ABSTRACT
In her 2019 essay “A Mirror in Hand, but Make It Spanglish,” Isabel Quintero describes one of the first interviews she gave after the publication of her celebrated novel, Gabi, A Girl in Pieces. As Quintero recalls, the interviewer registered shock at her writing success, given that she was, after all, “only” the daughter of Mexican immigrant parents. In exposing this interviewer’s limited understanding of Chicanx communities, Quintero also questions why her community is narrowly understood as incapable of expressing intellect, as if Chicanxs and intellect are incompatible sides of a coin. The writers normalize intellectual curiosity in our communities while also affirming multiple ways of knowing. In her recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, literature scholar Marlene Daut narrates the racist and sexist hostility she experienced in her tenure-track position while she attempted to go up the ranks in academe.
