Queer Latinx Author Carolina de Robertis On Writing Her Way Back Home

It’s a sunny day on Zoom, and queer author Carolina de Robertis and I are reminiscing about Uruguay—the small South American country where the author and I both lived (unbeknownst to me, in the very same neighborhood) back in 2013.

De Robertis—who uses both they/them and she/her pronouns—is from Uruguay originally. The country is also the setting for her 2019 novel Cantoras, which centers on the relationships between five queer women in a beachside village during Uruguay’s 1970s dictatorship. These woman find chosen family in a time when “it was incredibly dangerous to be seen as subversive in any way,” according to de Robertis.

Wearing glasses with red frames and a chic spiked do, de Robertis smiles easily and speaks with heart. She has a poetic, passionate, and alive way of delivering her thoughts—whether it’s about the buñuelos that her mother used to make (“spinach and dough, rolled together and fried like a hush puppy from the south”), or the groundbreaking influence that author Jeanette Winterson had on conceptualizations of gender back in the 90s.

The room de Robertis inhabited during our interview personified her vitality. Light streamed in through the curtained windows, illuminating the soft yellow walls behind her. A five-rows-tall bookshelf— long, white, and almost fully stocked—added a tempering and cerebral touch to the spacious surroundings.

In addition to queer family structures, chosen family, and LGBTQ representation in books and movies, in time for Latinx Heritage Month, De Robertis and I discussed the experience of being an immigrant and Latin-America as a vanguard for equality movements (despite the U.S. tendency to project condescending ideas of backwardness and impoverishment onto the continent as a whole).

De Robertis’ musings on balancing separate cultures within one’s psyche particularly resonated with me, as my main job interpreting for Latinx workers ties me to that world. So does the fact that my dad is an immigrant as well, having moved to the U.S. from Cyprus at the age of 16 (De Robertis moved here with her birth family when she was 10).

After relocating from Uruguay to the U.S., the author says that she frequently experienced the feeling of her root culture being far away, invisible, and indiscernible to those around her. Often, she felt like a culture and country existed inside her skin that didn’t exist out. Writing, particularly of Cantoras, helped her to reconcile this.

“It’s like I wrote my way back in; I wrote my way home,” she says of the experience.

Here’s more of our conversation, edited for clarity.

I’d love to know how the idea for Cantoras originated. How does the book explore the theme of queer chosen family?

Cantoras is my fourth novel and it began—in terms of the initial idea, the seed of it—many years before. I went on a trip in my early 20s to Uruguay, desperate for signs of queer life as I was in the process of being cut out of my family of origin (due to homophobia, among other factors).

One of the messages I’d received from my immigrant parents was, “You can’t be both gay and Uruguayan.” And I felt that message in my bones, and really wanted to resist it. So I went to Uruguay sort of looking for lesbians. I really wanted to find a way toward being able to fully exist as all of who I was without having to sacrifice any aspect of my truth or culture.

Once there, I found this woman who is now one of my best friends, and whom I to this day consider chosen family. And she invited me to this little beach on the east side of the country called Cabo Polonio. Basically she said, I have this small hut with some friends, do you want to come? And I went for a few days and started to hear the stories of these women, who were all a generation older than me. As young people in the late 70s and early 80s, they had come out to each other and built a queer community and a beautiful life together, very much under the radar.

This was all during a dictatorship where it was incredibly dangerous to be seen as subversive in any way, including being gay. I was just absolutely blown away by their courage and by the fact the that their culture existed and wasn’t documented anywhere.

That’s incredible. And so the novel is based off them?

It is. I listened deeply to their stories for 15 years—on and off, whenever I could go back to Uruguay. Eventually I sat down and said, I would like to write a novel inspired by these women’s stories.

Finding them was so important to me in shaping my sense of belonging in the world. My greatest hope is that the book can be a catalyst for others on their journey to full belonging in the world as well.

I’d read that you and your family lived in Uruguay back in 2013. From what I remember when living there at the same time, that was a pretty exciting moment for gay rights.

Yes, 2013 was a particularly promising year for queer presence and visibility in Uruguay. There was a lot of intersectional movement work happening between Black, Uruguayan racial justice organizations and LGBTQ+ organizations. And the government has also been quite supportive of gay rights. Over the years, Uruguayan culture has transformed immensely with regard to queer presence, queer visibility, and the possibilities for open queer life.

I think in the U.S. we have such a projection on Latin American countries as being backwards, or in need of educating and enlightenment from the North. There’s this idea of gay rights and feminism needing to be exported to Latin America. It can be a patronizing lens, one that’s not rooted in an actual truth about Latin American countries but more in racist and xenophobic dynamics in the U.S. (which have their own histories).

Because of that, it’s often hard for many to see the ways Latin-American and Latino communities are also on the vanguard of shaping queer culture. Uruguay is one of the most secular countries in South America, and also one of the most cutting edge of queer rights. I think there’s still a fair amount of interpersonal homophobia, as there is in many places. But not necessarily more than other parts of Latin-America or even in the U.S.

Photo credit: Lori Eanes

As a queer family, what was the experience like for you, your partner, and your children when living there?

Familial homophobia existed in my own family of origin. My kids are also biracial and Black, and my wife is Black. For these reasons, I was protective of them on multiple levels—racially and in terms of queer identity. So my wife and I really sought out a preschool that would be extremely supportive. We were absolutely the only gay couple among the parents.

But at our preschool, it was so moving how the teachers really tried. They had this unit on La Familia, where they showed all these different pictures of families. The teachers found this old, 17th century painting of two women with babies, and they put it in there and said, “This is a family too!” I thought it was just so tender and lovely.

We came out to so many cab drivers. Almost every day, we were the first open lesbians that somebody had met. Because we had the privilege of coming from the U.S., I felt like I could do that and still feel safe and solid about my life. So I said to myself, I’m going to do that with any and every cab can driver who wants to talk about it—in the hopes that it opens something for other people for whom coming out is still a bigger risk.

You mentioned chosen family earlier. In the absence of supportive birth family, many LGBTQ individuals turn to literature and movies to gain a sense of chosen queer family. What were your experiences with queer representation in literature, movies, and other mediums growing up?

As a kid, I absolutely did not have access to queer literature; it just didn’t exist around me. When I went to high school in the ‘90s, we had to dig for it and interpret into the materials we were reading—which means when I did finally encounter openly queer literature, it was like a beautiful explosion in my mind.

I would say one of the first of these encounters took place in college. I’ll always be grateful to professor Arthur Little at UCLA for assigning all of these amazing queer writers of color, including Cherie Moraga. Reading Audre Lorde also just really blew things open for me. And Loving in the Warriors, the first queer, Latinx book I ever read, absolutely blew my mind. The author is Chicana and queer. Within that book, I found a mirror that allowed me to feel like I could exist.

The novel Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson was another memorable one. It was such a bold experiment in gender at the time. It’s told from the point of view of a narrator who’s passionately in love with a married woman, and it is quite erotic. The narrator’s gender is not disclosed throughout the entire book. So it really pushed upon our assumptions of gender in a way that’s maybe much more recognizable to us now. But back in the 90s, it was truly groundbreaking in ways that were so important to me at the time.

How has your experience with LGBTQ books and movies changed since then? What have you noticed about depictions of queer families?

The Dragon Prince was a movie I saw recently that really broke ground. It’s about a princess who has two moms. They are both queens, an interracial couple. When I saw it—and I wasn’t expecting this, as I hadn’t read up on the movie or anything— I was like, is this what it feels like to feel seen? Is this what straight, white couples feel like when they watch television? You just feel like you’re actually here.

Additionally, Sort Of on HBO Max is an absolutely delightful, beautifully wrought queer show with a nonbinary protagonist from a Pakistani, immigrant family in Canada. It feels very ‘by us, for us.’ I use the term “us” in a very expansive way here. I’m not Pakistani, but I am gender-queer, and I found so much of myself in this show.

Speaking of ‘by us, for us’—When you wrote Cantoras, were you writing with queer readers in mind?

Toni Morrison has spoken a great deal about unapologetically writing for and about Black people. Everybody can read Morrison. I as a non-Black person am absolutely free to open her books. Her writing for Black people in no way shuts out readers. But her refusal to write for the white gaze gives us such an incredible gift—one of truth and honesty and power.

So when I set out to write Cantoras, I said to myself, I’m not going to explain anything; I’m going to write this as a love letter to queer people, to lesbians, to all of the above LGBTQ+. It was really freeing.

Loosely related here, but when I think of family—and human bonding in general— food comes up for me. I think cuisine can be such an amazing way to connect individuals through a shared sensory experience. What’s an amazing Uruguayan dish everyone should know about? Or your personal favorite?

One that I’d like to uplift is buñuelos, which is a comfort food that I inserted into Cantoras (the characters are on the beach, and they eat seaweed buñuelos for the first time). This was a food that in my immigrant household; my mother used to make and recreate as a way of reconnecting to the homeland. They’re basically vegetable balls or patties with spinach and dough, rolled together and fried. It’s a little like a hush puppy from the south. They’re a very comforting food.

Pasqualina is also very unique; it’s a spinach pie that has hard-boiled egg in it as well. It’s such a great meal.


What do you hope for the future of characters in LGBTQ books?

I think we still have a long way to go for queer voices to be fully integrated. We’re still on that road of creating a full presence of queer narratives worthy of everything our communities are. We’ve had so much narrative scarcity for generations, and what we need is to transform that narrative scarcity into narrative abundance—the same abundance that dominant communities have always enjoyed.

When thinking about queer culture, narrative, and where we are headed, I want to recognize that we are in a time of great danger and devastation. Many people are, rightfully, quite worried about the future. And yet I also want to acknowledge that there are also so many beautiful seeds right now in our culture, for a brighter future that is also possible.

I think many of us are wishing and hoping for this, one conversation and courageous loving act at a time. I believe there are millions of us who want a world where every person can truly be safe and free. And I feel that it’s worthwhile to keep working for it. Little by little. Queer people have always done that, and it’s brought us quite far. It’s brought us to incredible places.

What’s on the horizon for you in terms of your future work? I heard you describe in an interview that your next book would be “queer AF,” which I love. Tell me more. 

For my next book, I’m thinking a lot about queering the root stories of our cultures. So I’m taking a very ancient story and looking at it from the prism of queerness. To bravely resist the forces that would wish us to be diminished—That’s a real part of living as a queer person in a heteronormative and trans phobic society. But another reality about queer existence is that it’s so beautiful, and so joyful.

It’s such an incredible experience to find within yourself a unique truth and then affirm it, and shape a life around it—in a manner that’s guided by love, as well as creativity and innovation. I think we queers have also innovated so much culture through our existence. We’ve talked about chosen family today, and I think that’s one key example of one of queer culture’s great innovations. We’ve really pushed the envelope when it comes thinking about what it means to shape family connections through the heart, and through what we choose to forge.

I love being queer. I feel so grateful and happy and delighted to be the way I am. To be queer af. And so my hope for this book is to really infuse it with this sense of queer joy and queer delight, along with queer resistance and questing.

*Visit https://www.carolinaderobertis.com for more on the author, or follow her on IG @carolina_derobertis.