June 2025 Update

+why writing a historical romance set in 1900's L.A. is important at this current moment in history

This will be a short update, mostly because nothing has happened re: querying since my last update and I’ve mostly been focused on editing my current book WIP, applying for and taking exams just to qualify for getting interviews for a new job I desperately need, and trying to not stress out too much about the fact that Latinx people in LA and their families are being threatened by a fascist regime that carried out an illegal invasion on our city this month and wants to wipe us out the same way Nazi Germany wanted to wipe out Jews—regardless of whether we are immigrants or not, legal status or not—and taking time to write updates about nothing going on in my publishing career seems like one of the least important things I can be doing right now (and these usually take an hour or more to write up and edit).

I am also posting less on social media lately for the same reasons, and most of my free time when I’m not working on trying to get a job or trying to finish editing my book is going back to my other hobbies, like playing video games, drawing, and going outside to feel some sense of joy in my life that isn’t tied to work (reading and writing are work for me now). I also haven’t sent new queries for TBOAD since March, since most of them would be requeries anyway, unless I find new agents to query for that book.

So here are the stats:

Queries sent: 89

Rejections/No-response: 84

Full & Partial Requests: 3

Withdrawn query + Agent left industry: 2

Pending queries: 7

Finally got a rejection from an agent I was so sure wasn’t going to say yes over 8 months ago in October lol so it didn’t really bother me and today I got a 3-months later poetry rejection from a magazine I had long given up on getting an acceptance from 👍 Publishing takes forever just to tell you no!

And in case you missed it on social media in the last few weeks, here is a new moodboard and the first page of my current book wip:

Even though this book is primarily focused on a romance and it feels so weird to be trying to write a book about romance at this moment in history, this book is still important to write—because writing about Mexican-American history in LA is so important now more than ever. We have been here since the 1900’s and LONG before that. The white narrative of the world wants to make you forget that. The white narrative wants to make you even forget that Los Angeles and most of our big cities in California are SPANISH names given when this land belonged to New Spain and Mexico long before U.S. takeover. And they really want to make you forget that this land belonged to indigenous brown people before the Spaniards colonized them.

I think I mentioned in a previous substack article that the history of Los Angeles and Mexican history I learned about while writing this book wasn’t taught to me at all in public school from K-12th grade, and there aren’t many fiction books at all that discuss this history, let alone focus on Mexican-American characters. I first set out to write a historical romance book featuring Mexican-American characters because I never see myself in things like Bridgerton, Pride & Prejudice, etc. and I think Mexican-American women should be able to see themselves in a story about romance, the elegance of historical balls and courtship, and the obstacles of societal rules and class differences (+ in this book’s case, the twist of a deadly curse upon the protagonist).

But you can’t write a good historical romance novel without acknowledging the actual history of the time period, and Mexican-American high society culture was complicated in the 1900’s.

🕷💋 WIP is set in a time period where the erasure of Mexican history in LA truly begins, and our main characters have to deal with the ripple effects of their land and generational wealth having been taken away when the U.S. government gained Alta California after the Mexican-American war in 1849. So while our characters are “old money” they have lost much of their status and wealth in an Anglicized Los Angeles 50 years later—but not all the Mexican-American characters in this book lost their land or wealth, so there is still a class and social divide within Mexican-American society, and skin color plays a big part in deciding who belongs and who doesn’t.

I think the differing attitudes within Mexican-American society in this book are relatable in 2025; you have people who really want to hang on to their Mexican and Indigenous roots, and then you have people who want to assimilate to white culture, emphasizing their white European heritage, and who let their internalized racism treat other Mexican-Americans with cruelty and prejudice.

Here is an exclusive 🕷💋 WIP snippet for my substack subscribers, in which this very subject comes up (and while this may be painful to read for some, writing these characters came easy to me because this type of conversation has been normal for me to hear from my own Mexican relatives at weddings and parties):

Francisco nodded and turned to Luis. “Young man, is it possible you are related to a family named [REDACTED] in Santa Barbara?”

Luis’ dark eyes widened, looking genuinely shocked.

“Yes, I remember now—good family—French,” Victoria added, smiling. “Established in Santa Barbara since before the days of Mexico’s independence. True Californios, just like us.”

“Yes, I believe the [REDACTED] couple we were acquainted with moved to France about twenty or thirty years ago…but they had a daughter named Eleanor who stayed in Santa Barbara. I believe she married a mestizo man with no social rank, so any prestige she had died after she married that low.”

“Apa,” Selena quietly scolded.

“Well, young man—are you related to the [REDACTED]’s in Santa Barbara?” Francisco asked Luis.

“Yes. I am Eleanor [REDACTED]’s son,” Luis replied, without managing to put on a polite smile that time.

“Oh, my… So she did have a son! Well, those cruel rumors must be false, then,” Victoria laughed. “You’re not that dark!”

“Yes, well… You are correct. My father was mestizo, and he had darker skin than I do.”

Victoria grinned. “And despite that, look at where you’ve ended up! We’ll just have to hope that if you and Aranea have children, they won’t take after yours or Aranea’s father—rest his soul; he was a kind and generous man, but he looked just as much Indian as his mother.”

Aranea gently squeezed Luis’ hand in hers, hoping she conveyed the comfort in it that she desperately wished to give him for enduring this awful, insulting conversation.

(+ another fun historical fact: some Mexican-Americans with a long family history in California have French ancestry instead of/in addition to Spanish ancestry since settlers from multiple European countries came to California in the 18th and 19th centuries—and my MMC is one of them!)

Even though I feel heartbroken and powerless right now to help people who are getting kidnapped, imprisoned, and torn away from their families—people who are just like my own Mexican parents and grandparents who came to L.A. as immigrants—finishing this book feels like one important thing I can do for my culture and my people because so many people in this world would prefer that no one ever told this story. So many people would prefer to pretend that Mexican people didn’t exist in L.A. in the 1900s, let alone hundreds and thousands of years before that. So many people want to pretend that Los Angeles isn’t where we belong, even though we built this city and even though many, like myself, were born in L.A. and continue to be L.A.’s heart.

🕷💋 WIP is a speculative historical romance book, but it is also a book about the truth of Mexican history in Los Angeles, and if it gets published, so many more people are going to learn about it.

And that’s reason enough to keep writing.