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Xochitl Gonzalez | Otter.ai

Xochitl Gonzalez

Allbritton, Evan L1h 5min

Speaker 1

00:00

Studies and my wonderful colleague there who recognized the vital importance of amplifying Latinx voices.

Speaker 1

00:10

Now it's my pleasure to introduce our moderator for tonight's conversation, Dr Carolina stone, senior professor of the practice with a joint appointment at the Stone Center for Latin American Studies and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She specializes in 20th and 21st century texts of the Spanish speaking Caribbean and its diaspora, and teaches courses in English and Spanish in literary, cultural and ethnic studies based in Latin and Latinx America. As Associate Director of the Cuban and Caribbean Studies Institute since 2012 she organizes events highlighting the region and teaches for summer broad programs in Cuba and Panama. Finally, I'd like to invite Tulane undergraduate student Tanya Garcia, up to the podium to introduce our featured author. Tanya is a first year student studying public health, international development and Latin American Studies. They are Dominican Puerto Rican descent from Queens New York.

Speaker 2

01:12

Good evening, everyone. So. Chive Gonzalez is a cultural critic, producer, screenwriter, and the New York Times best selling author of Olga that is dreaming name the best of 2022 by the New York Times, Time Kirk is Washington Post and NPR. Olga that is dreaming was the winner of the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize in fiction and the New York City books Book Awards. Her latest author, sorry, her latest novel, Anita de Monte last last was selected as a Reese's book club pick and long listed for the Aspen words Liberty prize. Gonzalez is a 2021, MFA graduate from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her non her non fiction work has been published in El decor, allure, Vogue, real simple, and the cut as a staff writer for The Atlantic. She was recognized as a 2023, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and commentary prior to writing, Gonzales was an entrepreneur, fundraiser and all around hustler for nearly 20 years, she was a board member of the Lower East Side Girls Club and the Brooklyn Public Library and a trustee of the corporation of Brown University, where she received her BA in visual art, a native Brooklynite and proud public school graduate, she lives in her hometown of Brooklyn with her dog, Hector Lau. Gracias, chauci, for your work and joining us today. You Hi

Speaker 3

02:52

everyone. Before we get started, I want to do our land acknowledgement, so we acknowledge and pay tribute to the original inhabitants of this land. The city of New Orleans is a continuation of an indigenous trade hub on the Mississippi River, known for 1000s of years as native peoples, the chocolahoma, chimata, Tunica Biloxi, have lived on this land, and more have lived on this land since time immemorial and the resilient voices of Native Americans remain an inseparable part of our local culture. With gratitude and honor, we acknowledge the indigenous nations that have lived and continue to survive here, let us hope they soon thrive once again.

Speaker 3

03:42

Thank you so much. So I want to start off with a question about Latino representation. So particularly in the media, Latinos have had a lack of narrative plentitude or complexity, right? They've been kind of one dimensional. And so you write against this trend, and your novels feature rich, complex Latina characters that define this kind of one dimensionality. And not only that, they also kind of acknowledge their contradictions at all times. So I'm going to read a little bit, and this is from Anita Delmonte right at the beginning, but it perfectly personifies or represents a great example of this. This is Anita at a party at tilly's house. She is decided to well here so something respectful motion, right? So around me I could feel their thoughts and assessments and presumptions. Anita Del Monte, art star on the rise. Anita de Monte, a once in a generation artistic voice. Anita Del Monte, a one trick pony. Anita Del Monte, immigrant opportunist. Anita Del Monte, wife of the legendary Jack Martin. Anita Del Monte, Lucky Bitch. Which the moment the most miserable bitch alive. No one realizing that I was all these things at once and more. So my question is that idea of lack of narrative plentitude or complexity, did you feel the pressure to write against that, and how did you manage to create these characters that were kind of contradictory at times, even unlikable yet, but kind of just letting their virtues and effects, but in a very compelling way, like, how did you manage to balance that? Yeah,

Speaker 4

05:38

so I always remember talking for those undergraduates to state this really honestly, which is, I don't think that I would be good at this if I had not done something else for like 20 years. So I think that for like 20 years, books were

Unknown Speaker

05:57

a thing I read to

Speaker 4

05:58

commute with to get to and from work, and I never felt like I saw women, like people that I knew and and actually, and not just that. And sometimes, you know, notice about when I graduated, which is in the late 90s, it was a little blip, like in the 90s, and like, into the early, very beginning of the 2000s is a little blip of Latina fiction, and a lot of it was kind of historical written by women that were older than me. And so, like, you know, you had so far from God, which is an amazing book that really bucks a lot of trends. It's very ahead of its time kind of book. But, like, there wasn't a ton, you know, you had in the tip of the beautiful book with historical fiction like you didn't really have women living like in contemporary times. And then there was this book that is a giant thing with all of our People Magazine, when people actually read People Magazine, like, you know, and it was for the jury girl Social Club. And then, in fact, like a giant advance it was gonna change everything. And then they were gonna make it into a movie. And then, like, nothing happens, and the victim, whoa, but not amazing. And then, like, you know, 4% like, what, like, driven into, like, you know, like mad by this situation, and then, and then they were like, Oh, this stuff doesn't sell. Like, and so then there's just nothing. It wasn't like I was reading a trend of Latin fiction and then, like, I'm not seeing myself. There wasn't a ton of it coming out and but what I was definitely seeing was that, what I never saw was I was still seeing a lot of sort of stereotypes, and I was like, That person exists, and also, I'd say, a lot of immigrant narrative, which has an important place in American literature, but just wasn't the experience that I was having. And so I didn't really feel like I needed to prove anything, or just like I just, I really felt like I know that there's women that know this experience, and they were Latino women, they were second generation immigrant women. They were Caribbean women in general. And where you're balancing this demand, particularly with my first book with Olga, where it's like, how do you stay true to what you were raised as being happy in the when that, when those things are in direct like, competition with the demands of capitalism and American success and so, like, how do you balance that and and so I didn't really feel we decided to do something post 40. Like, I started this book when I was 41 years old. I didn't really care. I remember, like, leaving, I gave up a rent stabilized apartment in Brooklyn, and I came down here before I was gonna do my MFA at Iowa, and I had to move to Iowa to give up this apartment. And I came down to New Orleans, and I was like, Well, this is much cheaper than New York. I can always come here. This is a cool place. So like, I think I just sort of felt like I didn't really have anything to lose. And like, if 100 people read it, I'd feel really happy. And then it turns out that, like, I was right, and there was like, and it's spoken to so many different kinds of people. It speaks to my audience, but so I just say like, I don't think so that I would have been I think I would have felt like I wanted to make people happy. And by people, I mean, I think editors and agents and things like that, who didn't really know what I was doing. And because I was older, I was really confident. And I remember my editor being like, I know this world exists. Like, literally, what I was doing, she read the first 100 pages of the first draft of Olga, and she was like, I know this family exists. I don't know them well, but I know they exist. Keep going, and let's just do it, and I'm gonna sell this book to you and like, and I think though that it was because I was kind of like, I'm just writing it unapologetically, and so I don't think, though, that everything can't come with every age. And I don't think that without having lived all those experiences and also seen to the point about the piece that you read, I had like, I remember being at like an alumni thing at Brown and somebody with a straight face named me. I can't wait they start putting white people on the cover of the alumni magazine. Again, look what they really thought. And for years, just living this life of microaggressions. And so when I started working on old people, like, what's it that it's a big book of microaggressions, four years of microaggressions. Like, I think that the contradiction and partly why it is, like, challenging, sorry, I think that it gives us long answers. I've had women Latino women that are a little older than me or my age that, like, have worked and excelled and thrived in corporate America, and they're like, you say these things, like, I like, I wept because I didn't know this is what was happening to me. Because I think sometimes we don't have the space to have language for it, but it's like, like, the truth of the matter is that you were cognizant that you were holding up an entire department while at the same time being sabotaged by your boss, like and like, and yet you don't. There's no space for that cognitive dissonance. And I think what I do is give voice to the cognitive dissonance, and then that's what sort of speaks to a lot of my readers. Yeah,

Speaker 3

11:04

thank you. And that that the fact that you said organized reading the book of microaggressions, that was one thing we talked about the book that was like, how amazing the way you articulate microaggressions in such a way that so, yes, absolutely. Thank you very much. I'm gonna get this question about and there. It's kind of like these two kind of questions and ideas go together. The idea of the brown female body in both novels, right? We have Olga, we have back in total, and we have a Monday. And these, the way these brown bodies are work both for them as an asset and as a liability. Right because simultaneously, they wield their bodies to their advantage. They are sex positive, but then it becomes a liability. They lose autonomy to white men who desire and want to control them. And in our book club, we noted kind of this relationship between controlled, violated bodies and colonization empire. And can you talk a little bit about that dynamic? Yeah,

Speaker 4

12:08

I mean, in a very literal way, in Olga, that book operates, it's meant to like, I, you know, I kind of, I had a friend when I was working at the college, very briefly, when I was reading this, and she had a book club. It was a very lovely book club, you know, like, it was kind of like a white wine book club. And I was like, I want this to work for her, like, you know, I want the story for her white wine book club, but I want this to work on this very deep level that, like my mom was, my mother was, like a militant socialist. Anyway, she's insane, but, like, it doesn't matter, like she's not insane. I wanted my mom to sit there and then, like, fight with me about whether I got things right. Like, so I think all the quite literally, every major character. The major characters all kind of symbolize something within the story of Puerto Rico, and then the minor characters represent kind of political belief systems. And so Olga operates as sort of like the people of Puerto Rico. And Blanca is much more like the land, the sea, the stuff that you can't control, and its Ross form, and pieto is really meant to be the kind of diaspora like it doesn't think that they're patronizing with the diaspora region that like sort of things they know better. And like, you know, the Lin Manuel of it all, and then we're not having Thanksgiving together. I think, you know, the whole thing with that story is you can't tell that story without having the United States involved in that story. And so, you know, the sexual assault and Olga, you know, a lot of people were, like, so mad about it and that came out. And I think, you know, I felt a little bit like people being mad about that was, like, how I felt a little bit about people being mad about a Nora was like, I don't want to say people do sex work. Like, I don't want to say women get raped. Like, it's like, why are you upset about like, women do get raped, unfortunately, all the time. But like, I think my feeling about this was, like, you couldn't tell that story without that happening with Anita. Everything's a lot more subtle, partially because I think one of the things that I've always been fascinated by, and like, I certainly really look at it a little bit more within gender, sexuality dynamics in my third book. But like, I think I'm really fascinated by the ways in which we use people, particularly women as status markers. And so it's like, like, what does this person say as a signifier to somebody? And like, you know, in its most space, it's like the man that was trophy wife, you know? But in this particular case, you sort of have these two kind of blase white guys, you know that? What? The person is trying to be counterculture, and he wants to be seen as different. And this whole thing is that he's edgy, even once he becomes the establishment. And so what makes him seem more edgy is this look at who my partner is, and then whether that was told to nick or not, he's trying to rebel. He's rebelling against who his parents are and all these things. But it's like this thing, and so it's like, you because sort of start to see like identity as accessory for somebody else. And I think I did hope, you know, I hope you book clubs, people are talking about it and not sure. I think that I wanted neither woman to be fully sure if they are they wanting to benefit or are they not. And I think that from minute to minute, it changes. And you try something on, and then you're like, I don't like the way that makes you feel. Or you try something, you're like, I've taken this too far. And I think that that is, again, like versatility of women's feelings is probably one of the most important things to me. Like, even when the circumstances are heightened, I think I spend a lot of time thinking like, how does that really feel, you know, like, how does that really feel? And like, it was really important to me, you know, that Raquel is kind of, like, ambivalent about, I think Raquel still working through sexuality, you know, like, and I think, like, this whole thing is like, but him making her feel hot, makes her feel good. And then it's like, how do you process that, you know, like, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3

16:29

Well, that's what, like, the kind of the intimacy of their like, the you know, in the way you write it, you reveal these thoughts that are contradictory, but, but that's why we all think, right, like, we're like this now, but like, later on, in two hours, I might not like this, or is it because of this or because of that? I won't think about it now, like a lot of times, like, I'm not gonna think about that. It makes it uncomfortable. I always,

Speaker 4

16:50

when I was researching for this book, like I pulled out my own diaries from college, I would tell, like, the most traumatic story, and then I'd be like, I feel like I didn't write for like a month, and I never talk about it again. Really support mentalized trauma, I think, too, like in a very particular way, like when you're especially when you're young, and engaging with such stark contrast and differences from what you've grown up with. Yeah, well,

Speaker 3

17:21

that leads us to our next question about and I think that the month and last, last, you kind of explore two institutions, academia and the artwork. And so I kind of experienced first gen at a PWI primary, right? Institution? This in this right? Yeah. And so the storyline of this first generation student, kind of navigating elite institutions, has appeared in some other Latino writing recently, and it also appears over that dreaming guys, dreaming like always in the background being an elite institution. And that experience and what the pros and cons of that? So what drives you to examine these spaces?

Speaker 4

18:09

Yeah, like, Okay, I think I didn't really set out to want to write a campus novel, per se. Like, I don't think, I think there was something really interesting when I was on the road with Olga. I already was working on this, and it was really interesting, because, like, the campus part of old is like, five sentences, like, maybe less, and people would always talk about it. And like every book set, people would always bring it up. And it was so related to her time in college. It was like, it's like, so tiny. So it made me feel that there was something there. But what really didn't want to do it was I was working on the TV adaptation of ice cream, which you haven't seen, which tells you how that process went. But we shot the whole thing like, I wrote a script. We shot it. I produced it. I was in the streets of Sunset Park with stars, stars, and then they were like, not for us. We're like, we thought this was gonna be wrong. No, I'm gonna pay $30 million later, they just said sitting on a shelf. And in the process of all this, I found myself thinking about a lot of their feedback, and it didn't feel authentically Hispanic. And I was like, you know, if you're on a zoom and I go off camera because the dog was barking and, like, bang my head, right? Like, but I think what it made me realize is that I started thinking about how esthetic it shapes, in terms of what you think is good, or what you think is bad, or what you think is beautiful art or not, at such a young age, and it gets told to us, particularly in college, I think a lot. And then I started thinking about my own time in college and my own experience as an art history student, and what I saw and what I didn't see in my experience of self discovering Evan get the like right after I graduated, like and. What, what would have been different had I found that differently? Had that been part of my curriculum, had that part of these executives at schools curriculum, and that the part of any like, what would have been different if everybody would have been told that this is also beautiful art, and this is also an esthetic and like from a from a developmental time when we're still super impressionable, right? I still think, I mean, it's a lie to say that that is an impressionable time, because I still think that that's the best music in the world. Is that the best music in the world, I don't know, like it just that was the time that period you're so impressionable. And so this is what you think of as the best art and the best like stuff. And so I was interested in the campus, in how the campus impacts the outside world, and how then that impacts what our sense of good and bad and wrong in space, and who should take up space, and who's an auxiliary character. And that was what was really interesting to me. And so, you know, that was kind of why the campus, the Raquel story, is fascinating to me, but it's, it's fascinating to me more in the way that it communicates with this missing dialog like that is wrong from her, and how could you correct that? Yeah, well,

Speaker 3

21:10

I also, I mean, I was listening to an interview you did, and I'm going to paraphrase, and if you told this is the podcast, and I had seen all narrative, all these narratives, that it was hard to fit in the character, hard to fit in. Hard to fit in I want, but I wanted them to take me as I am. So it's interesting how you reframe Raquel Olga's and even anita's, right? It's like, and I think that's Anita her motivation, right? She's like, they're gonna take me as my as I am, yeah. And I love how you turn that on on its head right, instead of, like, the brown body is wrong or there's something defective about them because they didn't fit in. You turn it, you turn the tape

Speaker 4

21:50

well. And I think I thought about how one of the things was really important to me about Anita was that I was like, I don't want everybody to just do this one note. Like, I think, I think one of the things I find delightful about people that choose to teach in general, is they often are people that still choose to learn. And I think, like, the easy version is like, John Temple is this villain who's like, like, you know, like, and I think at the end of the book, she sets in, like the morning, fuck my ear. Like, you're like, What am I doing here? And he's like, Oh my god, I become the old man. Like, I become the same person and like, and that was not going to be, you know, like, and I think that, like, you know, this idea of growth. And, you know, it's funny, because I did a book talk at Brown for this book, and actually, Chris Paxson was president. Brown told me this fascinating story about how she did an English class when she was an undergraduate and they never read a single female like were written by a female author, and how she confronted her professor and nothing happened. And then she was like and then five years later, my brother went to the same college and took the same class, and there were like, five or six books by women. And so she said, so I don't know if it was my conversation or if it was other or if it just stated, and then it was like, and so anyway, it's just to say, like, I think institutions don't just get changed by the people that are there permanently. They're often changed by the people that pass through. And I think that's partly why we've seen such resistance to protests, right? Like, is because these are the things that change perspective. And I, I think I wanted, I wanted, well, Raquel is not like me, because I just was sort of like, here's my essay about Mondrian. You know, I really appreciated the idea that, what had this knowledge and discovery done to give her more confidence, and this discovery of erasure done to give her more confidence? Yeah,

Speaker 3

23:52

so the next this is segues great to the next question on this idea of resistance. And we talked about this in Book Club, and you know, I was thinking about this idea of resistance. Of resistance, what your characters are resisting, and how they resist. And you know, I started making a list of all the ways your characters resist. And you know, I mean living and not residing, not just your characters, also writing for The Atlantic, occupying white spaces, telling forgotten stories, running for political office, questioning the norm, solidarity with Cornelius groups, bodily autonomy, skimming off the top, because all the skims off the top, buying all the properties, which Mateo does, you know, breaking shit, which is what I need. Does that on my list, and our creativity as resistance. So I'm interested in this topic of kind of resistance. You give a blueprint of all sorts of ways of resisting, which I appreciate and also, and you mentioned this earlier in Olga died dreaming. You talk about these tensions, or you didn't talk about things, but you talked about kind of like Olga has to balance success with fulfillment. Of. The way the tension between activism and personal relationships that we see in Blanca right and the figure of the mother right and and that tension in that figure, we also have a brother. We also have a brother who balances political ambition with community representation and sexuality. So tell me a little bit about those tensions. Tell me a little bit about the way they resist. Yeah, and what are they resisting? I think,

Speaker 4

25:31

well, Olga's Olga's complicated, because Olga's resisting what she feels like is the expectation that her family has for her, as well as then resisting the way she's perceived by the people that she's positioned herself to have to meet, right? And so, like, hold it when we meet her is really in trauma and conflict about this. And then Daniel is true, but because he's given himself no room by performing a version, right? And it's like, I think ultimately, what they're all resisting as the book goes on is performance and performing a version of who they are supposed to be. You know, blocks. This is the most basic in this weird way. Except it's not because, like, I think, you know, everybody always wants Blanca to be the villain. And I'm like, No, unfortunately, the US government, but I think Blanca is the villain. Is not the villain, because Blanca is also fucking if you go get me in a room with a bunch of like, a book club of Boomer age moms, like, they will write love letters to Blanca, like Jen, Jen z is like, she's horrible. And like, boom, like, and, you know, we couldn't just go off and get an apartment on our own. We couldn't even get out of pocket. It would go through all the ways in which block they were, like, and I, I've never left my kids, but, you know, I thought this was a mate, like, and so I think that, like, she's resisting a lot of gender and cultural norms, right? She's resisting religious norms, like, you know, I think then, because of that, then you find Olga, like, secretly trying to get communion, you know, like, it's like, like, everybody's resisting, like, this sort of package. But I think in general, in that book, the resistance, I think we're and I think why Olga has spoken to so many Latinas is and Latinos, but like Latinas in particular, is because she's resisting stereotype in general as well. And so I think I'm just demanding to be accepted as a full person and like her version of herself. And I think, I think that that is a form particularly well. I mean, I don't know what I think particularly Latina is the most misunderstood thing by whiteness, and the only people who understand it are Latinos, okay, like, and even then, with, like, educated, college educated Latinos, because kind of an institutional construct, okay? It's like, an institutional political construct. And so it's like, Really though, like, when Latina to me is like, when I'm in San Francisco and somebody kind of spots me and asks me to directions, because, like, they're like, you know, like and like, okay, for some reason you feel like you can trust me. Like there's something we sense there's some sensory here, thing like, and I think like that that's like, pragmatic. Let me do that. And I think, you know, I feel like, in general, though we're 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 and be like, I just don't, I don't want to fit into your description. I don't know. I just don't want to fit into your description. I don't know yet, and that stands on it. Oh yeah, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3

28:50

Thank you. And this is the question it so race plays a part in your novels, but really the unmistakable thread is class and classism, and I want you to talk a little bit about why it's so important for you to center center class, and I have written down as an issue, but you don't really present it as an issue. You print, you present it as a given, like it's just a powerful dynamic that we have to maneuver or that's part of our world. And so why center class?

Speaker 4

29:20

This really funny thing happened to me when I was getting my MFA, we had a math workshop by E and Lee came doing this math workshop, and she worked at the classmates, two classmate stories, and in both stories, this is known as my classmates. But she was like, How do I earn a living? And I thought to myself, you are in Wonderland. How does somebody write a 25 page story and not wonder how this person has money like and I think that what's happened is why we find ourselves, not exclusively, but one of the primary reasons why I think we find ourselves in this current political moment is because. Because we have seen places where decision making happens, where culture making happens, where media making happens be completely taken over by what I call like a comfort class of people that write a story and don't wonder how the person earns a living. Like, we're both thinking about, how do they pay their rent? Like, like, there's no connection to the actual like, which is like, a dominating, like, you know, preoccupation for most people, and partly why we find us exploited by labor, for health insurance and all these other things. And like, it's so annoying to me because they really did not want to ruin my mother about so many things. Here we are, but like I think, it's not that race is not important as much as race gets weaponized in order to distract us from the fact that we have become, particularly now, in this mode of hyper capitalism and technology, like we're in the matrix, like we're literally in the matrix and and I think that if we don't expose that at every turn, like, I think I would say this is going to be a woman where we see exactly how she makes her money and has to subliminate herself in order to make that money. And I think with Raquel, like, even the idea that she's trotting off to work, and I didn't need you to see her at work, you just need to know she's running to work. She's coming from work like, you know, Anita is like, Anita, at one point said she was, like, the least of my problems was being poor, like, you know, and that's all that he cares about. But it's like, like, I think that there's a relation to money, because I feel that it is so often money that compromises us and that forces us to compromise ourselves and to settle and I think that the not talking about it is a weird weapon of the of the wealthy, because it's like, you know, the funny part about talking about if you don't have money, is Like, most people be like, I that situation before, but it's like, what? What people that don't want to talk about it often don't want to talk about is because, oh, I want to tell you that my parents are helping me pay my rent, or I want to tell you that actually it was a family connection that got me this job. Or I want to tell you that I haven't made myself a bill ever like, you know, like, and I just, I think it's not that I resent those things as much as I think when we pretend that there's an even playing field, it creates the psychic trauma that some of us aren't leveling up enough or doing enough, and I refuse to operate in that place of Pharmacy.

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