A dark cloud hangs over Belén Dolores Itzel Del Toro’s world in East Oakland. Her father abandoned her family. Her mother – a teacher – has begun to disappear after work, so Belén comes home to an empty house most days. And her older sister, Ava, constantly lectures her about not ending up like their dad.
“I don’t really know what I want to be. It isn’t my fault,” Belén narrates. “After my pa left, I’d cut class, collect my Wendy’s money, and go home to lie in bed. I laid there because I felt like I couldn’t move, like my body was tethered to the mattress.”
At school, Belén cuts class often. She’s now at risk of not graduating high school. There’s also her best friend, Leti, who is expecting a baby with her boyfriend and hasn’t broken the news yet to her parents because he’s Black and they’re racist.
Shut Up, This Is Serious (out now from Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins) is debut author Carolina Ixta’s unforgettable YA novel about a Latina teen’s circuitous path towards healing, and life’s complexities along the way. I found this to be such a richly rendered story with great nuance, care, and an unflinching eye on Ixta’s behalf towards issues like anti-Black racism and inequities in education. Shut Up, This Is Serious is at times heartbreaking, maddening, and hopeful. I didn’t want the novel to end, but was anxious to see where Belén and Leti would end up.
Ixta – herself a Mexican-American from Oakland – spoke with Latinx in Publishing about the inspiration behind Shut Up, This Is Serious, why she chose to address certain real-life issues in her book, and more.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Amaris Castillo (AC): Congratulations on Shut Up, This Is Serious! I read that the inspiration behind your novel was driven, in part, by some resentment you felt growing up in the YA market. Can you elaborate?
Carolina Ixta (CI): The YA market when I was growing up was not at all what it’s like today. And I will say I think we have a long way to go, still, in YA. But when I was growing up, the big names were John Green and Sarah Dessen. The Hunger Games became very popular. Twilight was still very popular. But there just weren’t any Latinos apart from a handful. I remember the book that everyone talked about was The House on Mango Street, which was published in the 80s. There were a couple others, but they were very few and far between.
When I was younger, I was writing competitively with the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and I was doing their novel writing category. I would do it every year. When I got to college, I took this class on Latino literature… It was the first time that I was reading work by other Latino writers. This was in the literary fiction world, so it was not YA. I was really stunned by the repertoire that the lit fic community had to choose from. I know there’s diversity issues there, as well, but they seem to have so much more.
I look back at my old work that I’d written when I was in high school or before, and I realize that every character I had written was white. And I had no idea. I just wasn’t cognizant enough of their identity, of my own identity, and I chalked it up a lot to reproducing what I was consuming… I was reading a bunch of books about white people and, somehow in my subconscious, thinking those were my own experiences when they really weren’t. And then reproducing them – writing these characters that were white that weren’t dealing with any of the real issues that I was dealing with in my life. So I felt very resentful. I finished school and went to Berkeley for graduate school. And I started writing a book and reading a lot of middle grade because I was a fifth-grade teacher. In my time away from YA, I realized that there had been this beginning of a renaissance, I’ll say, where I was able to go into the middle grade and YA sections and suddenly there were these big names like Elizabeth Acevedo, Erika L. Sánchez and Jason Reynolds.
Again, I want to emphasize (that) I feel like we still have lots and lots and lots of work to do. But I didn’t want to feel like I was the first in a conversation. I wanted to feel like I was in conversation with other people. And it was the first time I was able to feel that way. So that’s what really led me to write the book.
AC: Your book largely centers on Belén, a teen from East Oakland who is struggling after her father abandoned the family. She is also at risk of not graduating. She is an incredibly compelling character who doesn’t always make the best choices. What was it like to form this character?
CI: Belén was a really challenging character for me to form because I related to her, but I really didn’t at the same time. I related a lot to her family structure; I was also raised by a single parent. But in terms of her academic performance in high school, I was not that. I was very much an AP student. I did all of my homework. I was a good student growing up. But because I studied to be a teacher, I found that most of the time when students are “underperforming” or truant or missing class, it’s because there’s usually issues at home. If not, they’re responding to systemic obstacles placed in front of them that are working.
One of the reviews I read of this book was like, ‘Belén hates school.’ I was like, ‘No, no, no. Actually, I think school hates Belén.’ She’s not on the right track. She has teachers who really couldn’t care less what she’s doing. So when I wrote her, I very much wanted her to be opposite to me in my experiences as a student. I wanted her to be opposite to Leti. She’s (Belén) underperforming. She’s cutting class all the time. And I very much wanted her to follow an anti-hero arc; every solution that would seem so clear from the vantage point of a reader or even an adult, she’s not going to take. Because she’s young, right? She’s making a lot of mistakes. I think what made her such an interesting character to write is that she’s making so many mistakes and that the path out of her issues seems very clear, but to her as a 17-year-old girl, it really isn’t.
In earlier drafts of the book, she’s not making that many mistakes. She’s a little bit too mature. So as I worked with her character, I wanted her to make mistakes and be almost empowered by the mistakes that she is making – specifically in this romantic relationship that she gets into. She’s privy to some information that I think any other cognitive person would be like, ‘Ooh, you should probably stop doing that.’ But given the nature of the situation that she’s in, she’s very much like, ‘This is all I have left.’ I really wanted her character to be a character where the answer seems so clear: ‘Go to class. Do your homework. Don’t go out with this guy.’ But at the same time, I wanted to give her so much of an introspective monologue, where readers then can walk away saying something like, ‘Well, it would make sense why she would do that. She’s in a very, very challenging position.’
For her character, it was really important for me to make sure she was making mistakes that were relevant to a 17-year-old’s experience, but also relevant to someone who’s going through a profoundly challenging time that even some adults haven’t gone through. So for Belén specifically, it was very much walking the line of making her empowered but also still making her immature and making her a child, and behave very much like a child.
AC: You touch on some real-life issues within our community: anti-Blackness, colorism in the Latinx community, inequity in education, differences in class. You’re also an elementary school teacher. What drove you to address these themes in your novel?
CI: Very much my experiences growing up, and then the experience of being a teacher. I am a white-presenting Latina. My sister is not. She’s a Black-presenting Latina, even though nobody in our family is Black. It’s interesting how that can happen. I had a very easy childhood growing up. My nickname meant ‘pretty.’ I was favored by my grandparents because I was so pale and white, and I had green eyes. As I got older and became cognizant of issues around race generally, I then became very cognizant of issues about race in the Latino community. So the caste system, the effects of colonization, all of that. I was taking a lot of classes on ethnic studies and critical race theory in my undergrad, and then in my graduate school experience. And I was learning a lot. I literally felt my brain growing some days.
“When I thought about the book, I was like, well, I want readers to walk away with knowledge that maybe they didn’t have before. But I can’t just sit there and give these dictionary definitions. It’s too boring. It’s too dry. So I have to make sure they’re embedded into the story. ”
I became a fifth-grade teacher, and my students were going through exactly everything I had gone through as a child. They were repeating these words and this really aggressive language, specifically to their Black peers. And when I would call for parent-teacher conferences, their parents would be like, ‘Well, what is the problem?’ It reminded me a lot of my upbringing; my parents and my family members would similarly make these very racist backhanded comments. I didn’t realize they were a problem until I was in university, or somewhat high school age. I didn’t know it was a huge problem, and a problem I had language for where I can point to mestizaje, colorism, caste system, and blanqueamiento. I didn’t have that language until I was in college. And I was looking at my students and really thinking like, Man, if I don’t teach you what these words mean, you may never learn them. And not because I don’t think they’re not going to go to college. I really want them to. But because there are so many obstacles in their path to get there, the largest of them being finance. And many of them would be first-gen students. So it was like, ‘I can’t guarantee all of you are going to have the same path that I had. So I have to teach you about this stuff’....
When I thought about the book, I was like, well, I want readers to walk away with knowledge that maybe they didn’t have before. But I can’t just sit there and give these dictionary definitions. It’s too boring. It’s too dry. So I have to make sure they’re embedded into the story. A lot of that came with attempting not to underestimate my readers, and just throwing it in there in a subtle way and letting them make their own connections.
AC: Let’s talk about the stereotype of teen pregnancy among Latinas. It is something Belén seems keenly aware of as it relates to her best friend, Leti. Can you talk about how you chose to address this stereotype and turn it on its head?
CI: It’s so funny to me because I never thought I would write about teen pregnancy. It was never something that was super pressing in my mind. I wanted to write more about sex, and sex for Latinas and sex for young women – and our perceived notions about Latinas and young women who are sexually active. And I think the only way I could do that was if I did make Leti’s character pregnant. Leti is obviously a character who you wouldn’t imagine would get pregnant, right? She’s like a very nerdy AP student. She’s very, very devoutly Catholic. But when I was younger, I remember having pregnant classmates. As early as seventh grade, I remember having a classmate who was pregnant, who was Latina. And I remember the way that the teachers treated her. They treated her like she was some kind of zoo animal and as if she was lesser than. I didn’t have the language then. I just was observant.
I went to a very big public high school. We would have pregnant girls, and it was just kind of par for the course. There were just too many of us to really care too much. But as I got older, when I went to university, again, I was taking all of these classes and learning a lot about the tropes of the Latina pregnant girl and of the promiscuous, sexy, hot Latina – and where these things come from.
Specifically in regards to teen pregnancy, I was learning that statistically it’s not that Latina girls are engaging in sex more than white girls, for example. It’s that most of us are brought up Catholic. So if we’re really pointing fingers, it’s not toward promiscuity. We’re truly pointing fingers at colonization. That goes centuries back. Mexico was colonized by the Spanish and we’re taught to believe certain aspects of the Bible. One of them is that you don’t have sex until you’re married, and you only have sex with your husband and then you don’t use birth control. All seems good and well until you realize that kids are human. Leti, for me, served to exemplify that it’s not because she’s stupid. She’s perhaps one of the smartest characters in the book. It’s not because she’s promiscuous. She’s really not having sex that often. It’s because she was just never taught that this is what happens when you have sex. Or this is what could happen, because in her household, her parents are what I would say almost oppressively Catholic… I wanted Leti’s character and her arc to really show that the archetype and the stereotype of the pregnant Latina is usually posited to readers and to media consumers without much context. If you know the history of colonization, if you know the Catholic Church, and if you know young teenagers, teen pregnancies specifically for Latinos makes lots of sense. Because we can preach all we want about not having premarital sex and abstinence being the best way, but kids are kids, right? They need to experiment and do what they’re gonna do. They’re human beings…
And I wanted readers to understand that a pregnancy is not the end of a life. It truly, biologically, is the beginning of another one, but also just a different path for someone to take. And to also address some of the stigmas around premarital sex and teen pregnancy.
AC: What are you hoping readers take away from Shut Up, This Is Serious?
CI: I wrote this book with Latino readers in mind first, and I’m hopeful that everyone else takes something away from it as well. But for the Latino readers: I really want folks to really think deeply and critically about our racial identity, and to not shy away from thinking about race. We talk all the time about how people are discriminatory toward Latinos, which is very true. We talk less about how we are discriminatory toward each other, and then how we are discriminatory toward other racial groups. So I want that to be the first thing that folks walk away from.
I also wrote this book for Latina women. I want them to walk away understanding that they’re seen and they’re valued. I think Belén’s story, despite her being a Latina girl, is pretty ubiquitous in theme of asking for help when you need it and understanding that abandonment is not the end of life. It really truly is just the beginning of a different one. And to think of absence as presence after a lot of grief and healing. That’s really what I wanted folks to walk away from.
Carolina Ixta is a writer from Oakland, California. A daughter of Mexican immigrants, she received her BA in creative writing and Spanish language and literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and obtained her master’s degree in education at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently an elementary school teacher whose pedagogy centers critical race theory at the primary education level. Shut Up, This Is Serious is her debut novel.
Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Aster(ix) Journal, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms Be Like… (part of the Dominican Writers Association’s #DWACuenticos chapbook series), and most recently Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, “El Don,” was a prize finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. She is a proud member of Latinx in Publishing’s Writers Mentorship Class of 2023 and lives in Florida with her family and dog.
