The Radical Element by Jessica Spotswood (ed)

Author:Jessica Spotswood (ed) [Spotswood, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780763699307
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2018-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

In the imagination of many Americans, Golden Age Hollywood was a time of elegant gowns, cigar-smoking tuxedoed men, and starlets posing in soft focus. But Hollywood was a place of as much racism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism as the real world in which the studio lots existed.

Though not all Latinas of the silver screen guarded their identities as closely as Graciela, some of the most successful Latina actors of the Golden Age gave themselves stage names rather than using the birth names that signaled their heritage.

When it came to representation of LGBTQ identity, portrayals were overwhelmingly reduced to stereotype and sensationalism, played for laughs or shock value. Like depictions of characters of color, depictions of queer and transgender characters mark some of the most offensive and damaging moments in Hollywood history.

Sawyer could expect his disability to be the subject of jokes that would go unchecked on a Hollywood lot, if he was hired at all. Ableism was no less rampant in the 1920s, even after hundreds of thousands of men had returned from World War I with physical injuries or psychological damage that resulted in long-term disabilities. Veterans like Miguel faced a society that ridiculed them and turned them away from jobs, even as Hollywood profited off portraying their experiences.

This story is my wish to give Graciela, a daughter of Mexican-American farmers, and Sawyer, a transgender boy living with a disability, the space that history would have tried to deny them. And it’s a wish to give them room for their own magic, from the sparkle of a Hollywood set to the glitter inside a cascarón.

Many thank-yous to Kayla Whaley, Tehlor Kay Mejia, Mackenzi Lee, and the transgender boy I’m lucky to call my husband, for their notes that enriched and deepened this story.

I chose to write magical realism not only because it’s where my stories most often live, but because it’s an important part of the history and heritage I come from as a Latina woman. In the midst of oppression, seeing the magical even through the tragic, the unjust, the heartbreaking, is a way of survival, for people, for communities, for cultures. Our spirits depend on not overlooking that which might be dismissed or ignored. I write magical realism not only because I’m a queer Latina woman, but because the world is more brutal than so many are willing to see, and more beautiful than they imagine.

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