On Feb. 24, Oregon author Tehlor Kay Mejia’s sophomore novel, “We Unleash the Merciless Storm,” a young adult (YA) queer Latinx fantasy set in a dystopian reality, will hit the shelves.
Mejia’s books come at a time when diversity in YA literature is steadily increasing, but still has a long way to go. Just less than 6% of children’s and YA books published in 2018 were by Latinx authors, according to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center. According to data collected by author Malinda Lo, mainstream publishers published 79 books with LGBTQ+ main characters in 2016. Yet, when Mejia was trying to sell her first book, “We Set the Dark on Fire,” publishers told her it was too “niche” to have a main character who was both Latinx and queer. She would have to pick just one.
She didn’t, of course, and her first book, “We Set the Dark on Fire,” was published early last year. It’s set in a Latin American world where upper-class women’s options are to become either a first or second wife, and the poor are separated by a border wall. The main character, Dani, is a teenage girl who lives in the upper-class world, but hides the secret of her lower-class origins. With a revolution brewing, she is asked to spy for the resistance — all while she begins to develop feelings for another girl.
Mejia, a self-taught writer, wrote the novel during Obama’s presidency. As a third-generation Mexican-American, the dystopia came from her imagination of “the worst thing that could happen” for her community. Then, Trump was elected, and she began to see the political landscape reflect, in many ways, the story she had written.
The sequel, “We Unleash the Merciless Storm,” is about taking the fight to the ground. It explores the resistance movement in the novel, La Voz, and also celebrates youth activism in a time when young people are making headlines for leading movements.
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Sarah Hansell: Can you talk about why you chose fantasy as the medium for this story? How does fantasy as a genre fit for this story about resistance and revolution?
Tehlor Kay Mejia: It’s an interesting question, for me especially, because I originally wrote the first draft of “We Set the Dark on Fire” when Obama was still president. So the themes of the book, like the border wall and the immigrant detention and the resistance sympathizers disappearing, sort of started to happen after I wrote the book. For me, as a Mexican-American person, I was looking at my family and my culture and my friends, and trying to create a fantasy world that was the scariest thing that we could imagine. What would it be like if all of these things that are sort of on the back burner of our lives were brought to the forefront in really terrifying, totally in-your-face ways? As we got closer to publication, the election happened, the executive orders started coming down, and it all sort of started coming true. So it’s interesting because it seems like a fantasy world that’s a reaction to what’s going on around us, but actually it was the opposite. I was trying to come up with the worst thing that could happen, and then the worst thing happened.
Hansell: How are the two main characters, Dani and Carmen’s, struggle and path to resistance related to or inspired by youth activism today, especially the activism of youth of color and queer youth of color?
Mejia: I was active politically as a teen. I was definitely out there protesting the Iraq war, I was in speech and debate. I was really, really invested in bettering my world and finding a way to use my voice to create change in what was then sort of a naive way, but I think a good way. So Dani’s road is really kind of like a reflection on how I had approached the world and the bad things happening in it as a teen.
I wrote book two in large part on tour for book one, so I was at festivals, I was meeting teens who had read the first book and loved it. I was meeting kids who are out there living their truth and just fighting back in the most impressive ways that made everything I did as a teenager seem silly. The biggest thing I’ve discovered in the whole process of this is just my respect for teenage girls is through the roof. They’re some of the most incredible people, and I think definitely a lot of the fire and passion and ambition, and just willingness to go out there and destroy what’s keeping them down made its way into this book in a huge way. I was so, so inspired by the kids I met on tour.
Hansell: The first book really explored the second-generation immigrant experience, with the pressure Dani felt because of her parents’ sacrifice for her to have a better life and her feeling of isolation in the world her parents wanted her to be a part of. Can you speak to that? Has your own experience shaped tis part of the story?
Mejia: Actually, my family is third-generation American, so I was definitely coming at it from an exploration of what privilege is like. Because I certainly can’t speak to the story of someone who as an adult, or even a teen, came to this country and dealt with all the things that the immigrant populations are dealing with right now. But certainly, as part of my family history, there’s a lot of sacrifice. Not just physical sacrifice, like moving and money and opportunity, but also cultural sacrifices. There were big sacrifices made by my family to keep us safe, to keep my parents safe. We weren’t taught Spanish as kids. We were really encouraged to blend in, in a lot of ways, because for them growing up in the sixties in Central California, there was a lot of xenophobic rhetoric and hate going on.
So a lot of my experience has been growing up sheltered from a lot of that stuff, but also really aware of how it had impacted my family and how it had forced them to sort of stay small, and quiet, and blend in. And as a kid who was a really loud, out there kind of kid, I had and still have a lot of privilege because of the sacrifices that my family made. And because of the choices they made to have the type of voice that’s easier for a white supremacist dominated society to listen to. Dani is really about finding ways to use her privilege for good, and that’s a parallel big time to what I’m trying to do. Which is to acknowledge the fact that I have immense privilege because of a lot of things, but in large part because of sacrifices my grandparents and parents made, and then to just decide how best to use that in service to the community I love.
Hansell: In other interviews you’ve mentioned the pressure or expectation, as a queer Latinx author, to represent your entire community in your work. Can you speak to this?
Mejia: I think we’re at an interesting time in young adult literature right now, where there have been a lot of strides made for inclusivity and intersectionality in stories. When I was trying to sell this book to a publisher, I heard more than once that basically you could have a Latinx character, or a queer character, but that it was too niche to have someone who was both. And even since then, and that was three or four years ago now, there’s been an explosion of more stories. They’re more willing to put books out that reflect more diverse experiences. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to what needs to be happening, but it’s forward progress, which is good.
But I do think, especially in the beginning, when I was anticipating my first book coming out, there hadn’t been very many books about queer Latinx people in young adult literature, and my experience is really specific, and the inspiration I had was very specific. I’m a very light-skinned person, I’m a white-passing person, I was at the time in a marriage with a man, so I had a ton of passing privilege. I’m able to really navigate the world without experiencing a lot of oppression on a day-to-day basis, at least from the world around me.
So that was my story to tell. I wanted to be out there saying, here’s what it’s like to come at this fight from the point of view of a person with privilege, and to figure out how to be useful to your community. But certainly, it shouldn’t be seen as the only, or the best, exploration of what it’s like to be queer and Latin American in America, because there’s so many other stories from so many more diverse and intersectional backgrounds that it’s super important to just make sure you’re reading widely and that you’re not expecting any story to be everything, because it can’t be. The single story is a really dangerous narrative. The kind of pressure you have as a marginalized creator, that a lot of non-marginalized creators don’t, is the expectation that you’re going to be able to represent your entire community. ... All you can do is tell your own story.
Hansell: With that said, can you talk about the importance of representation in young adult literature of queer youth hiding, exploring and defining their identity?
Mejia: I grew up in a time before there was a lot of YA in general. We were getting there, but it was sort of pre-Twilight, barely pre-Twilight. My local library had one shelf, I think, of YA, and there was one queer book on the whole shelf, which was about white kids at summer camp who were from solidly upper middle class families. I think for me, as a kid, I was always sort of trying to Frankenstein together my experience through all these different literary entry points.
That affects so much. I didn’t believe there was a place in the world for a story that I could tell because I had never seen someone like me write a book before. So I had no idea. I never read about a character that was like me. I think when you grow up being surrounded by people who look like you and live like you, it’s a lot easier to imagine yourself in different scenarios, and imagination is really the springboard to success for so many young adults. I think in terms of sexuality specifically, I think it can be so incredibly validating and healing for a community that’s often historically been forced to hide, to be able to see their stories out there and celebrated, and see that it’s normal, even if you’re growing up in a community or a household that doesn’t support that, to be able to see it in positive light, and know that there’s more to that community and that experience than maybe what you’re seeing at home.
Hansell: How has parenthood affected your writing, especially writing parent-child relationships?
Mejia: I actually wrote my first book because my daughter is mixed-race as well, and even looking for picture books for her as a baby, there was just not a lot of diversity there. I wanted there to be stories. I didn’t want her to share the experience I had growing up where I had such a difficult time finding characters who were like me. So I was looking, looking, and I wasn’t finding anything, and I was like, OK, it’s time to write the story. I’d always written, but not until I was looking at it from her perspective as a person who’s going to grow up in this generation was I like — it’s time.
I’ve spent a lot of the writing process as a single parent. And that’s part of what came out with “We Set the Dark on Fire,” was the balance between being an ambitious person, being a person who wants career and success and wants to live your dream basically, but then also feeling like society doesn’t support you doing that, and being a good parent and a good nurturer and a good homemaker. I don’t think I would be here doing this if I didn’t have the inspiration of my daughter, but also I do wish that society made it easier to be a career-driven, ambitious person and also a parent. It’s difficult to do, especially as a woman.
Hansell: To my understanding you don’t have a writing degree or an MFA.
Mejia: Right, I didn’t go to college.
Hansell: Was that a barrier to getting your books published?
Mejia: No, I didn’t see it as a barrier. I grew up super, super poor. There was no college money. I could have gotten financial aid, but I was terrified of going into insane amounts of debt for something I just didn’t even understand why I was doing. So I think it’s certainly more challenging in some ways, because everything I learned about writing, I had to learn as I went. The first novel I wrote had no dialogue in it, literally none. It was just a girl walking around on a beach thinking about stuff. I was lucky and also really, really determined. I felt like I had a lot of catching up to do. But also, I don’t regret not going to school. It’s definitely possible, like anything else. If you start out from a different place than other people, because of whatever the obstacle is in your path, then you just have to work twice as hard. And I definitely felt that way. But I was lucky to get good feedback from people in the industry along the way. And then half luck, and half taking the lucky breaks and really running with them, and making the most of your moments.