Lines in the Dirt
Jeanine Cummins, author of American Dirt has another book coming out. This one is about how a hurricane affects a Puerto Rican family. While I had a grim chuckle thinking, well. . . at least Cummins is writing within a Latine identity she claims to be (in a New York Times op-ed, she claims a Puerto Rican grandmother, but clarifies that she was raised "mostly white"). The announcement of her new book during Hispanic Heritage Month felt like a provocation. It's as if her publicity team learned all the wrong lessons from their amazingly tasteless American Dirt campaign, complete with coils of barbed wire decorating everything. They may have realized that yes, you can damn the torpedoes and go full speed ahead to ensure the book becomes a bestseller.
I did not read American Dirt because I felt I had no need to. It might be a work of staggering literary genius, for all I know. In all honesty, I've friends who have read it and confirm it absolutely isn't. Let's just say that I'll continue trusting in their judgment. However, this situation flushed out my thoughts on identity in general, and the Latine identity specifically.
I go back and forth on "Latine-ness." Once I was forced to leave the archipelago known as Puerto Rico, I had to confront my own lingering feelings about the trap of authenticity. It would seem to be common enough for parts of the diaspora to feel less Puerto Rican. So much so that Esmeralda Santiago felt the need to title part of her autobiography When I Was Puerto Rican.
Note how “Puerto Rican-ness” is conditional.
Before I was forced to leave, I saw this mantle of authenticity work the other way around, too. Local celebrities were only viewed as "making it big" if they became bestsellers in the U.S. Not surprising, since Puerto Ricans are encouraged to view U.S. markets as the only yardstick to measure themselves against. That's what colonies are for, after all. There's also the plain fact that "Latine" (and the gendered "Latino" from which it's derived) is a bit of an umbrella identity, used to create a broad political coalition. It was always a bit of a jerry-rigged identity, trying to encompass all of the ethnicities, races, cultures, and so on in Central and South America. In practice, it tells you just as much about an individual as it is to say "American" - perhaps even less.
In the U.S. that old coalition has fallen apart. In wider politics, the revelation that there are reactionaries among Latines seems to have made both our parties even more anti-immigrant (this feels like another "damn the torpedoes" strategy). In publishing, I suspect the adoption of "BIPOC" (an acronym for "Black/Indigenous/Person of Color") may have changed how Latine authors identify themselves. For myself, even though I have a mixed background common to almost anyone from the Caribbean, my family never maintained those connections and so considered themselves Latino and American (not to be confused with Latin Americans). Given the obvious incentives and rewards for assimilation, my maternal grandparents truly bought into the entire project. Why wouldn't they? Both of them had been born in the early years of the 20th century, and probably witnessed an incredible increase in their quality of life in the wake of the 1898 invasion. They saw no reason to view these improvements in a negative light, and viewed the improvements as benevolence, not as infrastructure designed to more efficiently extract resources.
All of this is to say that my default position regarding "Latindad" in general, and Puerto Rican-ness specifically has been that if someone has old family ties, or lived as a "diasporican" all their lives - if they feel Puerto Rican and want to strengthen ties, then more power to 'em!
The problem, of course, is: was this what Jeanine Cummins was trying to do?
To take a step back, and entertain a "there but for the grace of God go I" type of sentiment, I ask myself if given the chance to make it big would you have done it? And while I like to tell myself no way, it's not really the point. I think these types of opportunities are only offered to people who are willing to commodify parts of their identity. Harsh, but something I've been mulling over since I read Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki's What Publishing Taught Me essay for SFWA. It seems to lean into it. This excerpt seems to break down what the business need is:
". . .The writer’s identity is inseparable from the writer themself, who they are. So, the writer’s identity does matter. It directly influences how many and who reads the material. . ."
I hoped that essay would problematize this type of practice, but in fairness it's written from the standpoint of an editor, and it lays out the business needs for this type of behavior.
It also seems like part of a larger trend, which includes writers thinking about themselves as having a "brand" - just a lot of stuff I understand, but have absolutely no interest in pursuing. But it shows how prevalent this type of thinking can be in publishing. In this type of environment, it's easy to see how Cummins justified her choice.
As it turns out, I'm the weirdo.
Short Fiction: The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strain’d by Archita Mittra (Lightspeed Magazine #171)
Confession: I didn't realize the title was from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (what can I say? I haven't read as much of the Bard as I'd like). With that out of the way, let me just say I have a soft spot for Old Earth narratives. Worlds long-abandoned by humanity, but where the machines and machinery left behind continue in their old patterns, following their dusty circuits until they break down. Onto such a melancholic world lands our unnamed second-person POV narrator. Tasked with scavenging an Iridium circuit board by The Olympus Corporation, the narrator ducks into an abandoned burger place to find a lone robot still trying to do its job despite everything falling apart around it. Thus begins a fascination that takes the tenor of a halting courtship, with the narrator returning to this abandoned world over and over through the decades. Subjected to become mostly cyborg to survive, forced to work for the equivalent of a galaxy-spanning Amazon warehouse to pay down their debt, alienated from surviving family, one wonders if it’s the shock of recognition our narrator sees in the robot’s dusty visor. Is this the narrator’s ultimate fate? If so, the cruel irony at the end is made all the more tragic - and ominous.
One More Thing...
I went to Capclave this past weekend (September 27-29), and had a lot of fun - I might have a brief write-up about it soon.
With the advent of ghost and ghoul season, Podside undergoes its yearly transformation into Graveside Picnic [insert maniacal laughter here]! So, keep a lookout for our upcoming episodes on Daniel Kraus’s Scowler, and Panos Cosmatos’s metal fantasy, Mandy.
However, if you’re not interested in a monthly commitment, you can purchase some of our more popular individual episodes under Podside’s shop.
And that’s all she wrote!