Latine Women Authors for Women’s History Month (and an Introduction to Latine Lit!)
Welcome to Latine Lit, a celebration of all things Latine literature. I’m Book Riot’s Managing Editor, Vanessa Diaz, and I am so excited to be at the helm of our newest newsletter, exploring a subject that’s so deeply personal to me. Every other week, I’ll bring you news, new releases, recommendations, and other good stuff from the big, beautiful world of Latine lit, with regular doses of Spanglish and plenty of enthusiasm.
For the inaugural send of Latine Lit, I have a list of some of my favorite underrated Latine women authors. Since we are presently celebrating Women’s History Month here in the U.S., it felt like a good time to praise these phenomenal women and share some of my favorites from their body of work. But before we dive into that, let’s lay down a few simple guidelines and norms about the language you can expect from this newsletter.
Latine Lit Norms and Guidelines
Why Latine?
Let’s start off with the name of this newsletter, Latine Lit. I’ve chosen to use the term Latine to approach our subject from the most inclusive place possible. It is a gender-neutral way to describe people of Latin American origin or descent.
Why Not Just Use Latino, Latina, or Latinx?
If you’re unfamiliar with Spanish, it is a gendered language, meaning that Spanish words almost always have a fixed gender. A house, for example, is always feminine (la casa, una casa). A heart is always male (el corazon, un corazon). A dog will generally be male (un perro) unless the specific dog you’re referring to is female. In that case, you would say “la perra.” Language is fun!
Because of this gendered grammar structure, using the terms Latino and Latina marginalizes folks who fall outside this gender binary. The term Latinx was born from a desire for a more gender-neutral approach. While its earliest use was documented somewhere around 2004, it feels like it reached widespread popularity around 2022. But the term proved to be polarizing, and not just among folks who have chosen to be personally offended by anything “woke.” Many took issue with using a term whose spelling and pronunciation are unnatural to Spanish speakers. The letter “x” does exist in the Spanish language, but the long and short of it is that a word ending in “x” in this way violates Spanish grammar and syntax rules.
Latine is now the preferred term among many, but not all. I’ve opted to use it as it feels like the most inclusive and expansive option available to me. Still, it’s important to remember that this community, like any other community, is not a monolith, and self-identification wins every time. I use Latina to refer to myself and Latine to refer to my people at large. You might prefer Latinx. It comes down to personal choice if you’re of the community in question, and deference to that choice if you aren’t.
What About Hispanic?
In broad terms, Hispanic refers to a person from a Spanish-speaking country, whereas Latina/o/x/e refers to someone from a country in Latin America. If you’re Spanish, for example, you’re Hispanic but not (necessarily) Latino. If you’re Brazilian, you’re probably Latine but not Hispanic, as Portuguese is the dominant language there. Are there exceptions therein? Yes. This is just a broad baseline.
Spanish Not Required!
I’ve spent all that time talking about Spanish, and you will see me include a ton of Spanglish because that is how I speak! But make no mistake: no one’s Latine identity is defined by whether or not they speak Spanish (cough, it’s is the language of the colonizer anyway, cough).
With that out of the way, let’s celebrate some of the baddest Latine women authors in the game.
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Latine Women Authors to Celebrate All Year Round
I sat down to write this list and it very quickly got out of control. To curate it a little further, I decided to focus on recent favorites and authors who still feel underrated to me. I’m sure I will dive into some of the OGs of Latine women’s lit in the future (Julia Alvarez, Laura Esquivel, Isabel Allende), and while they’re popular enough that you might not need me to extoll their virtues for you, I’ll add some bonus recs here: Ada Limón, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Elizabeth Acevedo, Angie Cruz, Carmen Maria Machado, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Zoraida Córdova. For today, I’ve highlighted some authors who I want more people to read or who’ve written recent favorites that have stayed with me.
Aya de Leon
With a background as an acquiring editor for a climate justice fiction imprint and as both a creative writing professor and Poet Laureate at UC Berkeley, it’s no wonder writer and activist Aya de Leon writes such compelling fiction. She writes for both adults and younger readers and blends genres in her fiction, which generally include crime, romance elements, and social justice themes.
Her Justice Hustlers series begins with Uptown Thief, a novel Jamie Canaves once called “Robin Hood in the form of a group of sex workers stealing from terrible men (CEOs) to fund a women’s clinic.” Her middle grade The Factory series is spy fiction about a young girl in a family of spies who also gets pulled into the game. It perfectly nails a younger voice with a climate justice mystery that adults will enjoy. My favorite of her works is A Spy in the Struggle, a standalone novel about a young Black woman hired by the FBI to go undercover and infiltrate an extremist teen activism group. You get a juicy mystery, a spy story, and some spicy times.
Ann Dávila Cardinal
Ann Dávila Cardinal is a self-described “Gringa-Rican” and “aging tattooed punk” who writes both YA and adult fiction, and I’ve been on a mission to get more people to read her for a while now. I was first introduced to her work via her Five Midnights series, a YA duology about five cursed friends that explores the myth of El Cuco (if you know, you know) in modern-day Puerto Rico. The Storyteller’s Death took my breath away, an adult novel about family and the power of storytelling full of magical realism and characters that could be part of my family were I Boricua and not Mexican American. I think her most recent novel, We Need No Wings, might be my favorite, a beautiful exploration of grief, identity, aging, and purpose about a woman who begins to levitate spontaneously and decides to trace her family’s rumored connection to Saint Theresa of Avila. It’s a story that I keep thinking about and that I’ve gushed about more fully here.
Lilliam Rivera
I knew I was going to like Lilliam Rivera’s books as soon as I learned that her YA novel Dealing in Dreams featured an all-girl teen crew called Las Mal Criadas. The book did not disappoint with its bold exploration of gender roles, class, and the corruptive nature of power in a dystopian setting unlike any I’d read before. Rivera won me over again with Never Look Back, a YA novel reimagining the Orpheus and Eurydice myth with Afro-Latine characters and a little bit of magical realism. I have not gotten around to her latest release, Tiny Threads, but it is high on my TBR: it’s an adult supernatural suspense about a woman who gets her dream job working for a famous designer only to quickly discover the world of high-stakes fashion she so longed to be a part of has a very sinister side.
Vanessa Angelica Villareal
It felt wrong to call this author, poet, essayist, and critic underrated when her work was just longlisted for the National Book Award (among many other accolades), but with less than 500 ratings on Goodreads, more people should know about the masterpiece that is Vanessa Angelica Villareal’s Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders. Villarreal felt called to Mexico when she became a mother, eager to reconnect with her ancestry. But her return from that journey was marked by layers of profound loss, leading to a reflection on borders, identity, grief, and erasure that became this collection of essays. The book explores the role of fantasy and magic in our collective lives and the author’s personal story, using anecdotes and analysis of pop culture (one minute it’s Game of Thrones, the next it’s Selena) to ask this very important question: “What does the constant state of loss after colonization, enslavement, and dispossession do to the collective imagination?” I kept slapping the table between essays and yelling, “Santa madre!”
Melissa Mogollon
I am such a fangirl for Melissa Mogollon’s debut novel, Oye. It’s a coming-of-age novel about a Colombian American teen who is go-ing-through-it. Luciana (Nana) has just come out to her mom and it didn’t really go well. She struggles in school and isn’t sure what to do with her life after graduation. Her big sister has gone off to college, leaving her feeling abandoned. Now Nana’s mom has made it her responsibility to convince her stubborn, youth-obsessed abuela to evacuate when Hurricane Irma is headed straight for their Florida home. This is all just the tip of the iceberg, and the part that really makes this book special is that it’s told entirely through Nana’s end of phone calls to her sister Mari, recounting the chaotic goings on of life with their mom and grandmother. Mogollon really brings Nana to life in all her not-a-girl-not-yet-a-womanness. She’s at once tender and prickly, lost but determined, a little quick to fly off the handle but so deeply in love with her people. The book reads a little like a telenovela if the main character were a queer teen having to grow up a little too fast. Mogollon is another author who writes teen characters so, so well. She is one to watch.
What Latine authors do you wish more people were talking about? Let’s chat in the comments!
Until next time, here’s more fantastic Latine content to fill your reading days:
8 Compelling Works of Contemporary Latine Fiction
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