In Rosa by Any Other Name, Hailey Alcaraz’s Romeo and Juliet-inspired sophomore novel, Mexican teen Rosa passes as a white girl in 1955, following the Brown v. Board of Education verdict, and struggles when her identity is threatened to be revealed. Josuee Hernández makes his YA debut this fall with What We Did to Each Other, the tale of biracial 17-year-old Yesenia Rivera, who’ has always struggled to fit in with her Mexican and white peers. Then a move to a new school grants her the opportunity to present herself as white. Hernández and Alcaraz discussed addressing white passing from a Latine perspective, how their own culture shows up in their work, and telling stories for marginalized young readers that aren’t solely focused on tragedy.

Hailey Alcaraz: To kick off, do you want to talk a little bit about your book and the inspiration behind it?

Josuee Hernández: As I was going through graduate school, I’d read a lot of racial passing stories from 20th-century African American literature, and I always thought they were really interesting. But I thought, oh, what if I updated this? What if I thought about it through a Latino perspective? This was something that I hadn’t seen, which is why I was very surprised when I heard about your book as well. I was like, “Oh, another one!” My book is in a more modern setting in the early 2010s, but I think a lot of themes definitely span decades and settings and such.

So tell me about your story.

Alcaraz: Rosa by Any Other Name deals with the topic of passing at school. Very similar to you, I read a lot of civil rights fiction. When I was teaching, I taught To Kill a Mockingbird, and we learned about Emmett Till and delved into the literature of that moment in history after this codified segregation was beginning to unravel, but not in an efficient way. I’ve always been fascinated by that, but I’ve never really learned about it from the Latine lens. Occasionally, when I would teach these units, I would see the Jim Crow-esque signs saying things like “No dogs or Mexicans allowed.” I had a sense that when there’s discrimination like that somewhere for one group, they’re probably doing it to everyone else too, in some way, shape or form, and I found out about Mexican schools in the southwest, about how they would often put kids in different groups. And they would say, “Oh, it’s language deficiency,” but they never really looked at whether these kids spoke English or not.

My protagonist is white passing, much like myself, and she is at the white high school trying to go to college. Her whole arc concerns how she can legally be there as school segregation is not legal anymore, but they’re not integrating as quickly as the law says they should. It’s still a very precarious situation for her to be lying about who she is. Then tragedy unfolds and her identity is exposed, and she’s forced into the spotlight.

Hernández: Yeah, I saw that it was a retelling of Romeo and Juliet.

Alcaraz: I often call it a Romeo and Juliet sequel rather than a retelling, because the events my book focus on are what happens after Romeo and Juliet die and how a community responds to tragedy. But yes, it is centered around the idea of two star-crossed lovers meeting an untimely death, from Rosaline’s perspective. Rosa is my take on Rosaline.

From a former educator to a current educator, what do you think books like this do for kids? What do you hope kids make sense of when they read your book?

Hernández: I want students to be able to connect with stories. I think a lot of texts that are chosen [in classrooms] have very broad, universal themes, but still, when you have particular students, for example Latino students, they might not be able to connect as much [to these texts]. Stories need to be provided for students of different backgrounds. I saw that when your character Rosa is at home, and she is talking to her parents, they’re speaking Spanish. And I was like, “Oh yes, I understand that. I get that. That’s totally relatable.” And so that’s what I’m hoping for my students to get. For every student, there’s the broad universal themes, and then there’s the way it can also exist in a very relatable, one-on-one way to my Latino students.

Alcaraz: It’s kind of like that windows and mirrors thing, right? For mirrors, you hope some students see themselves, but hopefully, there’s also students from different backgrounds who would never consider that perspective learning from your characters as well. I think that’s really powerful for them.

Hernández: Absolutely.

Alcaraz: What elements of your background found a place in the story?

Hernández: A lot of Chicano stories I read while growing up tended to take place in California or Texas. I thought they were interesting and I could relate to them, but there’s just not as many Latinos in the Pacific Northwest. But we’re here and there are stories here that are interesting, and deserve to be told. Think about the Zoot Suit Riots and repatriation that was happening in the southwest— lots of history there. ’I thought it would be interesting to stick to this particular geography when telling this story. ’And what about yourself, regarding your background and your text?

Alcaraz: I have always been fascinated with the white Latina identity. I heard the term for the first time in my 20s, and I was like, oh, that’s what I am. Growing up as a biracial person, I often felt like I was not white enough or not Mexican enough. I thought, well, there’s probably just no one who feels like I do. And then when I went to college in those early years, I was like, Oh, there’s lots of people who feel this way. That’s why I wanted to write books that always center people who feel like they’re at the crux of two different cultures and explore what it means to not fit in either neat little box, in the hopes that when people [like me] are growing up, they also feel seen. I think a lot of books do this for a lot of different cultures and ethnicities, but I hadn’t stumbled across work that was specifically for people who are white and Mexican. Rosa is my second book, but both of my books explore that. I’ve had a lot of readers reach out and say, this is really eye-opening to see where we are now, knowing where we came from. And that is the ultimate goal when you write about these challenging things.

Josuee, you know how long it takes to get a book published. [The things that are happening today] weren’t really happening when I started writing this draft in 2021, and it’s horrifying, but it reminds me of how necessary books that deal with this kind of stuff are for young readers.

Hernández: It’s an important story to tell. I felt a little bit of pressure to not tell “the tragedy story.” I think there’s a lot of nobility in telling stories that aren’t those, but we are also overrepresented in low-income backgrounds and have a history of marginalization. I think we can’t be too paternalistic towards students and readers. I think they can read between the lines. They can read those stories and garner the truth from that. It doesn’t need to be tragic, but they understand what it means and can garner that happiness from seeing these kinds of stories with these kinds of struggles.

Alcaraz: Absolutely. It can be heavy, but also hopeful. And I think that is the sweet spot for issue books like these.

Rosa by Any Other Name by Hailey Alcaraz. Viking, Aug. 5 $20.99; ISBN 978-0-593-52557-9

What We Did to Each Other by Josuee Hernández. Flux, Sept. 30 $21.99 ISBN 978-1-63583-107-8