Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz
Chica lit, done right, is no easy genre. It needs to mix froth with genuine tugs to the heartstrings, and the best practitioners also weave in smart social commentary about class, culture, and gender, as does mi reina Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, who broke out in 2003 with The Dirty Girls Social Club, a kind of Waiting to Exhale for Latina readers. The Dirty Girls Social Club blazed a viable trail for commercial Latina writers by demonstrating to the publishing industry that, hey, Latinas read for fun. Alas, sometimes the host of imitators spawned by Valdes-Rodriguez just rehash standard chick-lit formulas with the occasional ¡Híjole! tossed in. (I’m not naming names here; they know who they are.)
I’m proud and excited that my friend and fellow Macondista Belinda Acosta has thrown her hat solidly in the ring with her forthcoming novel Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, due out from Grand Central Publishing this August. (Her editor there, Selina McLemore, is also the wonderful Lorraine López’s editor--and was Josefina Lopez’s editor for Hungry Woman in Paris; it’s a small Latina world.)
Belinda has her MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin and is the TV and media columnist for the Austin Chronicle. Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, which will launch on August 11 and is available for pre-order now, is her first novel, and it’s also the first in a series, the Quinceañera Club. If my sources are correct, Belinda has also written (already!) the second installation. Very exciting!
Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz traverses new cultural territory, since its heroine Ana Ruiz, rather than being single, is the 38-year-old married (well, separated) mama of two teenagers, one of whom is an openly hostile 14-year-old girl who blames Ana for her husband’s recent departure from their home. To reconnect with her daughter, Ana wants to plan her quinceañera together, but plans go awry and mayhem ensues. Meanwhile, Ana has to figure out her own romantic destiny.
Some elements of the story will be familiar to readers of chick and chica lit: Ana has a best gal-pal who gives advice and comfort from the sidelines, a successful (but not entirely fulfilling) career, and an apparent choice between differently desirable men, in this case Ana’s estranged husband and the handsome visiting artist from Mexico who reawakens Ana’s thrill factor. Except for a quick scene with lesbian walk-ons, the novel is strongly heteronormative; all the main characters are straight.
But the plotline also diverges from standard chick-lit and chica-lit fare. While negotiating her own dreams and desires, Ana must also face the complexity of mothering complicated adolescents (as well as her unmothered niece—ah, familia!), and she’s forced to consider the ramifications of her own sexuality upon her family’s future. In contrast to Sex and the City and its variously inflected ilk, in which 38-year-old women are “girls” who buy snazzy shoes and fly solo, Belinda’s new novel keeps a female protagonist at the center, but work, familia, and responsibilities play a much bigger role, and designer bags and giddy cocktails are noticeably absent. Unlike the relative free-fall individualism practiced by most chick-lit and chica-lit protagonists, Ana juggles the financial and emotional responsibility for more lives than just her own.
When the novel opens, Ana has been carrying the full responsibilities of adulthood for 20 years already. As a mother and primary breadwinner, she’s not just in a pickle; she’s tired. In this key divergence from the typical chica-lit plot and protagonist, Belinda makes a valuable intervention in chica lit. It’s a welcome shot of realism in a genre that trades in escape.
That said, it’s also a fun read with engaging passages and lively pop-culture references (especially music). The pace is rapid, and characters are often sketched in a few quick lines. There’s plenty of dialogue, but on the whole, the narrative mode tends to privilege telling over showing, but the telling functions here as an economical way to deliver a lot of information about the characters and their dilemmas. Readers of Latina will enjoy Belinda’s breezy, pro-empowerment handling of social issues, as in this passage about colorism within the Latino community:
As a former happy resident of San Antonio, I love the fact that Belinda set her novel there, and I enjoyed coming across references to paleta carts, the Blanco Street Café, Brackenridge Park, the Esperanza Center, and the occasional pecan tree.
In terms of characters, the protagonist Ana’s choices and thoughts seems frequently constrained by guilt, which made me guess that the book will resonate more for readers whose values are more traditional than mine—and if its happy ending (por supuesto it has a happy ending!) offers readers a brighter, lighter vision of what a woman’s life can be, then it will be doing important cultural work. And a writer-friend who once taught high school says the 14-year-old daughter’s grumpy yet vulnerable behavior and dialogue are spot-on.
My own favorite character was teenaged Bianca, Ana’s niece, who comes vividly to life in one of the novel’s subplots. She’s faced with the difficult situation of rebuilding a relationship with an institutionalized mother whose breakdown occurred in conjunction with Bianca’s own quinceañera, during which she destroyed Bianca’s dress. Because I had painful conflicts with my own mother when I was fourteen, this was a particularly rich moment for me, and I hope the second novel in the series delves further into the psychological tensions that the quinceañera moment provokes in mothers who are forced, in an image-driven society that exhorts women to look young forever, to face their own aging at exactly the moment they’re supposed to be celebrating their daughters’ beauty and maturity.
I really love the fascinating narrator Belinda concocted. She’s omniscient—the voice of the community (sort of like Faulkner’s narrator in “A Rose for Emily”)—yet particularized. It’s the believable voice of an older, wiser, all-seeing Latina looking down on the whole mess, critiquing the characters and yet rooting for their happiness, like a salty old aunt who’s gonna tell it like it is, sabe? Belinda has fun with language in the narrator’s voice, too: Ana, the narrator tells us, is “no spring kitten,” and “not escared of much.”
This voice is especially pronounced in the opening prologue, the beginning of chapter seventeen, and the final pages of the novel, giving it a strong frame. In the rest of the novel, it works much like a typical omniscient narrator, working flexibly to give Belinda the freedom to shift from one focalizer to another, building understanding and sympathy for a whole cast of characters, and occasionally providing commentary (and comic relief). In this, the novel works as an ensemble piece, a community and family novel that examines how a variety of sociocultural factors affect everyone’s choices and desires.
As an academic scholar and teacher of Latina/o lit, I particularly admired the book’s seamless, completely natural-sounding integration of Spanish and Spanglish into a predominantly English-language text. (Belinda has staked out solid political ground for herself here. For a fascinating academic treatment of the political ramifications of language-use choices, see “In the Contact Zone: Code-switching Strategies by Latino/a Writers” by Lourdes Torres in MELUS 32 [2007].)
In Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, Spanish words are not italicized, and thus not marked as foreign or other. They’re also almost never cushioned (which is when the word’s or phrase’s definition in English is provided immediately afterward). Puns dependent on Spanish knowledge aren’t parsed for the reader. The reader either knows the word, or gathers its meaning from context, or doesn’t; there’s no textual pandering to monolingual English readers. Yet the book is written primarily in English and would feel, I’m guessing, pretty comfortable to a non-Latina/o reader—or to folks whose Spanish, like mine, is todo rickety.
I have a lot of questions for Belinda, and she has been kind enough to agree to answer them soon. Watch for the upcoming Q&A!
I’m proud and excited that my friend and fellow Macondista Belinda Acosta has thrown her hat solidly in the ring with her forthcoming novel Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, due out from Grand Central Publishing this August. (Her editor there, Selina McLemore, is also the wonderful Lorraine López’s editor--and was Josefina Lopez’s editor for Hungry Woman in Paris; it’s a small Latina world.) Belinda has her MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin and is the TV and media columnist for the Austin Chronicle. Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, which will launch on August 11 and is available for pre-order now, is her first novel, and it’s also the first in a series, the Quinceañera Club. If my sources are correct, Belinda has also written (already!) the second installation. Very exciting!
Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz traverses new cultural territory, since its heroine Ana Ruiz, rather than being single, is the 38-year-old married (well, separated) mama of two teenagers, one of whom is an openly hostile 14-year-old girl who blames Ana for her husband’s recent departure from their home. To reconnect with her daughter, Ana wants to plan her quinceañera together, but plans go awry and mayhem ensues. Meanwhile, Ana has to figure out her own romantic destiny.
Some elements of the story will be familiar to readers of chick and chica lit: Ana has a best gal-pal who gives advice and comfort from the sidelines, a successful (but not entirely fulfilling) career, and an apparent choice between differently desirable men, in this case Ana’s estranged husband and the handsome visiting artist from Mexico who reawakens Ana’s thrill factor. Except for a quick scene with lesbian walk-ons, the novel is strongly heteronormative; all the main characters are straight.
But the plotline also diverges from standard chick-lit and chica-lit fare. While negotiating her own dreams and desires, Ana must also face the complexity of mothering complicated adolescents (as well as her unmothered niece—ah, familia!), and she’s forced to consider the ramifications of her own sexuality upon her family’s future. In contrast to Sex and the City and its variously inflected ilk, in which 38-year-old women are “girls” who buy snazzy shoes and fly solo, Belinda’s new novel keeps a female protagonist at the center, but work, familia, and responsibilities play a much bigger role, and designer bags and giddy cocktails are noticeably absent. Unlike the relative free-fall individualism practiced by most chick-lit and chica-lit protagonists, Ana juggles the financial and emotional responsibility for more lives than just her own.
When the novel opens, Ana has been carrying the full responsibilities of adulthood for 20 years already. As a mother and primary breadwinner, she’s not just in a pickle; she’s tired. In this key divergence from the typical chica-lit plot and protagonist, Belinda makes a valuable intervention in chica lit. It’s a welcome shot of realism in a genre that trades in escape.
That said, it’s also a fun read with engaging passages and lively pop-culture references (especially music). The pace is rapid, and characters are often sketched in a few quick lines. There’s plenty of dialogue, but on the whole, the narrative mode tends to privilege telling over showing, but the telling functions here as an economical way to deliver a lot of information about the characters and their dilemmas. Readers of Latina will enjoy Belinda’s breezy, pro-empowerment handling of social issues, as in this passage about colorism within the Latino community:
Bianca . . . was lean and curvy like most of the girls in the family, but unlike the rest of them, she was blond with sea-green eyes, something that used to bother her when she was a little girl. As a teenager, she came to accept her “güera” label. So, when some tonto said, “Hey, how come you don’t look Mexican?” Bianca replied, “We come in all flavors, menso!” turning on her heel to leave the baboso, her ponytail snapping like a whip.Throughout the novel, Belinda weaves in socioeconomic and cultural factors with a light but telling hand. Ana’s estranged husband Esteban’s crisis of masculinity, for example, is exacerbated by the fact that he was long ago unable to pass the firefighters’ exam—due in part, the novel suggests, to his difficulties learning English—and has been stuck in manual labor while Ana moved on up the educational and socioeconomic ladder without him. The private tensions of their marriage stem from wider tensions in the culture, and many women of color will recognize elements of that story from their own lives. I like the fact that Belinda’s sociopolitical and cultural awareness plays a role in the story’s shape, even though the project is ostensibly just for fun.
As a former happy resident of San Antonio, I love the fact that Belinda set her novel there, and I enjoyed coming across references to paleta carts, the Blanco Street Café, Brackenridge Park, the Esperanza Center, and the occasional pecan tree.
In terms of characters, the protagonist Ana’s choices and thoughts seems frequently constrained by guilt, which made me guess that the book will resonate more for readers whose values are more traditional than mine—and if its happy ending (por supuesto it has a happy ending!) offers readers a brighter, lighter vision of what a woman’s life can be, then it will be doing important cultural work. And a writer-friend who once taught high school says the 14-year-old daughter’s grumpy yet vulnerable behavior and dialogue are spot-on.
My own favorite character was teenaged Bianca, Ana’s niece, who comes vividly to life in one of the novel’s subplots. She’s faced with the difficult situation of rebuilding a relationship with an institutionalized mother whose breakdown occurred in conjunction with Bianca’s own quinceañera, during which she destroyed Bianca’s dress. Because I had painful conflicts with my own mother when I was fourteen, this was a particularly rich moment for me, and I hope the second novel in the series delves further into the psychological tensions that the quinceañera moment provokes in mothers who are forced, in an image-driven society that exhorts women to look young forever, to face their own aging at exactly the moment they’re supposed to be celebrating their daughters’ beauty and maturity.
I really love the fascinating narrator Belinda concocted. She’s omniscient—the voice of the community (sort of like Faulkner’s narrator in “A Rose for Emily”)—yet particularized. It’s the believable voice of an older, wiser, all-seeing Latina looking down on the whole mess, critiquing the characters and yet rooting for their happiness, like a salty old aunt who’s gonna tell it like it is, sabe? Belinda has fun with language in the narrator’s voice, too: Ana, the narrator tells us, is “no spring kitten,” and “not escared of much.”
This voice is especially pronounced in the opening prologue, the beginning of chapter seventeen, and the final pages of the novel, giving it a strong frame. In the rest of the novel, it works much like a typical omniscient narrator, working flexibly to give Belinda the freedom to shift from one focalizer to another, building understanding and sympathy for a whole cast of characters, and occasionally providing commentary (and comic relief). In this, the novel works as an ensemble piece, a community and family novel that examines how a variety of sociocultural factors affect everyone’s choices and desires.
As an academic scholar and teacher of Latina/o lit, I particularly admired the book’s seamless, completely natural-sounding integration of Spanish and Spanglish into a predominantly English-language text. (Belinda has staked out solid political ground for herself here. For a fascinating academic treatment of the political ramifications of language-use choices, see “In the Contact Zone: Code-switching Strategies by Latino/a Writers” by Lourdes Torres in MELUS 32 [2007].)
In Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, Spanish words are not italicized, and thus not marked as foreign or other. They’re also almost never cushioned (which is when the word’s or phrase’s definition in English is provided immediately afterward). Puns dependent on Spanish knowledge aren’t parsed for the reader. The reader either knows the word, or gathers its meaning from context, or doesn’t; there’s no textual pandering to monolingual English readers. Yet the book is written primarily in English and would feel, I’m guessing, pretty comfortable to a non-Latina/o reader—or to folks whose Spanish, like mine, is todo rickety.
I have a lot of questions for Belinda, and she has been kind enough to agree to answer them soon. Watch for the upcoming Q&A!
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