Getting Real for Hispanic Heritage Month
It’s Hispanic Heritage Month, and I want to get real with you.
We’re told to use this time for celebration, visibility, and pride—to honor the stories that make up our shared history. So here is innocent me with my brother Evan—smiling, unaware, before I even knew what ‘Hispanic Heritage Month’ was supposed to mean.
But like I ask my students when we read literature: what is this about? And also, what is this really about?
One answer is surface-level. The other is layered.
For example, Girl, Unemployed is about messy jobs and second chances. But it’s also about so much more—success and systemic hurdles, lack of opportunities, money, community, and family. It’s about how all those forces can collide to lift us up or pull us down.
Similarly, my main character confronts our concerns on race relations—are they sincere, or just hot-button topics that play on our emotions and consumer culture? Somehow, it always ties back to money and jobs. All roads lead to jobs.
Below is a cutting one-page excerpt from my book about a Hispanic origin story. After reading it, tell me: what does Hispanic Heritage Month mean to you? For me, it’s not just about visibility. It’s about wrestling with complicated truths that don’t always look like the colorful flowers, streamers, or nostalgic childhood photos often used to tell our stories this month.
Excerpt from Chapter 2, Jess’s “origin story,” Girl, Unemployed
“You know, I was talking to Elsa today,” my mother said, as if Hazelnut wasn’t all over her, crouched along the carpet. “And Elsa said my kids are boomerangs. Have you heard of this? Boomerangs?” My mother huffed with each scrub her hand made against the carpet. “We called it late bloomers in my day, but it makes sense. Elsa says, 'like a boomerang, Ariana. You throw a boomerang out in the air, and it comes right back.’”
“Thanks, Mom. Lots of insight on my birthday and super helpful. It motivates me to get off the couch, I mean, out of your kitchen, like all the women who came before you. Oh, look at that. I come home to find you still in the kitchen.”
My mother ignored me, as she usually did when I got all feministy. She stopped mid-scrub like she had a premonition, glaring off into the distance. “Elsa says, your home is a revolving door, Ariana, a revolving door. I know you love your kids, but you should make them pay some rent.”
“Mom! Who has Elsa been hanging around with in her Sharpie eyebrows? I’m paying for utilities and groceries, as agreed. Plus gas, insurance, and a new lease on a car so Missy can stop driving me everywhere. How much do you think I get for unemployment?”
“I know. Can you believe that? I said to Elsa, ‘Elsa, where did you get this from?’ She said, ‘the other ladies that work with me at the new Southwest Airlines Call Center.’”
“I see San Antonio is still vying for those competitive, blue-collared call center jobs. Wait, will you tell her I’m looking for a temp job and that I have travel experience?”
“It’s a bilingual call center job, so you must speak fluent Spanish.”
“Your fault, Mom,” I said in a tongue-in-cheek tone.
When my parents were growing up on the border, society taught their generation that they and their children would never prosper in the U.S. if they spoke Spanish. Being white had equaled economic prosperity, power, and wealth in the U.S. As a punishment, the nuns at my parents’ school would charge them up to a quarter for every Spanish word they accidentally spoke in class. So, when my parents grew up and started their family, they raised my brothers and me to speak only English, even though Spanish was their first language. But enter the 1990s with Selena, J. Lo., and Ricky Martin. Big corporations like McDonald's, Proctor & Gamble, and Liz Claiborne began to see the Hispanic market as an untapped resource. They started spending their advertising dollars in markets like Telemundo and Univision. We became re-branded as “Latino.” That word made me feel like I needed big J. Lo Hoop earrings, dark purple lipstick, and those trending Homies T-shirts with a picture of a big, souped-up hooptie.
“So basically, Mom, I spent the first half of my life shamed not to speak Spanish, and now I’m going to spend the rest of my life shamed by both Hispanics and non-Hispanics—sorry, Latinos—because I don’t speak Spanish? Why aren’t ‘Anglos’ shamed for not speaking Gaelic, Finnish, or whatever language that is consistent with their ancestry? Because it’s about money, Mother, just so you know. I promise you, the world doesn’t suddenly care about Hispanics or Latinos, but money does.”
