Cry, Scream, Rage, Throw the Occasional Plate: Monica Gomez-Hira on Quinceañeras
In her debut YA novel, Once Upon a Quinceañera, Monica Gomez-Hira takes on coming of age, tradition, Latinidad, and patriarchal family structures through the lens of the quince. Her protagonist, Carmen Aguilar, ends up working as a hired performer at the quinceañera of her cousin Ariana, the same cousin who robbed Carmen of her own quince three years earlier. Against a vibrant Miami backdrop, Carmen navigates intergenerational family dynamics, questions the meaning of the ceremony she was denied, and contends with an ex-boyfriend thrust back into her life. Gomez-Hira spent years working in the book world before publishing Once Upon a Quinceañera. She spoke with me about writing untold Latinx stories, the burden placed on creators of color, and where she sees Latinx representation heading.
Myles Jeffrey: You’ve worked for literary agencies, publishers, and booksellers. What prompted the jump to the creative side of books?
Monica Gomez-Hira: I knew I eventually wanted to write my own book, and I saw all of it as endless research. I wanted every perspective: what it’s like for an agent, what it’s like for an editor, what it’s like on the publicity end. What’s funny is that none of it has helped me emotionally with the process of debuting! But I really liked working in all of those areas, because it was an opportunity to elevate other POC voices. I was happy to put in my own perspective wherever I could.
MJ: What was the kernel for Once Upon a Quinceañera? Why quinces?
MGH: I never had a quince, but I was fascinated by them. Any party situation has the ability to bring out the best and the worst in a family. They’re rife with drama. And a quinceañera is this strange in-between period for a young woman. She’s a girl, she’s supposed to be seen as a woman, but how willing is the family to see the girl who’s growing into womanhood as a woman? The parties also became so much more elaborate over time. It went from very simple, “You wear a white dress, you have a mass with your family, and then you have a party,” to themes and fireworks and Disney cruises that are just for quinceañeras. And I thought, okay, there’s a story here. There’s definitely a story here.
“She’s a girl, she’s supposed to be seen as a woman, but how willing is the family to see the girl who’s growing into womanhood as a woman?”
MJ: Miami is a culturally diverse place, but Cuban-Americans form a majority of the Latinx population there. As the daughter of Colombian immigrants, what was it like writing from the perspective of a character whose cultural circumstances were different from your own?
MGH: It wasn’t as difficult as you might think, because of my own history. I grew up outside of Union City, New Jersey, which is predominantly Cuban, and then my parents moved to Miami, which is also very Cuban. I’ve been around Cuban people, surrounded by Cuban people, and I felt more culturally aligned with them than with Colombian people, because we were by far the minority in both places. So I could draw on the experiences of people I’d grown up with, friends, people I went to school with.
But we’re talking in broad strokes about a culture, and culture is very individual. Everyone experiences their specific intersection of it differently. I could only draw on the people I knew and their experiences, so I don’t make any claim that I’m speaking to a larger Cuban-American or Latinx experience. Everything that happens in the book is specific to Carmen and Ariana and their whole crazy clan.
MJ: Let’s talk about Carmen’s voice. What I loved about her is that she’s neither a straight-A student nor a troubled teen. She feels real.
MGH: Writers are probably overrepresented in the “I was a very good student in high school” category, so a lot of our characters are straight-A students focused on college and things like that. But there are so many young people whose path isn’t that, either because of grades, or finances, or family pressure. Those stories are really important, and they’re not necessarily being told. It’s very binary. It’s either “I’m going to be the first person in my family to go to Harvard” or “I’m on the streets dealing drugs.” There’s a lot of ground in the middle, and it isn’t fair to box people into either space so young.
“It’s either “I’m going to be the first person in my family to go to Harvard” or “I’m on the streets dealing drugs.” There’s a lot of ground in the middle.”
MJ: I noticed both in an NPR review of the book and in a quote from you that you characterize your style for Quinceañera as “telenovela style.” Is that more about form or content?
MGH: A little bit of both. When I say telenovela style, I mean not shying away from those big emotions. My characters are not the suffer-in-silence, stiff-upper-lip kind of people. They will let you have it. They will cry, scream, rage, throw the occasional plate. That’s how they roll. I see that heightened emotional storytelling as telenovela. What I love about telenovelas is that they’re always intergenerational. The adults in the family influence the younger people and vice versa. There are a lot of YAs where the parents are dead or absent, and I understand that it gives the teens more agency, but that was not my experience. My parents were very, very in my business and involved in my life, and their opinion mattered a lot to me growing up.
MJ: What kinds of risks do you see Once Upon a Quinceañera taking?
MGH: The biggest risk is probably that Carmen is very sex-positive as a character and very confident physically. It was important to me to read a heroine who wasn’t self-deprecating in that way. She’s comfortable with her sexuality and with sex. But I didn’t want to add to negative representation either. There’s an unfortunate burden put on creators of color, that fear of “I don’t want to say anything negative about my people.” But our characters have to have flaws. I wanted to write her with all of the freedom that white writers feel when they write their characters. She’s got big feelings. She’s going to jump to conclusions, do dumb things, be impulsive, because that’s what teenagers do. There’s an expectation that she should somehow be above that so she can be a good role model. Well, she’s not a role model, you know? The book is not didactic in that way.
"Your characters have to have flaws. I wanted to write her with all of the freedom that white writers feel when they write their characters.”
MJ: What does Latinx representation look like to you in the book world today?
MGH: We have really made wonderful strides. There’s definitely a ways to go, but things are so much better than they were. There’s a lot of really wonderful specificity now about experiences: being Cuban-American versus being Mexican-American, being a new immigrant versus being a third-generation Latinx person, being mixed or Afro-Latino. There’s so much intersectionality, and for too long Latinx teenagers, and other teenagers who were curious about the Latinx experience, could not see that multiplicity of representation.
Every story was a cautionary tale or a story about immigration. When I was growing up there wasn’t really anything but that, and there’s a tendency, or at least there was for me as a young person, to believe that people didn’t write stories about us because we weren’t interesting, or because we didn’t really have stories worth telling. It took years to realize that wasn’t the case.
“It’s so disheartening when we get these charts that tell you there are more animals in books than Latinx characters.”
MJ: Where do you see it heading?
MGH: It’s so disheartening when we get these charts that tell you there are more animals in books than Latinx characters. I think it will change, but I wish it would change faster! Especially with visual media. Books are wonderful, I love books, books are my first love, but as a culture we’ve definitely moved in a very, very visual direction. Something like To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, something with that level of success, or Twilight or Hunger Games, but with Latinx characters, would really open the doors to greater representation. We haven’t had that yet, and I would like to see it. I think it’ll happen. I don’t know what book it’s going to be, but I think it’ll happen. And when it does, I’ll be in the front row with my popcorn, ready to watch.
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