After seeing last Wednesday’s item about the debate over the “Latina writer” tag, Linda Nieves-Powell (left) wants to make sure Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez gets one thing straight: “NO, I WAS NOT TALKING TO YOU!”
Nieves-Powell wrote to GalleyCat over the weekend, emailing a copy of an entry on her MySpace blog that recalls how her attitude was shaped by a 2002 panel discussion at Queens Theater in the Park where she heard another, unnamed playwright reject the Latino label in favor of being regarded as “an American writer.” It was that incident, she told us, she had in mind when she responded to a questionnaire for Meetup.com by declaring, “I don’t understand why a Latina writer…who writes Latina characters would be offended when she is labeled a Latina writer.”
So when Valdes-Rodriguez assumed Nieves-Powell was talking about her, she was mistaken. “She could have easily invited me to a healthy honest debate,” Nieves-Powell says of Valdes-Rodriguez’s online response, but she’s convinced that the flame war that erupted instead was a deliberate provocation intended to create a public litrary feud before the publication of her debut novel, Free Style, next spring. As for the broader issue of whether being marketed as “Latina” enriches or limits an author’s career, “no one, in any of the blogs that I read, has come up with a solution. There are just a lot of angry people bitching about labels,” she says. “What I find funny in all of this is that Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez and I aren’t really saying anything different… I don’t have a problem with some Latina writers who don’t want to accept the label. I really don’t.”