Yesterday’s item about the feud between over Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez and Linda Nieves-Powell over whether to embrace or reject being pegged as a “Latina writer” prompted an email from Marta Acosta (left), author of the vampire comedies Happy Hour at Casa Dracula and Midnight Brunch. “New York publishing, which is utterly insular and provincial, assumes that all Latinos are alike,” Acosta charges. “While Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are the vast majority of Latinos in the U.S., we are still a small group in New York, and the publishers don’t get that there’s a difference in cultures.”
“They class all of us together,” she adds, “whether the Latino is Isabel Allende (upper class, educated, white, Chilean immigrant) or Nieves-Powell (Puerto-Rican East Coast, and mixed race, I think) or Alisa (half-Cuban, half Irish-American, from the Southwest) or me. Can you imagine them trying to market Cormac McCarthy with Mary Higgins Clark, because they’re both Irish-American? Then reviewers could use the same clichés and food references Latino writers get: ‘A grand tale full of malarkey from someone with the gift of gab! It was a hearty mutton stew of prose, washed down with a refreshing ale of action!'”