Soy Brown y Nerdy: The ChicaNerd in Chicana Young Adult (YA) Literature

In their 2016 music video for the song, "Soy Yo," the Colombian duo, Bomba Estéreo, features an unknown but instantly lovable young Latina girl as the protagonist.¹ In her long braids, overalls, thick-rimmed glasses, and Crocs shoes, one thing is for certain: this young Latina is unabashedly a nerd. With the self-assured strut of a young girl comfortable in her own skin, she takes on New York City streets, snickers from "cooler" White girls, and confused glances from teenaged Black and Latino boys, who are left speechless by her dance moves and her refusal to be mocked or rendered invisible. The protagonist combines confidence, swagger, and self-love while navigating potentially unsafe and unfriendly urban spaces. Within a few days of the video's debut, a number of online articles were published in homage to this young Latina named Sarai González, who had struck a chord in Latina nerds everywhere.² At the video's conclusion, the girl playfully yet confidently declares, "Soy yo" ("I'm me"), her own brown girl Declaration of Independence if you will, or a powerful acceptance to be who she is, haters be damned. To put it plainly, this is one tough chiquita who relishes in her nerdiness.

Borrowing Bomba Estéreo's mantra of "soy yo," I examine this reclamation and powerful acceptance of one's nerdy Chicana self in two young adult (YA) texts by Chicana writers, Ashley Hope Pérez's What Can(t) Wait (2011) and Isabel Quintero's Gabi, A Girl in Pieces (2014).³ Whereas popular culture and mainstream media have shaped the well-known figure of the nerd as synonymous with White maleness, Chicana YA literature subverts the nerd stereotype through its negation of this identity as always White and male. These ChicaNerds, as we might call them, unite their burgeoning sociopolitical consciousness as young nonwhite girls with their "nerdy" traits of bookishness, math intelligence, poetic talents, and love of learning. Combining the sociopolitical consciousness of Chicanisma with one aligned to the well-known image of the "nerd," ChicaNerds learn to navigate the many complicated layers of coming to an empowered declaration of "soy yo." Classifying the two characters as nerds is not to suggest there is something unique or unusual about Chicanas who enjoy reading, writing poetry, or math. This logic narrowly frames ChicaNerds as outliers, as young girls who are not "supposed" to have these types of interests. Instead, we can find ways in which this nerd identity offers teenaged Chicanas an empowered subjectivity in stark contrast to the all-too familiar stereotypes of the fumbling, rejected (White male) nerd in popular culture. While these characters do not necessarily refer to themselves as nerds, they do, in fact, claim their right to intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm for "nerdy" school subjects, qualities we can read as nerdiness.⁴

The ChicaNerds in both YA texts struggle with warring expectations of "appropriate" teenage girlhood in their working-class Chicanx families amid their own desires to excel in their studies and go on to college. By successfully battling the gender, racial, and class dynamics of their families and their communities, these protagonists learn, like Bomba Estéreo's young Latina, to accept and proudly claim their Chicana nerdiness. Although a number of studies have examined the nerd as a symbol of White, socially awkward, tech-savvy maleness, here we will broaden existing scholarship to focus on a group that has been overlooked by scholars as well as media outlets: young Chicana girls who enjoy calculus and poetry. The ChicaNerds featured in both novels are also vastly different—Pérez's Marisa Moreno excels in calculus and Quintera's Gabi is an impassioned poet—and these varying intellectual interests give a seldom-seen diversity and complexity to young nerds of color. And although Gabi does not engage in "traditional" nerd interests like science and math, her character expands the typical alignment of nerds to include artistic subjects like creative writing.

Including these complex ChicaNerd characters in books intended for younger audiences is significant, given that Chicana YA writers...