Talking about your book, Chasing the Jaguar, what’s it about?
It’s a young adult novel. I wanted to write a novel that would be kind of like a Nancy Drew series. It’s about a girl who’s a teenage sleuth. Nancy Drew books are so dated, they were even when I was a girl. They came out in the 30s.
They’re like: “There’s a mysterious clock on the wall”. “There’s a mysterious staircase.” And you know, kids nowadays are sophisticated, they’re not going think that’s a mystery. They have the internet, for goodness sakes!
So, I wanted her to be Mexican-American. I wanted her to be a girl who has one foot in North American social culture with her friends and another in Latin culture at home. And I also wanted her to represent the children of immigrants.
If felt this way growing up, so did my brother. If you’re part of an immigrant family, you don’t have a lot of room to screw up. There’s a lot riding on you. You’re going to get an education. You’re going to get a good job, and you have a responsibility, as a member of this family, to move forward.
I think a lot of children of immigrants feel that. You don’t have all this time to say, “I hate my parents” or “I have to repeat the 11th grade”. You can’t do that when your parents are immigrants. Because their attitude is: we came all the way and you’re going to do it!
Why did you pick a youth novel to write?
I think because I really relate to that. It’s a poignant time in all of our lives, and when we think of ourselves in terms of dating and all that, we’re still who we were when we were about 14. I think that’s a time when your life is coming at you so fast and furious and there are so many – you have hormones and you’re just starting to think about the rest of your life, and you’re not a child but you’re not an adult and it’s a really sort of loaded time and I can relate to that. I can still remember that. And it’s something I like writing about.
In your music, you sing and write in both Spanish and English, but mostly in Spanish. Is there a reason for that?
I like writing music in Spanish better. I think its more musical. The language is more poetic. It lends itself to music better than English does. English tends to have a staccato sound, and Spanish is so fluid and so soft when you hear it. Except when you hear Spaniards speak. (imitates the accent)
