad.

For this episode, we caught up with Edgar Gomez on his memoir High-Risk Homosexual
(Soft Skull, 2022). The conversation with Gomez was one of our
most wide-ranging, flowing, and honest yet. We talk about machismo, cockfighting, reconciling
with parents, the Pulse nightclub shooting, bilingualism in modern literature, and the
“messiness” of latinidad.

The New York Times called High-Risk Homosexual “a breath of fresh air.” The book is a finalist
for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography; an Honor Book for the 2023
Stonewall Book Award—Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Book Award; and was named a Best Book
of the Year by BuzzFeed, Electric Literature, and Publishers Weekly. Born in Florida but with
roots in Nicaragua and Puerto Rico, Gomez received an MFA from the University of
California, Riverside.

Writing Latinos, from Public Books, is a new podcast featuring interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad.

In this episode, Lorgia García Peña discusses her new book, Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (Duke University Press, 2022). For a long time, Afro-Latino scholars and community organizers have argued both for their greater belonging within Black and Latinx communities in the United States and recognition of their difference from them. 

Conversations about Blackness within latinidad became more urgent when members of the Los Angeles City Council were caught saying ugly things on tape and because of a proposal to combine race and ethnicity questions on the US Census that could lump all Latinos together as members of the same racial group, despite the fact that Latinos come from many racial backgrounds. As Afro-Latinas including García Peña have argued in opposition to the proposal, Latinos are not a race.

We discuss these broader issues of the relationship between Blackness and latinidad explicitly and implicitly by talking about historical figures like Frederick Douglass, Gregorio Luperón, and Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, as well as topics such as women’s activism and global movements led by Black Latinas and Latinos.

García Peña is a professor at Tufts University, in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. As of July 1, she will begin a new position at Princeton University as a professor in the Effron Center for the Study of America and the Department of African American Studies. In addition to Translating Blackness, she is the author of Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color (Haymarket, 2022) and The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction (Duke University Press, 2016).

Writing Latinos, from Public Books, is a new podcast featuring interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad.

This episode features our conversation with Graciela Mochkofsky, author of The Prophet of the Andes: An Unlikely Journey to the Promised Land. Mochkofsky’s book is about the extraordinary life of Segundo Villanueva, a Peruvian prophet who grew a following of hundreds, ultimately leading their pilgrimage to Israel and conversion to Judaism. The Prophet of the Andes shatters every preconception about religion in the Americas, and what we mean when we talk about Latino religiosity.

Mochkofsky is Dean of CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, contributing writer for The New Yorker, an award-winning journalist, and author of several books published in Latin America and the United States.