Why I Started Writing Jewxicans

They say—whoever “they” are—to write what you know. This poses a challenge in genre fiction, since most of us don’t have personal experience time-traveling, riding dragons, or navigating a romance with a 3,000-year age gap. Still, creators of all stripes incorporate aspects of their lives into their stories.

As a half-Jewish, half-Mexican woman, I encounter the world in a particular way. It’s not always a smooth ride, but my mixed background is instrumental to my cultural awareness, open-mindedness, and sense of humor. During my childhood, though, I was a lot less conscious of my identity, and I tended to default to implicitly WASPish characters in my works of fiction.

When I was 9 or so, I began to write a story, as I had done many times. The intro was painfully generic, along the lines of, “Greta Anderson was an ordinary girl with a boring life until a bunch of magical shit happened.” For some reason, I felt compelled to share it with my mother.

My mom had no comment about the boring life or abrupt magical shit. She wanted to know why I gave the character a white girl name, and not some Hispanic name like Maria Gonzalez. Frustrated, I tossed that story aside, and the world was probably better off for it. Don’t get me wrong—I cranked out some bangers as a kid, but this was not one of them.

For years, I had trouble articulating why this incident bothered me. On the surface, I was simply annoyed at my mom for immediately finding something to criticize instead of being supportive. 

When I was old enough to grasp the concept of internalized racism, I thought back on childhood events like this one and wondered if I was just ashamed of my Mexican heritage. I won’t lie—4th grade Texas History class wasn’t great for my self-esteem. My mom knew this, though, and took care to teach me the real story of the Alamo. No, there had to be some other reason I felt haunted by my crappy literary effort.

Only as a young adult did it hit me: my mom’s feedback reflected her experience, not mine. I didn’t need to write about Maria Gonzalez; I needed to write about Maria Liebowitz!  

It’s weird—I never questioned why Black authors focused on Black characters, or Irish authors focused on Irish characters, and so on, yet I spent an embarrassingly long time failing to utilize my own built-in diversity. In my defense, there weren’t exactly a lot of books, movies, or shows that featured people like me. At best, a given character would be 50% culturally relatable. (Isabella Garcia-Shapiro from Phineas and Ferb was a welcome exception—that show was the sole reason I watched Disney Channel past age 15.)

Once I finally got my shit together, I accepted the mission of creating my own representation. Most of the short stories and drafts of novel chapters I’ve written since my late teens have featured a Jewxican woman or girl as the protagonist. I’ve even gone back to stories that had unidentified or explicitly non-Jewxican characters, and rewritten them as Jewxicans.

The influence of my heritage is hardly limited to one medium. When I started doing stand-up in college, I found the intermingling of my cultural halves to be a treasure trove of material. Here’s a sample, if you dare.

By telling Jewxican stories, I hope to reach not just other Jewxicans, but anybody who’s ever felt stuck between identities or forced into arbitrary social boxes. The pursuit of belonging is a universal struggle, and if my writing can help people find self-acceptance, then fuck what any haters think. I’m a soflamera, and I kvetch—deal with it.