The event highlighted the community-building quality of Mojica Rodríguez’s work, especially in its representation of Latina women and their experiences
By JULIE HUANG – arts@theaggie.org
On Wednesday, Nov. 6, The Avid Reader invited Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez to speak in celebration of the release of her second book, “Tías and Primas,” a follow-up to her debut, “For Brown Girls With Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts.”
As in her first release, Mojica Rodríguez continues to represent and uplift the Latinx community in her latest book, examining the pivotal roles that Latina women play in their communities and families, as well as the influence they have on girls in the process of developing their own worldviews.
She was joined by Reyna Grande, an author from Woodland who has written memoirs like “The Distance Between Us” and “A Dream Called Home.” Grande began the conversation by asking about Mojica Rodríguez’s personal writing journey and how it eventually led to the publication of “Tías and Primas.”
“I think mine has been really weird,” Mojica Rodríguez said. “I started out writing Instagram captions. After a few months the Huffington Post reached out, telling me I’m a beautiful writer, and I was like, ‘That’s a lie.’”
Despite her disbelief, Mojica Rodríguez became a contributor for the Huffington Post in 2015. When one of her posts, “Dear Woke Brown Girl,” went viral, it sparked a wave of other publications reaching out, causing Mojica Rodríguez to enter a period of prolific writing.
Traditionally, writers may take months or even years to complete manuscripts to sell to publishers. Mojica Rodríguez followed a more unconventional path to authorhood due to her unusual beginning, unsure for a while that she even wanted the label.
“My writing journey was all a surprise,” Mojica Rodríguez said. “It took me a while to even accept that I was a writer, and now I say I’m an author.”
Before the publication of her first book, Mojica Rodríguez perceived writing as a highly personal and individual activity, using it to make sense of and process her own emotions.
“I never thought people cared about what I wrote,” Mojica Rodríguez said. “I was writing just to piece myself together. I thought, ‘I’m writing, I’m writing, I’m writing for my life.’”
When she started to garner a wider audience, Mojica Rodríguez realized that her writing held power outside of herself. As a Latina woman writing about her personal experiences within white patriarchal structures, Mojica Rodríguez’s writing resonated with other Latina women as well as people of different minority groups.
“Writing can be very solitary, and it can be quite a lonely experience,” Grande said. “One of the beautiful things about it is when you get to interact with other writers and the literary community, and support one another.”
As a fellow Latina author, Grande pointed out how for writers, sharing their writing becomes a way to connect with others and establish communities by finding those who feel recognized and represented by their work.
“We have to read each other, we have so much to learn from one another,” Grande said. “That’s the power of literature: it builds bridges between us.”
In “Tías and Primas,” Mojica Rodríguez sought to break down two-dimensional stereotypes often foisted upon Latina women, instead offering complex portrayals of the women that she has known throughout her life, acknowledging their quirks and flaws without judgment.
Naming her second book “Tías and Primas” was an intentional choice that Mojica Rodríguez made to shine the spotlight on Latina women and their stories, making it clear that she was specifically addressing them as an audience.
“For my first book, they didn’t want the title to be a ‘love letter to Latinas,’ because they didn’t think Latinas would buy the book,” Mojica Rodríguez said. “I had no say in the subtitle back then. It is a love letter to women of color, but I wrote it especially for Latinas.”
When penning “Tías and Primas,” Mojica Rodríguez also wrote with her mother as an audience in her mind, although they are currently estranged in reality and have not spoken in a year.
“My parents don’t read my stuff or acknowledge my career,” Mojica Rodríguez said. “I think they don’t want me to exist the way that I do, and instead be like them.”
Despite her parents’ complete lack of involvement with her writing, Mojica Rodríguez still views it as a way to connect to them emotionally.
“I’ve spent years trying to make sense of our relationship and have found a lot of peace in it all,” Mojica Rodríguez said. “The book is meant to explain things [to my parents], but not to say that they are not accountable. Just because I have critiques doesn’t mean I think you’re a bad person.”
Mojica Rodríguez also hoped to explore how intergenerational trauma manifests within Latinx families and how it affects girls growing up in those families.
“We talk about intergenerational trauma conceptually, but I wanted to give it bones,” Mojica Rodríguez said. “What does it look like, what does it feel like?”
One of the observations that she made were that those existing under white, patriarchal structures can themselves support ideas that uphold those structures.
“We know this about our [Latinx] communities, that colorism is a thing, and the girls seen as ‘pretty’ within our community tend to be whiter and look more European,” Mojica Rodríguez said.
Issues like colorism had an adverse effect on Mojica Rodríguez when she was younger, and she used the process of writing “Tías and Primas” as a means of catharsis.
“I had to feel grief for the little girl in me who never got to feel pretty because no one told her that Indigeneity is beautiful,” Mojica Rodríguez said. “Writing that chapter was hard because I could only get there if I felt all the anger, all the emotion.”
As a Latina author that has now published two books specifically speaking on her experiences, Mojica Rodríguez said she is deeply aware of the impact that her work may have, especially on young Latina girls who may recognize pieces of their own lives in the pages of her books.
“I’m not an author because I want to write books, but because I come from a context where I wished that I had access to the kind of books that I write,” Mojica Rodríguez said. “I donate my books to the local bookstores hoping some Latina will like the cover and pick it up and be radicalized.”
Whether writing for herself or writing for a wider audience, Mojica Rodríguez fundamentally understands her writing as a way to explore and record the expansive range of human emotions.
“We’re human beings and we’re going to feel very deeply about many different things,” Mojica Rodríguez said. “The healing begins when we start to understand why we feel those things.”
Written by: Julie Huang — arts@theaggie.org
