Hosted by the Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies, Xochitl Gonzalez, bestselling author and The Atlantic staff writer, visited Tulane University last Tuesday for an interview in the Village Theater at Lake Residential Hall. Joining authors like Sandra Cisneros as a part of the Stone Center’s Latinx Voices Author Series, Gonzalez discussed Latino representation in media and how her novels and characters resist performance.
Best known for her breakout novel “Olga Dies Dreaming,” Gonzalez is a Puerto Rican-American writer raised in Brooklyn — or a “Nuyorican,” as she referred to herself. While she is famous for her writing — both for her fiction novels and journalism — she was not officially educated in creative writing until 2021, when she earned her MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Gonzalez wrote her first book in 2022.
Reflecting on her unconventional career trajectory from being an entrepreneur and consultant to becoming a full-time writer, she said, “I don’t think that I would be good at [writing] if I had not done something else for 20 years.” She not only advised undergraduates to explore their options before settling on a career, but when speaking directly about her writing, she said, “[Latinas are] often being defined or told to define ourselves, and I think that what I’m trying to do here is sort of shake that off.”
This theme of resisting labels and stereotypes was apparent throughout Gonzalez’s interview, coming up when discussing issues like Latino representation in media, her characters’ experiences and her own experiences in Hollywood. Before she started her writing career, Gonzalez recalled seeing a trend in more Latino fiction coming out, but even in these novels, she “was still seeing a lot of stereotypes,” noting that many focused on the immigrant narrative. While immigrant narratives are important to American literature and deserve representation, they were not reflective of “the experience that [Gonzalez] was having” as a Nuyorican. By only highlighting this one archetype, the diversity of diaspora and experiences outside of this mold get lost.
Gonzalez not only saw this issue of stereotyping in literature, but in Hollywood and what publishers and producers thought would sell. Following the success of “Olga Dies Dreaming,” for instance, it was set to be adapted for a TV series with Aubrey Plaza and Ramón Rodríguez to play the lead roles. It was fully shot and produced, and yet the show was scrapped because, as the feedback went, “it didn’t feel authentically Hispanic.” This was especially ironic as Gonzalez describes “Olga Dies Dreaming” as “a big book of microaggressions,” and this anecdote was telling because clearly the themes of the novel itself were not understood by everyone, and this conception of “authenticity” is still rampant in the industry.
Within “Olga Dies Dreaming” itself, Gonzalez was asked specifically about resistance and her characters’ experiences with resisting cultural norms in the novel. While each character resists different things — such as religious norms and familial expectations — Gonzalez stated that “what they’re all resisting as the book goes on is performance and performing a version of who they are supposed to be.” She believes this is why the novel “has spoken to so many Latinas and Latinos,” and this societal expectation for Latinos, and particularly Latinas, as she emphasized, to define themselves and fit into stereotypes of who they “should be” is a focus of her work and her characters’ resistance.
Gonzalez’s interview offered a perfect look into her work as a journalist and novelist, and the Stone Center, with Carolina Caballero, Zemurray-Stone senior professor of practice of Latin American studies, as moderator, did a fantastic job organizing the event and asking meaningful questions. With a focus on her unconventional career trajectory, experiences in Hollywood and her characters’ subversion of stereotypes, Gonzalez’s conversation illustrated the importance of resisting performance, and she will definitely be an author to watch in the coming years.
