From pen to paper

Prologue:

Recently, I’ve been accepted to Hollins University Children’s Literature summer MFA program. I’m very excited about this and have already ordered my books for the two classes I’ll be taking in late June. Chapter one of one such book, “The Pleasures of Children’s Literature, Third Ed.” prompted this reflective post…

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In chapter one, the authors go into some detail describing their background, focusing mainly on their ethnic roots, and how they have influenced how they read and study literature. It reminded me much of two speakers I heard at the SCBWI conference in January, where a writer and her editor spoke about their respective histories and how they shape what they publish and what they write.

Reading this, however, has caused me to reflect on my writing and how my ethnic background has shaped it. I’m from hispanic decent. In every form I’ve ever filled out, the “Hispanic/Latino” box is always checked. And I’m proud of that. Yet why are all my characters American-looking and -sounding? I attribute this to my non-Cuban Cuban family. That’s right, I’m third-generation Cuban, meaning my grandparents got here during the “Exilio,” when a host of Cubans left the island for the United States in the wake of Fidel Castro’s rise to power in the early sixties. My parents were born in Miami, I was born in Miami, and I’ve lived here my whole twenty-two years of life. 

So why don’t any of my characters reflect my “Cuban-ness”? I can probably attribute it to the fact that my family is as American as American gets. We don’t listen to latin music 24/7. Our level of spanish music intake is at parties, and those are few and far between. We eat salad, grilled chicken and hummus with pita chips more than we do “pastelitos de guayaba,” “lechon asado” and “platanitos fritos” (guava pastries, pork cooked on a spit and fried plantains). Again, only reserved for parties and special occasions. My two youngest siblings speak spanish with the fluency of a non-Hispanic learning it as a school requirement, and my own fluency fluctuates depending on how often I’m talking to my grandparents. We speak English at home with a few spanish/spanglish words peppered in, usually when emphasizing a point or driving home the punch line of joke. 

Furthermore, all my neighbors, with the exception of one, live the same type of “non-Hispanic Hispanic” lifestyle, where we speak spanish and have some pigment in our skin but live the modern American life. To me, this constitutes “American”. To me, a white American and a tanned Cuban-American are the same. There is no distinction with the exception that I speak a second language, which the white American probably does too. The fact that everyone in my city is pretty much on the same level of “Americanized Hispanicism” further adds to my identity as “American”. 

What does this have to do with my writing? Well it got me thinking. My character is a typical, white American boy with white American parents and similar friends. If I changed his last name to “Rodriguez” or “Perez,” instead of the white name he has now, nothing would happen to him. He’d still act the way he does and talk the way he does because that’s how I see, to quote my novel, “an average kid living in a town like most in suburban America”. Would readers feel cheated out of a “hispanic” character because every other word was not in spanish, or that at home, he ate peas and mashed potatoes for dinner instead of rice and beans and fried plantains? Would they be outraged that he didn’t talk with an accent or that his family was not Catholic? How far do the roots of stereotype actually go? Will readers feel like the character is two-dimensional because he acts like a white kid but has a spanish last name? That the character is not “deep” enough?

In college, my professor once asked me to draw on my culture to write a short story. So I pulled together everything that was “Cuban” about me. But in the end, I felt that the story reflected what most people expected out of a Hispanic family instead of what really happened in my home. Kind of like a “novella” (a Spanish soap opera) instead of day-to-day reality.

Sure there are rules in my family that are influenced by our Cuban roots, such as the fact that a girl is supposed to live at home until she is married, but there are other aspects of my family that defy the stereotype. For example, we’re not Catholic. We don’t wear Cuban pride memorabilia and the men in my family don’t smoke cigars. Playing dominoes and drinking Cuban coffee are reserved usually for special occasions and holidays. We don’t even celebrate Three Kings Day. We eat healthy meals and when I want to bake something special I look up recipes for “apricot squares” and “home-made apple tarts” instead of the typical Hispanic desserts. In fact, I don’t even like them.

All this to ask, what does my writing say about my identity, about my background?  I like quirky characters with interesting names whose meanings shed some light on what kind of person they are. I like situations that are not of this time or even this world, per se, preferring to delve into fantasy and sci-fi than contemporary literature. I like quests and stories with moral fiber that make me think at the end and question how it applies/compares to my own daily life. I prefer flawed characters that learn and grow from those around them and their experiences, seeking to pull on my own life’s roller-coasters to write them. None of this really says, “Oh, she’s hispanic.”

The biggest connection I can make to it is that as a hispanic, I was raised with a conservative worldview. This, along with my spiritual, non-Catholic upbringing causes me to look towards that moral fiber in what I write. That my being stereotypically “different” from the “white Americans” causes me to write about quirky characters that are different, yet the same as the main character in many ways so that they share a common bond.

What does your writing say about you and your background? Thoughts and discussion are welcomed.