Coming to Cultura

Latinx writer Stephanie Jimenez has gifted us with her debut new adult novel, They Could Have Named Her Anything, a narrative that interrogates Latina girlhood in a way many have shied away from. The book centers around high school student Maria Rosario, her financially distressed father, Miguel, her rich, white friend, Rocky, and Rocky’s power-hungry father, Charlie. Maria is a Puerto Rican-Ecuadorian girl from Queens, but attends an Upper East Side private school on full scholarship, making her one of the few Latinas at her school.

Feeling like an outsider in school while being critical of her family at home, Maria is desperate to be truly seen. She is a girl with big dreams, one of them being to be the first of her family to go to college. However, the gender- and class-based walls begin closing in on her, and similar to how her mother “showed Maria how to bury [her used pad] at the bottom of the trash can, Maria understood then that it was the men in the family from whom she was supposed to be hiding … And it wasn’t just her body — she soon learned that everything about her was wrong — her questions, her values, her dreams.” Miguel recently lost his job, and despite filling out countless applications for a new one, was having no luck. Maria knew her family was opposed to her dreams, and she also knew that it wasn’t entirely their choice to oppose — they needed her to work. “What a struggle it would be to be who she was when it came at the risk of someone else’s disappointment.”

Jimenez has crafted a story that intricately engages with the way our goals and desires are often entangled with our insecurities, touching on issues of language, faith, consent, assimilation, mental health, shame, and money. Most importantly, Jimenez articulates the racialized nature of these issues, and how people of color are often preyed upon due to personal insecurities of the privileged. Unlike many novels that focus on the lives of teenagers, this book doesn’t avoid issues that are mythically “inappropriate” for the age of its audience.

Maria befriends Rocky, a rich white girl that also attends her private school. While visiting Rocky’s place after school one day, Maria meets Charlie, a “charming” businessman and, when convenient, Rocky’s father. Charlie is nothing like Maria’s Latino boyfriend, Andres, who pressures her into having sex and disrespects the vulnerability involved with it. Maria sees that Charlie holds a level of privilege she could only dream of obtaining, and if she could just get him to “see” her, she must be worthy of opportunity. However, the point of view shifts many times throughout the novel, and when Charlie is the narrator, readers understand that what he “sees” and admires in Maria is what he represents to her: She “made him feel powerful, capable.” In his transactional nature, Charlie takes advantage of Maria while promising to pay for her college tuition and anything else that she might dream.

In this brilliant novel, Jimenez takes Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of mestiza consciousness to a tangible level, where young, aspiring-scholar Maria moves from memorizing Emerson to prove her intelligence to a privileged white man to reading poems from Latina anthologies to herself. Ultimately, Jimenez has expanded Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s poem “Hombres necios que acusaís” (1689) into a story about a young Latina, even including the quote: “Who was more to blame, even if both were in the wrong, / la que peca por la paga / o el que paga por pecar?” Maria’s borderlands are ones of not being a child but not quite an adult; of “entiendo pero no hablo” ; of wishing to be desired but wanting to consent; of being the kind of girl men fuck and the kind of girl men marry; of wanting to go to college but having familial responsibilities...