By Dani Herrera
April 19, 2021
Right now I am sitting in my darkened room with strung Christmas lights falling into the crevices of my room and illuminating them. I’m editing a new story, hoping to send it out for publication. The story features a young girl who is so torn with anxiety that she erupts from her skin and becomes a werewolf. At night she runs through fields, looking for the lost bits of herself or whimpers in the backyard of her family home, waiting for her family to join her. When the werewolf finds comfort in her fur matching her mother’s luxurious crushed velvet ballet folklorico costume, I find comfort in writing about this little piece of my culture.
I try to press this comfort so deep into myself that it reaches into my memory and comforts the past versions of myself.
Because these versions of myself did not know how to write about these comforts. They were never taught to her.
I’ve never made my home where I’m supposed to. It wasn’t a matter of rebellion, but one of being constantly misplaced, or just lost.
There is a point when something like this cannot be ignored, and for me, that was when I was sitting in the backseat of a Prius with four other English majors, my junior year of college.
My whole life I was told these would be my people. But I got to college, declared myself an English major, and nothing changed.
I wondered what it was. They were me and I was them and we were this entity of words. That’s what it was supposed to be.
In the backseat of the Prius, the four others talked about the books they pack for vacation.
They worshipped at the altar of Jane Austen, the great unmatched matriarch. They gave offers to Thoreau, our great American father. Bronte, Tolstoy, Hemingway.
Of course, I knew these names. I knew these names so well that I could recite my lines about them.
This is all to say, these classics were so classic, I could fake a light conversation about them.
But that time, with all that classic talk, I was quiet. I didn’t want to lie about what I read.
I just stared out the window and it was my 21st birthday and I never felt so alone.
My aversion to “the classics” has been an internal battle my whole life.
They were supposed to pave the way for me, a writer. Instead, I felt blocked and stifled. Seeing their writing as the pinnacle of excellence made me feel as if I was born to fail because my heritage would not allow me to follow in their footsteps.
There is a real, obvious reason why I don’t like the classics. One that didn’t present itself till around 2018 when the word “representation” started getting used.
People of color started pointing out the importance of representation and I was too naive to even know this had been a problem, let alone one that affected me. People never “think” I’m Latina, especially being full Latina, because of my light skin, but know I’m not white because “white people don’t have hair and eyes as dark as you”, according to old college roommates. I was halfway passing, it seemed. But what I was passing as, or what the ideal was to pass as, I had no idea. Was I passing as white? Or was I passing as Hispanic?
White has always been the color. Blue eyes, blonde hair, strong noses, and family discussions always in English. It was what I had always seen and read, it was how every story was. Again, stories I knew, but something I couldn’t ever truly know because there was something blocking me.
Most of the classics are white. This is a fact when you start to think of it, if you think of it.
It’s like in fourth grade when my private school had “pioneer day” and told us our ancestors came from the Mayflower and made friends with the Native Americans and churned butter and panned for gold. And I left that day unable to picture my ancestors living that life.
Because they didn’t pan for gold; they picked tomatoes and onions. They weren’t churning butter but instead were making huge pots of masa for Christmas tamales. Honestly, way back down the line, my ancestors were not the ones on boats making their way to California, they were probably being forced off the land by those ancestors.
Maybe being misplaced is a tradition.
I could never picture myself as a fair Jane Austen character, walking through grasslands to houses with servants, my blonde hair turning into a halo in the sun’s rays.
Because when I think of “back then”, when I think of the people that came before, I picture cobblestone sidewalks and dirt roads.
The first time I ever encountered the landscape of my ancestors was in 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I felt at home in those pages with wild landscapes and that magic, that otherworld magic that feels like the kind my grandparents have warned me about.
I read it when I was staying in my grandpa’s town in Tecuitatlaán de Corona, Jalisco. I was sitting in a room with scorpions hiding in the corners, a domed tile ceiling, and biblical thunder splitting open the sky. I looked outside and thought, “This is my Macando by the sea.”
See, it was more than the characters being Latinx, it was in the family dynamic, the scandal, the innuendos. I looked at the family tree in the book and laughed, because haven’t we all had a tío that got two women pregnant and then the women physically fought each other over who would get to name their baby after him; and then both women name the child after the father? Maybe that’s just my Mexican family.
I went to my grandfather’s town, him and me walking the cobblestone sidewalks to the plaza, two raven-haired people, at home. I stayed for a month, with the scorpions, and the agave plants and the river that I was legitimately afraid housed La Llorona.
I walked through the town one day, watching the women sweep the sidewalks with huge palm leaves.
My grandpa would nod and say “Adios” to them and I said, “Shouldn’t it be hola?”
He shook his head. “No. Adios. Or buen dia. That’s just the way it is. That’s just what we do.”
From then on I walked, nodding, saying “adios” to people I passed in the street. And they nodded and said it back.
Because that’s what we do.
I went home and wrote a story. I had the main character look in a mirror and say, “I’m a raven-haired girl with raven eyes.” Then I looked in the mirror and did the same.
I went from there and never looked back.
My characters all have hair as dark as mine. They have large tight-knit families. They are girls being raised in a matriarchy, with fathers with an aversion to onions because they spent their whole lives picking them out in the fields.
These girls of mine are often not thinking about marriage or love, but instead are concerned with the shadows chasing them.
The read books always left a mark on me: a type of character, a plot, a sentence structure. I am told my sentences are staccato and bare bones. I did not learn that forcefully trudging through the elaborate and elongated sentences of early American or European literature. And because of that, I was told they didn’t have value.
I write stories featuring grandma’s yelling in Spanish at ghosts and families taking their anxious daughters to a medicine man in the mountains to remove the evil eye.
When I show these stories, there seems to be an importance to separate what is real, what can operate in our world, and what I made up. At times, I don’t understand the distinction and that explanation felt tired.
I had the opportunity to moderate an event for Ingrid Contreras Rojas, writer of Fruit of the Drunken Tree. I drank in every word. I looked at her like she hung the moon, a formidable Latina, unapologetically writing what she wanted. There were questions about the magical elements she writes. But she didn’t shy away. She pointed out that it was part of her culture, “magical” realism has always been rooted in Latin culture.
And that one explanation gave me what no “classic” ever could. It was comforting to know that what I had been writing my whole life was something sneaking into my DNA. Not a roadblock, but a new path, maybe one cut through nopales. Maybe it found me and possessed me in Tecuitatlaán, because the thing is, I hadn’t always written like that.
My first attempts at writing were of course messy and juvenile. But reading them back, they were also flat and inauthentic. My characters were thin and gangly, with wispy blonde hair and blue eyes. They had names that when I read them aloud all I could hear was my great Grandma Lupe saying, “Ay, Hija,” in disappointment.
I had been a reader all my life at that point, and yet I had never read any stories but ones of white people. So that’s what I *tried* to write. I’m proud to look back now and see how I failed; because what if I had succeeded? Who would I be now?
I wondered what I was trying to hide, who I was trying to fool. Because those stories were just for me, I never intended to show anyone.
When I was around twenty years old, I started forcing myself to read the classics. I started with Tolstoy, then went to Bronte, to King, to Stoker. It was grueling work. I no longer enjoyed my reading. I would reread the same sentences, finding myself skimming, just trying to get to the end.
So at twenty-one or twenty-two years old, when the word representation came into my vocabulary, I changed my self-assigned Required Reading.
I read works by authors who were Mexican, Japanese, Afghanistan, LGBTQ+. I read stories that I didn’t know could be written. Characters that weren’t white. Diverse family structures. Folklore and legends. Magic that I have since been enchanted by.
I’m not saying that the classics aren’t noteworthy. They have stayed favorites for so long because of the craft, the ideas shared in them, the beloved characters. A lot of writers look to those books over and over again, gaining a new inspiration every time. But those stories are not a one-size-fits-all. Some can find themselves in those pages. Some see what they want to write on those pages. They just didn’t work for me.
This was also the point in my life when I began to really struggle with anxiety and depression.
I didn’t just want Mexican girls in the books I read. I wanted girls trying to find their place in the world, dealing with loneliness. I wanted some otherness to take me away from the anxiety in my head. Since my interests deal primarily with mental illness, and its otherworldly physical manifestations, the classics are lacking.
Old ways of looking at mental illness were often writing it off, locking it away, or sending it away. It is presented as madness, a type of death sentence instead of something manageable.
As someone who struggles with mental illness, the dismissiveness of pain only made the pain grow. And as I would read books of these grand adventures I often wondered what happened to the characters after. Did they wake up, crying out from nightmares, like me? Would they run out of restaurants because it was too crowded and they couldn’t breathe? It seemed that stories were ending just where I wanted them to begin. I would sit with a finished book, wondering who would help them through the darkest times, these saviors of worlds, these chosen ones. Because I was the girl being taken to the medicine man in the mountains, to remove the evil eye that gave me unrest in my mind.
The stories I write now feature the same adventures and battles but take place in the character’s mind. This internal battleground always seems to be missing from the classics. These writers would get their hands dirty, but I wanted to be dosed in the mud, to be drowned in it.
There is no “supposed to” when it comes to what to read, just there is no “supposed to” when it comes to writing. In fact, it seems the best acts of writing are the exact opposite of what you are supposed to do.
Dani Herrera
Dani lives in the simmering Central Valley of California. She received her BA from Azusa Pacific University and is working toward her MFA in Fiction from St. Mary’s College of California. The recipe to her writing is magical realism, her Hispanic culture, and the deepest fears. She has been previously published in Crack the Spine. Follow her on Instagram @dani.herreraa to see her writing, what she reads, and her beloved border collie Blu.