Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature

Introduction

Weirding Out Latinx America

In Guadalupe García McCall’s debut young adult (YA) text, the Pura Belpré-winning verse novel Under the Mesquite, the teenage protagonist Lupita struggles to negotiate her talent and love of dramatic arts with her bicultural Chicana identity amidst accusations by high school classmates who taunt her with the following lines: You talk like / you wanna be white … you think you’re / Anglo now ‘cause you’re in Drama? / You think you’re better than us? (80–81).

In the classmates’ accusations that Lupita must wanna be white because she enjoys studying drama, Lupita is rendered an outsider, not a real Mexican. These hurtful accusations undoubtedly stem from mainstream myths of Chicanx/Latinx intellectual inferiority, sentiments that are unfortunately internalized by Lupita’s classmates. Although Lupita is shamed for her interest in so-called white academic pursuits, she insists on her right to create, to act, to be Chicana on her own terms.

This insistence on constructing an identity that pushes against and challenges mainstream or cultural pressures to be hip or on fleek forms the central tenet of the essays in Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx/Latinx Young Adult Literature. While sociological research has documented the ways in which teenagers and young adults form cliques (Ortner, Kinney) based on arbitrary markers of coolness, popular culture has seen a recent resurgence of decidedly uncool Latinxs that redefine the ways we think about identity, culture, and how to be a Latinx teenager. For example, the Colombian band Bomba Estereo’s music video for their song Soy Yo features a geeky young Latina who basks in this nerd identity and who became an instant internet sensation, and the Twitter account @LatinxGeeks provides a community for Latinxs who love all things geeky, according to their page.

Moreover, the popular 2018 film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse featured Milo Morales, an Afro-Latino teen who is often described as an intelligent nerd and attends a competitive middle school in a more affluent part of New York City. This resurgence also comes at a time when Latinx YA writers have published a plethora of texts documenting outsider Latinx teens, seen in texts like Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s Artistotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, Isabel Quintero’s Gabi, A Girl in Pieces, Matt de la Peña’s Mexican WhiteBoy, Erika L. Sánchez’s enormously popular debut novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, or Meg Medina’s Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, among many others. These are worlds in which Latinxs are the mainstream. In this way, the protagonists in these YA texts must navigate their communities as outsiders within an already marginalized community. Given the established canon of Latinx YA literature and the growing body of those works that explore weirdos, nerds, and other taboo identities, an edited volume that examines such identities is warranted.

Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks ¿Y Qué?: Reclaiming Outsiders

Existing Latinx literary scholarship primarily expresses a concern with literature for adult audiences, and while this work reflects Latinx literature’s emergence as a major cultural and financial player in the larger literary scene, our collection addresses literature intended for youth readers, who make up one of the fastest-growing demographics in the United States. In very recent collections, such as The Cambridge Companion to Latina/o American Literature, for example, a number of well-known scholars trace important developments in the large canon of Latinx writing. Yet not a single chapter addresses the growing number of books targeting children and young adults by Latinx writers, some of whom write only for this demographic. As Frederick Luis Aldama pointedly adds in his collection of interviews with Latinx children’s and YA writers, "The two-thousand-plus-page behemoth, The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (2005), does not include one US Latino author" (Aldama 10). Just under 6 percent of children’s and YA books published in 2017 were written by Latinxs, according to a study conducted by the University of Wisconsin’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center (Publishing Statistics).

Moreover, in a much-circulated 2012 New York Times article, For Young Latinos, an Image Is Missing, Motoko Rich sheds light on the scant Latinx representation that exists in classrooms and public libraries across the country. As Rich shows, this lack of proper representation can have negative impacts on how young Latinxs view themselves.¹ Even so, the literature that children are exposed to does not adequately reflect the growing canon of Latinx children’s and YA literature that is being produced by Arte Público Press, Cinco Puntos Press, Children’s Book Press, and Lee & Low Books, among others. Despite these presses publishing the work, as literature scholar and editor of Arte Público Press Gabriela Baeza Ventura notes, We have yet to see this literature at the forefront of awards, curricula, and bookstore displays (244). In the same vein, this literature has yet to be given serious consideration in the academy.

The title of our edited volume, Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx/Latinx Young Adult Literature (hereafter referred to as Nerds), signals a much-needed approach to the study of Latinx young adult literature. This edited volume addresses themes of outsiders in Chicanx/Latinx children’s and young adult literature, a topic that has not been explored in edited volumes thus far. In recent years, the field of Latinx children’s and YA literature has exploded with new imprints specifically dedicated to the field, such as Piñata Books from Arte Público Press and mainstream publishers such as Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers and Lee and Low Books, which have consciously made efforts to publish Latinx texts. Despite the achievements of award-winning authors, such as Guadalupe García McCall, Meg Medina, Margarita Engle, Matt De La Peña, and Benjamin Alire Sáenz, scholarship on Latinx literature has overwhelmingly ignored texts written for younger audiences. Esteemed journals on the study of children’s literature have published few scholarly articles examining Chicanx/Latinx children’s and YA texts. As the Latinx population in the United States approaches becoming the majority by 2043, the need for scholarship centered on Latinx children’s and young adult writing has become more pressing. In addressing this theoretical gap, we also acknowledge the important fictional literary work done by African American YA writers, such as Angie Thomas and Renee Watson, whose texts also examine similar themes explored in our collection.

Our collection adds to recent scholarship such as Voices of Resistance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Chican@ Children’s Literature (2017), edited by Laura Alamillo, Larissa Mercado-López, and Cristina Herrera. While our book shares some commonality with this text, Voices of Resistance is primarily focused on the field of education and mainly discusses children’s and middle-grade literature. Further, the essays in our collection share a thematic concern with weirdness, nerdiness, and what it means to be an outsider in Latinx and mainstream communities. We are also expanding on the recent work by co-editor Cristina Herrera in children’s literature journal The Lion and the Unicorn, which has examined Chicana nerd identities in YA literature, characters she dubs ChicaNerds. Following Herrera’s lead, this collection furthers the discussion of nerd and weirdo identities to include texts not explored in her study. As our book contends, these multifaceted identities need to be examined to account for the ways in which Latinx children’s and YA literature has broadened the textual representation to include outsiders, those who exist on the margins.

While related titles have been recently published, such as Multicultural Literature for Latino Bilingual Children, or Immigration Narratives in Young Adult Literature: Crossing Borders, these texts do not consider themes that we explore in our collection. Of further significance, it should be noted that in studies such as Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers and Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature, Latinx/Chicanx-authored texts are not discussed, demonstrating the timeliness and necessity of our collection. The prevalence of studies on YA literature, though an important feat, exposes what we consider to be a troubling fact: YA literature has indeed been explored and has established itself as a viable field of inquiry, but work on Latinx YA literature remains disturbingly under-studied.

In the same way, Latinx YA literature has been systematically excluded from scholarship on Latinx literature. The gold-standard edited collections The Latino Studies Reader: Culture, Economy, and Society; Performing the US Latina/Latino Borderlands; and The New Latino Studies Reader: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective include very little scholarship dedicated to unpacking the nuances of Latinx youth identities as seen through a cultural studies lens. As these landmark studies demonstrate, there has been and still remains a historical erasure of YA texts from discussions of Latinx literature at large.

Towards a Typology of Latinx Outsider Identities

In Gloria Anzaldúa’s seminal work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, she theorizes the US-Mexico borderlands as both a literal space of occupation and confrontation and a metaphorical site of rupture, identity-crossing, and of course literal and figurative border-crossing. For Anzaldúa, this open wound of the borderlands (Borderlands 25), while undoubtedly invoking violence, colonization, and separation, nevertheless allows for her theoretical New Mestiza to create and build a borderless society that liberates her from the confines of borders that seek to confine and contain. This borderland is home to what Anzaldúa calls los atravesados, or border crossers: The squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal’ (Borderlands 25). As an in-between space, these weird border-dwellers thrive in a zone that contains contradictions and ambiguity (Anzaldúa, Borderlands 101). In that spirit, we expand Anzaldúa’s theory to include those nerdy, goth, geeky, freaky, and outsider Latinx teens that she does not name: those troublesome misfits that are caught somewhere between their communities and the Anglo world. These outsiders reflect Anzaldúa’s notion of El Mundo Zurdo (the left-handed world), a liminal space that presents opportunities for re-envisioning weird Latinxs as the future of a less oppressive world. From an in-between borderlands space, the individuals in question can embark on the path of a two-way movement—a going deep into the self and an expanding out into the world, a simultaneous recreation of the self and a reconstruction of society (Anzaldúa, La Prieta 208). From here, they can transform the societies around them, the same societies that have previously marked them as outsiders.

In the same way, our collection engages with José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification, which explains how racial outsiders mediate the dominant culture by transforming it for their own benefit rather than adhering to the dominant culture’s mandates for appropriate forms of Latinx identity. While Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory and Muñoz’s disidentification are useful frameworks for the purposes of our book, we also insist on identifying their short-comings; after all, these scholars have taken for granted an adult perspective that does not necessarily speak to the realities of young Latinx weirdos who are excluded from the grownup worlds of their families and communities at large.

As outsiders, these Latinx youth must take back their own narrative, ultimately responding to Chicana theorist Emma Pérez’s notion of the Decolonial Imaginary. Pérez views Latinxs as subjects within an environment that constantly reminds them that they are objects and must be controlled; she inspires the Latinx community to revise our history and reinscribe it with the new (127). With this in mind, the Latinx outsiders in Nerds write themselves into the community and revise the traditional identity scripts to be more inclusive of outsider identities such as LatiNerds and queer Latinxs.

This collection of essays by scholars whose work focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first century Latinx literature continues a critical dialogue and broadens the field of Latinx cultural studies to be more inclusive of YA literature. As such, this volume is the first critical anthology addressing thematic concerns around outsiders and other taboo identities. Our collection insists that to understand Latinx youth identities, it is necessary to shed light on outsiders within an already marginalized ethnic group: nerds, goths, geeks, freaks, and others who might not fit within Latinx popular cultural paradigms such as the chola and cholo, identities that are ever-present in films, television, and the internet. In light of this, Nerds establishes a typology of youth Latinx outsider identities such as the aforementioned. Nevertheless, the characters who take on these identities do not wish to separate themselves from the mainstream Latinx community. Rather, they theorize their identities to forge new paths for Latinx youth to follow in ways that harmonize notions of being different and fitting in.

In Nerds, the analytical category of outsiderness intersects with discussions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Other topics include Latinx theatre for young audiences, queerness in YA writing, representations of reading/writing/science/math/art in YA writing, bullying, and violence. The volume addresses the following questions. What does it mean to be an outsider within an already marginalized community? What constitutes outsider identities? In what ways are these outsider identities shaped by mainstream myths around Latinx young people, particularly with the common stereotype of the struggling, underachieving inner city Latinx teen? How do these young adults reclaim what it means to be an outsider, weirdo, nerd, or goth, and how can the reclamation of these marginalized identities expand much-needed conversations around authenticity and narrow understandings of what constitutes Latinx identity? How does Chicanx/Latinx children’s and YA literature represent, challenge, question, or expand discussions surrounding identities that have been deemed outsiders or outliers? How have Chicanx/Latinx children’s and YA writers contributed to these thematic and theoretical discussions?

This book is divided into four sections that interrogate varying outsider identities. While we have employed the identifier Latinx to demonstrate the shifting terminology in the field, our contributors make use of diverse terms, and as such, we have kept the terms they have chosen to also show the ways in which terminology continues to be a major focus of scholarly debate within our discipline. To facilitate a more inclusive discussion of outsiderness, some of the chapters address texts intended for middle-grade readers. Section one, Artists and Punks, features chapters that examine artist protagonists who are deemed weird for their interests. In chapter one by Amanda Ellis, "Chicana Teens, Zines, and Poetry Scenes: Gabi, a Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero, Ellis investigates the YA novel and its use of zine culture to argue how the protagonist uses poetry and zines to make sense of her life as a young, fat, weird" Chicana artist in the making. Lettycia Terrones analyzes the middle-grade novel The First Rule of Punk in her chapter, "Praxis of Refusal: Self-Fashioning Identity and Throwing Attitude in Pérez’s The First Rule of Punk, which argues that the novel’s protagonist finds affinity in the figure of Chicana punk rocker Teresa Covarrubias. As Terrones states, Malú self-fashions an integrated identity by activating a punk rock ethos to refuse agents of assimilation."

Following Terrones is chapter three by Adrianna M. Santos, "Broken Open: Writing, Healing, and Affirmation in Isabel Quintero’s Gabi, a Girl in Pieces and Erika L. Sanchez’s I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter. In this chapter, Santos argues that the central characters struggle with their otherness and their Mexican-ness and use language as not only a means of self-expression but also as a way to both unravel and remake themselves." As artists and punks, these characters use creative means to adapt and thrive in a world that makes little room for them.

The chapters in section two, Superheroes and Other Worldly Beings, examine texts that introduce concepts of the obscure, dark magic, and spirit worlds to speak of those teens whose other-worldly lives are under constant surveillance and attack. For example, in chapter four, Bite Me: The Allure of Vampires and Dark Magic in Chicana Young Adult Literature, Christi Cook explores the ways in which the Anzaldúan paradigm of the New Mestiza, which embraces an in-betweenness and hybridity, does not fully speak to the experiences of teenage Chicanas; the writers’ use of dark magic, according to Cook, emphasizes this painful teenage world.

Following Cook is chapter five by Domino Pérez, "Afuerxs and Cultural Practice in Shadowshaper and Labyrinth Lost, which looks at the world of fantasy and shadowshaping to examine how the young women protagonists in both texts, through acts of refusal, are outside of the material, ritual, and cultural practices of their communities. Ella Diaz concludes section two with chapter six, The Art of Afro-Latina Consciousness-Raising in Shadowshaper" In her chapter, Diaz examines the representation of street art and muralism in Daniel Older’s novel, arguing that the protagonist Sierra uses muralism to insert herself and other Afro-Latinx peoples into an art world that has historically refused to see them.

The chapters in section three, LatiNerds and Bookworms, discuss texts that explore nerd identities and characters who enjoy subjects that have traditionally been deemed inappropriate interests for Latinx youth. LatiNerds, or Latinx Nerds, represent bookish characters that challenge the ways in which mainstream culture has oversimplified Latinx youth as intellectually stunted, struggling, or not interested in books or reading. In chapter seven, "The Smartest Girl in the World: Normalizing Intellectualism through Representations of Smart Latinx Youth on Stage, Roxanne Schroeder-Arce explores how Miriam Gonzalez’s play offers youth a look at young Latinx intellectuals who never question their smartness in relation to their ethnic and racial identity. By engaging with theories around Latinx youth identity development and culturally responsive pedagogy, this chapter shows how the play may affect Latinx youth who see themselves represented in a legitimate space. Cristina Herrera’s chapter, ‘These Latin girls mean business’: Expanding the Boundaries of Latina Youth Identity in Meg Medina’s YA Novel Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, explores the ways Medina’s novel expands what it means to be a young, urban Latina. As Herrera discusses, the novel questions the ways in which those Latinas who do not model themselves as cholas are victims of identity-policing, rendered not really Latina, and dismissed as weirdos or outsiders within this narrow gender-racial identity script that defines the chola as the only authentic young, urban, Latina identity that exists. In chapter nine, Tomás Rivera: The Original Latinx Outsider," Tim Wadham focuses on one of the most pervasive figures of Latinx literature: Tomás Rivera, author of the canonical … y no se lo tragó la tierra/ … And the Earth Did Not Devour Him. The chapter sheds light on Rivera’s own journey becoming a reader and a writer through an overview of the play Tomás and the Library Lady, which demonstrates how a fellow outlier helped Rivera break from the constraints of the stereotypes forced on him and find a way to belong through the power of literature. Ultimately, the LatiNerds in this section find ways to embrace their identity through reading and their love of literature.

The chapters in section four, Non-Cholos in the Hood, tackle one of the most pervasive stereotypes of Latinx urban identity. Also known as the home-boy, the cholo has been visible in films such as Colors, American Me, and Cheech and Chong, to name only a few. Although there are variations, popular culture has depicted the homeboy/cholo as a young male in baggy pants and flannel who may or may not drive lowrider cars. With this in mind, these chapters open up new possibilities for how young Latinx children engage with identity politics in such a way as to forge new paths for Latinx childhoods in the barrio. For instance, in chapter ten, "Young, Gay, and Latino: ‘Feeling Brown’ in Emilio Rodriguez’s Swimming While Drowning," Trevor Boffone examines gay Latino teen coming-out and coming-of-age narratives and the issues affecting this often-forgotten demographic, specifically the perils of LGBT youth homelessness. Through an analysis of Emilio Rodriguez’s play Swimming While Drowning, Boffone engages with José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of Feeling Brown to present the ways in which queer Latino outsider identities manifest, ultimately pushing against stereotypes of both urban and queer youth. In her chapter on Gary Soto’s Chato Series, Elena Avilés argues that Soto rewrites the iconic figure of the cool cat to reconsider urban male Chicano masculinity. In Chapter 12, "The Coming-of-Age Experience in Chicanx Queer Novels What Night Brings and Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe," Carolina Alonso establishes a dialogue between canonical coming-of-age queer YA novels by renowned authors Carla Trujillo and Benjamin Alire Sáenz to demonstrate how both writers destabilize the genre by centering queer youth identities. The novels’ protagonists break from traditional gender binaries and stereotypes, thus becoming outsiders who endure violence to varying degrees. As such, Alonso’s chapter presents the difficulties that can manifest when Latinx urban youth question traditional identity scripts. Ultimately, these chapters present characters that push against the chola/cholo archetype to forge a new typography of Latinx urban youth identity.

Note

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/education/young-latino-students-dont-see-themselves-in-books.html.

Works Cited

Alamillo, Laura, Larissa M. Mercado-Lopez, and Cristina Herrera, eds. Voices of Resistance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Chican@ Children’s Literature. Rowman and Littlefield, 2017.

Aldama, Frederick Luis. Introduction: The Heart and Art of Latino/a Young People’s Fiction. Latino/a Children’s and Young Adult Writers on the Art of Storytelling, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018, pp. 3–25.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute, 1987.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. La Prieta. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, Third Woman Press, 1983, pp. 220–23.

Baeza Ventura, Gabriela. Latino Literature for Children and the Lack of Diversity. (Re) mapping the Latina/o Literary Landscape: New Works and New Directions, edited by Cristina Herrera and Larissa M. Mercado-Lopez, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 241–54.

Basu, Balaka, Katherine R. Broad, and Carrie Hintz, eds. Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers. Routledge, 2014.

Brown, Joanne. Immigration Narratives in Young Adult Literature: Crossing Borders. The Scarecrow Press, 2011.

Clark, Ellen Riojas, Belinda Bustos Flores, Howard L. Smith, and Daniel Alejandro Gonzalez, eds. Multicultural Literature for Latino Bilingual Children: Their Words, Their Worlds. Rowman and Littlefield, 2015.

Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC). Publishing Statistics on Children’s Books about People of Color and First/Native Nations and by People of Color and First/Native Nations Authors and Illustrators, 2018. https://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/books/pcstats.asp.

Day, Sara K. Reading like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature. University Press of Mississippi, 2013.

Herrera, Cristina. Soy Brown y Nerdy: The ChicaNerd in Chicana Young Adult (YA)Literature. The Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal of Children’s Literature, vol. 41, no. 3, 2017, pp. 307–26.

Kinney, David A. From Nerds to Normals: The Recovery of Identity among Adolescents from Middle School to High School. Sociology of Education, vol. 66, no. 1, 1993, pp. 21–40.

McCall, Guadalupe García. Under the Mesquite. Lee and Low, 2011.

Pérez, Emma. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas Into History. Indiana University Press, 1999.

Ortner, Sherry B. ‘Burned Like a Tattoo’: High School Social Categories and ‘American Culture.’ Ethnography, vol. 3, no. 2, 2002, pp. 115–48.

Rich, Motoko. For Young Latino Readers, an Image Is Missing. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/education/young-latino-students-dont-see-themselves-in-books.html

Section 1

Artists and Punks

1

Chicana Teens, Zines, and Poetry Scenes: Gabi, A Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero

Amanda Ellis

Isabel Quintero’s 2014 young adult novel Gabi, A Girl in Pieces imagines a teenager’s transformative senior year of high school. Quintero’s title and cover image announce much about the form and content of the novel, given that Gabi is composed of various kinds of fictional pieces of writing that narrate pivotal events in the main protagonist’s life. Gabi Hernandez, like most adolescent characters in YA fiction, is all but consumed by life’s transitions. Gabi’s self-conceptions, her ideas about sexuality, her father’s substance abuse, and her constant wrestling with body shame drive Quintero’s narrative. Through Gabi, Quintero gives readers a depiction of a witty teenager’s life by way of a narrative that culminates with Gabi’s unique rebellious evolution and triumphant agency as a geeky Chicana teenager who experiments with activist art, creative writing, and performance poetry. Quintero’s plot also maintains fidelity to the title because through the course of the novel Gabi risks psychologically being brought to pieces by tumultuous personal circumstances. Quintero’s narrative highlights the multifarious forces shaping Chicana teenage life, and more significantly the importance of creative writing and revision. The novel affirms that creative personal