"Don't Blink": Marcela Fuentes Brings Malas to the Forty Acres
Paloma Aguirre and Andrea M. Escalante, Latinx Pop Magazine On-the-Ground Team, covered Marcela Fuentes charla with Professor Domino Pérez at the Texas Union. They talked La Llorona, female rage, a twelve-way bidding war, and why the thing you most need to write is the thing you fear.
On the afternoon of October 16, a room in the Texas Union at UT Austin filled with students, faculty, and readers for a conversation between novelist Marcela Fuentes, who teaches creative writing at SMU, and Domino Pérez, Professor and Distinguished Teaching Professor in UT's Department of English. The subject was Malas, Fuentes's debut novel, published by Viking in June 2024 and now out in a hot-pink Penguin paperback stamped with the gold seal of the Good Morning America Book Club.
Set in a South Texas border town, Malas braids two stories: Pilar Aguirre, cursed in 1951 by an older woman who claims Pilar's husband as her own, and Lulu Muñoz, a fourteen-year-old punk singer facing her quinceañera in 1994. Since publication it has collected an American Book Award, a WILLA Award, the Texas Institute of Letters' Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction, and a REFORMA National Book Award, among other honors.
Pérez did not hide where she stood. "I'm a huge fan of her and her work," she told the audience before diving in. What followed was part craft talk, part family storytelling, and part pep talk for every aspiring writer in the room.
Starting at the End
Pérez opened with that gold seal. Fuentes explained that her path to it was anything but typical. Only weeks after the novel sold, Good Morning America's literary scouts came calling, before the book had even been edited. "They've never asked for a book this soon," she said. She learned of the selection in 2022 and then had to keep it secret for two years, until the show announced Malas as its June 2024 pick.
That was no small task for someone with a family like hers. When she won a Western Heritage Award, she texted the news home with strict instructions not to share it, and her relatives spread it anyway. During the GMA embargo, she asked a friend at a Latino-owned bookstore in Dallas's Bishop Arts District to cover the seal with her thumb in any Instagram post.
The sale itself came through a twelve-way bidding war, which Fuentes conducted from the road while driving her mother across South Texas on a family visit. "So I'm on the Zoom call with, like, twelve different New York agents," she recalled, "and my mom's like, are we going shopping?" Along the way, she enjoyed teaching a few New York publishing professionals the word chingona. Her advice: "Put it on a tote bag."
The whirlwind that followed included a promo with Peloton instructor Robin Arzón, family photos chosen to evoke the book's sense of home, and a trip to New York with her son and her closest friends in a car service paid for by the show. "It was kind of like a fever dream," she said.
Fuentes framed the story as a caution rather than a template. "My experience is not everyone's experience," she said more than once. What she wanted the audience to take away was something harder. For writers who come from families that ask "What's your real job? What's the one that pays you?", she acknowledged, that can be a long negotiation.
"Own your art. Own your artist self."
From Fairy Tale to Novel
Malas began as a short assignment in novelist Edward Carey's fairy-tale class at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Fuentes's story simply would not end. "I ended up writing fifty pages," she said, "and the ending is still not there." Carey told her to keep going.
Homesickness fed the work too. Living in Iowa, she longed for the punishing South Texas August where the novel opens. She also wanted to write against the way the border usually appears in the news, and to fill it with people.
"Every time you see the border, it's always something absurd, ridiculous, and terrible. But there are no people who live there."
She realized she had a novel a year or two after leaving the workshop, when the manuscript reached two hundred pages and its two storylines still had not met. She compared the feeling to swimming far from shore: at some point you have to commit. Instead, she admitted with a laugh, she left for a PhD.
After the doctorate came a fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Just before it began, her father died. "I went to Wisconsin and I wrote nothing," she said. Returning to the manuscript, she saw it with new eyes: "I looked at the book and I was like, this is a book about Dad. Who knew that? Not me." She was clear that Lulu's father, Julio, is not a portrait of her own ("my dad's definitely a nicer guy"), but writing a father-daughter relationship so soon after the loss was more than she could take on. Instead she drove through Wisconsin looking at the farms where her father had once worked as a migrant laborer, material that now feeds her next book.
The deadline that finally broke the logjam was an academic one. On the tenure track at Texas A&M and facing a third-year review, she wrote fifty or sixty thousand words in a single semester. She sent the finished draft to agents on May 22, the day after her son's birthday. Within a week she had five offers of representation, and by the end of the summer twelve publishers were bidding. "I feel like the world was like, we're just waiting for you, girl. Get it done."
La Llorona, Rage, and Women Who Want to Be Seen
Pérez, whose first book, There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture (University of Texas Press), traces the Weeping Woman of greater Mexican folklore, called her next question "completely selfish and self-serving." Was Fuentes thinking about La Llorona while writing?
"Yes, absolutely," Fuentes answered without hesitation. She wanted to explore the character's rage while refusing the cautionary tale that so many versions of the legend become, the story that warns poor or Indigenous women away from men of higher standing. Her aim was to humanize.
"Don't judge your character. Do I think that Pilar is terrible? Yes. But I'm gonna write her in her pain and her love and her feelings and her real self, and let you decide what you think."
Pérez observed that both Pilar and Lulu are allowed something women rarely get on the page: the right to claim their own rage. Fuentes said that dimension deepened in revision, as she thought about how repressive a community can be. She made Pilar vain on purpose, writing against the old compliment that a woman is most beautiful when she doesn't know it. "Bro, she knows it," Fuentes said, to laughter. Being asked to pretend otherwise, she added, "is not allowing you to own your own beauty."
Lulu, meanwhile, does not want a boyfriend or a husband and has no interest in checking in with anyone. Pérez called her "fierce," with a "punk, independent streak" she had not seen before on the page.
Pérez also raised one of the novel's most painful moments, when Pilar sells her earrings to pay for her son's funeral and promises herself that one day she will have something all to her own. Fuentes imagined the small windfall Pilar receives after her husband's death as a way to use skills she already has. Pilar is highly literate, a translator, and Fuentes pictured her working at the courthouse, saving her money, and spending it as she pleases, with only her series of dogs to look after.
Five Drafts and No Muse
Asked how many major revisions the novel went through, Fuentes answered: five. The first was what she called the "stretchy" draft, where everything goes on the page. The second carved it down. In the third, she cut a hundred pages told from Julio's perspective once she understood the book was really about female friendship. "His perspective is not the one for this book," she said. "Another book, maybe." Each later pass had a single job: one for structure, one for connections, one for sentences alone.
"People think about writing or art like, when the Muse strikes you," she said. "You still have to put in the work on your book. It's about the repetition, and just showing up for your book."
Her advice to young writers was simple. Make playlists to stay connected to the work. Take the day job if you need it, but carve out time each week that belongs to you as an artist. Pérez seconded her: "Her books are fire."
"Write the book you want to read, because no one else is gonna write it. You are."
Questions from the Floor
Audience questions ranged widely. A student asked about the novel's soundtrack, which runs from punk to Tejano. Fuentes, who confessed to being kicked out of piano and clarinet lessons as a fidgety kid, spoke about Selena with real tenderness. Growing up in South Texas, she could hear Selena perform from down the street without buying a ticket. The scene in which Lulu sits in her room listening is, she said, "straight from my life." In her community, "that's our Selena," a star so familiar that the rest of the world only recognized her greatness after her 1995 death, just as her English-language crossover, Dreaming of You, was arriving.
To get to know her characters, Fuentes made playlists for each of them and for particular scenes, and she wrote many scenes that never made the book but told her something about the people in it. On finding an agent, she credited summer workshops such as Sewanee and Tin House, connections from Iowa, stories published in strong venues, and a Pushcart Prize for her story "The Observable World." As for what made her query succeed: "They liked the book. That's it. So write a good book."
One reader asked about the mysterious old woman who curses Pilar, and why she returns at the novel's end. Fuentes revealed that she had originally meant the woman never to reappear. She wanted to leave open whether the curse was supernatural or whether it was generational trauma, a question she sees running through many Mexican American families. She told the story of her mother, who holds a master's degree, rubbing her grandchildren with eggs to ward off the evil eye, and of her own failed attempts to convince her otherwise. "It's a yes, and," she said. Her agent and editors pushed for the old woman's return, and Fuentes agreed, but on her own terms: the reader learns who she is, while the characters never do.
Another reader described having to set the book down during the deaths of Pilar's children. Fuentes said she cleared her schedule, went away from family, and stayed with those chapters for hours at a stretch, then turned on something silly like Tiger King to recover.
"The thing you need to write is the thing you're afraid of. If you're gonna make art, don't blink. No flinching."
A reader who loved the scenes between Lulu and her father asked how Fuentes made something so specific feel universal. She said she never sets out to write something relatable. She writes something specific, trusting that a true detail can ring true for many. What might be universal, she suggested, is "the moment when you start to realize that your parents are people." Growing up means seeing that how they treat you "may not even be personal. That might be their own baggage." She added that one of the highlights of her book tour was reading that scene aloud to a library audience that joined in.
A final question asked why the novel's lost children are eldest sons. Fuentes said that thread was there from the start, born of her thinking about La Llorona and the loss of children. As the only girl in her family and, she said, her father's favorite, she still saw the cultural weight placed on sons, down to an obituary writer who wanted to list her brother's name first.
Pérez closed by thanking Fuentes for her generosity and insight. "It's an absolutely beautiful book," she said, "and I am so glad that you committed yourself to it. I think it's a book that we need." The room answered with a long round of applause before readers lined up at the back table for signed copies.
The Books
Malas by Marcela Fuentes (Viking, 2024; Penguin paperback, 2025). A Good Morning America Book Club pick.
There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture by Domino Renee Perez (University of Texas Press).
Fatherhood in the Borderlands by Domino Renee Perez (University of Texas Press)
***Coming next from Fuentes: My Heart Has More Rooms Than a Whorehouse, a story collection whose title comes from Florentino Ariza in Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera.
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