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Cynthia Gómezis the author of Muñeca, out June 2nd from G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Below, she discusses why she chose to write a Latine Gothic novel.
Close your eyes and picture a classic Gothic novel cover. (Or disable “AI results” and search for that phrase in Google Images.) Chances are fairly high that at least one of the pictures in your head and/or on your screen was of a young white woman running from a mansion in a nightgown, an image and phrase so clichéd that it’s spawned multiple blogs and at least one podcast. But you know what those novels very rarely concern themselves with?
Just who was washing all those gowns, anyway? And what might their lives and their interiority—and their political agenda—bring to the Gothic?
That’s one of the questions I wanted to explore in Muñeca. Nati, my protagonist, knows all about [washing nightgowns], but she’s actually there to play a different Gothic role: the domestic employee who occupies a liminal class position. She serves as a caregiver for Violeta, a young heiress who’s completely paralyzed, unable to move or speak.
Nati learns quickly that she’s really been hired to keep Violeta company, by a family that can’t be bothered to do so themselves. (Nati definitely has her own agenda, involving spells and witchcraft that were delightfully fun to write.)
The liminal figure is there in the Gothic to bring in simmering class tension—and Nati’s is a very particular kind. Muñeca is set in 1968, and Nati comes into the wealthy house from her queer found family, with her suitcase of radical books and songs from the civil rights movement and the class-conscious politics she learned from her mother, who once worked as a maid in that very house.
Because I wanted to write a novel about the politics and the worldview of the working class that those women are part of: people who, unlike their wealthy employers, have never earned their existence from colonization or subjugation.
Nati wants nothing more than freedom: for herself, for the woman she comes to love, and for everyone else who’s had freedom denied them. At what price that freedom might come, and who is faced with paying it, I would not dream of spoiling for you.