on writing as homecoming: ella cerón in conversation with jeanna kadlec
& also on magical realism, pride & prejudice, & taco bell
Ella Cerón is a debut author you want to pay attention to.
You may have read her reporting on world-changing issues like abortion, not knowing it was hers, at Bloomberg News, or Teen Vogue, or MTV News. But as of today, Ella is telling the story that she cares about most: about a booksmart teen girl sent to live with her family in Mexico City for the summer, who must reckon with Pride & Prejudice-esque young love, a family curse, and the incumbent challenges of self-discovery.
¡Viva Lola Espinoza! is now available everywhere books are sold.
Ella joined me over Zoom from her home in NYC to talk about everything she poured into this book, but also about religion, about family, about Spanish translation in the very white publishing world, and so much more.
It’s an honor and a privilege to get to share this interview with you on my dear friend’s pub day.
This interview has been edited for length
Jeanna Kadlec: I know and adore you, but for anyone who is not familiar with your work, didn't read Teen Vogue back in the day, is not following you in the wonderful Viva Lola Espinoza journey — if you could introduce yourself to astrology for writers readers?
Ella Cerón: Absolutely. I am a writer, an editor, a journalist. Currently, I am an equality reporter at Bloomberg News. I am also officially now a young adult fiction writer. Viva Lola Espinoza is my first YA novel. My pronouns are she/her.
JK: And for our readers’ sake, what's your sign?
EC: I am a Scorpio Sun, Capricorn Moon, Scorpio rising. I think I have four Scorpio placements and four Capricorn placements. My chart is very you get what you get.
JK: It also explains so much about our Capricorn Moon, very business brained friendship.
EC: Yes!
JK: As the two of us have Capricorn moons. But I also love the Scorpio and all of the ambition and drive therein. I don’t think we’ve ever actually talked a lot about your chart!
EC: I was born three days after Halloween. I mean, you grow up with a Halloween birthday party every single year and that really does inform a lot of who you are. Then you mix that with my heritage, given that I am Mexican American, and Mexicans have a different tradition than Halloween, we have Dia de Muertos, and that is a celebration of our ancestors and the people who are gone.
I always grew up with the best of both worlds, and then given that it was my birthday, it was a triple time of celebration. I loved the Halloween costumes. I loved the Dia de Muertos celebrations. I loved that it was my birthday.
So it makes perfect sense that I am the way I am as a person in that I'm a little goth, I'm a little macabre. I was definitely called Wednesday Addams when I was a kid. I'm still called Wednesday Addams today.
JK: I think, too, of one of the current works in progress that you have going on that also touches on some of those more macabre themes.
EC: Yes. I'm not afraid of death in this big astral way of thinking about death. Obviously, there's a lot of grief and I think we should process all of that.
But I've always grown up knowing that, like, my grandfather is still around. I will go home to go back to Mexico City and visit my grandma, and something weird will happen in her house, and she's like, Oh, that's just your grandfather saying hi. And at first when you're a kid, you're like, he's been dead for 50 years. What are you talking about? But that is how she processes her grief and how she celebrates him.
Everything's haunted. It's just, are you going to poke the hornet's nest or are you going to live in harmony with the bees? If you don't bother the bees, the bees don't bother you. If you don't bother the ghosts, the ghosts are going to let you live. They just want to stick around and say hi.
JK: I love that we started there because that does tie into my opening question, which I think can feel really loaded because the word “spirituality” sometimes feels New Age Instagram witchy, which is not how I intend it. It really is very individual. I think it can mean whatever it means. But what is spirituality — whatever the fuck that means to you — in this moment?
EC: It’s definitely shifted over time. I think in this moment it's really just about relationships and the way you move in the world.
For context, I was raised Catholic in a very Mexican Catholic household. I was baptized when I was six weeks old at the Basilica in Mexico City, which has the shroud of Guadalupe. My parents are very proud that I was baptized in the basilica.
My parents divorced when I was a kid, and my mom would try to take us to church. It never really stuck. I did go to Catholic school, and then I burned my uniform in the barbecue the day I graduated.
JK: What a ritual!
EC: And it was flame retardant! It would not burn! It was PLASTIC! And I was like, this is some dark sided nonsense!
JK: Oh, my God, that's awful.
EC: But I did burn it. I made sure it burned.
[As] I say that I'm laughing, but it really is symbolic of how as a teenager, especially a teenager who went through a lot of trauma, being forced to sit for a religion class every day for a period — my relationship with it has been fraught over the years.
My family also practices a lot of traditional folk rituals. Some people call it curanderismo. My family just calls it “what we do.” They don't really put a name to it. We visit a woman every year and she does the limpia, which I got to explore a little bit in Lola, which was very fun, and I still wanted to be very respectful.
These traditions have survived through literally hundreds of years of colonialism and oppression and [have] survived in many ways by blending with a lot of Catholic iconography. It’s all just a compass pointing north. It’s a lot of the “real” in magical realism.
I think we're often operating under this very puritanical idea of what magic is, and it's very different in different cultures.
I was very excited with Lola to explore the kind of magic that I grew up with that is very normal. That is a limpia with an egg and with chili peppers and saint statues.
JK: It’s very mundane.
EC: Yeah. It also very, very much pulls on what I like to call the aesthetics of Catholicism, which I still personally respond to. I love a candle that smells like a church. I love incense. I love velvet. And obviously that is also rooted in a lot of colonialism and oppression.
It’s fair to be really cognizant about all the ways in which that caused pain for people, but you still put me in a church with all of that reliquary and a rosary and it still feels like — maybe not home, but like a room of home, because that's what I grew up with.
JK: It’s still one root, one line, that is still locked in. Even if we are very far away from that world and that life, it still is a connective tissue that's a part of the whole.
EC: I can still recite the Our Father, I can still recite the Hail Mary. Doing the rosary was part of my life for a while when I was a kid.
But also, specifically being Mexican American and the way in which the Guadalupe has always been really important — I have a Guadalupe necklace. She means different things to different people. Right? You see a flag with the Mexican colors and the Guadalupe in the middle, and that is also a sign of Mexico for me and for a lot of people. And I think that it’s worth holding space for.
JK: This also so much gets to the relationship between spirituality and creativity and spirit. You were talking about the ways that different places are haunted, and your experience having different relationships to different places.
Could you say a little more about magic and family magic, which plays such a big role in Viva Lola Espinoza?
EC: I want to be very clear that Lola, like I said, is far more about the real in magical realism. Magical realism is its own tradition with a lot of luminaries, and obviously it was created by Latinx authors.
And I want to be very careful, because I do think that there can be a trend of people being like, I'm doing magical realism! without honoring the history — sociologically, politically — of that. I'm far more interested in treating this as a real, faith based system that people just live with every single day and less as a fantasy element that I think you see fairly frequently, and with good reason.
Earlier [drafts of] Lola were far more rooted in magical realism really playing with this idea of fantasy and what we know to be reality and bending those times. A lot of magical realism is García Márquez and Allende. Zoraida Córdova wrote The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina, which is a beautiful new book that really kind of pushes the boundaries of magical realism forward. And in a lot of that, they treat things that seem otherworldly as very normal. They don't provide any explanations. It's just what happens. A flower grows out of this woman's neck, and that speaks to something that she's going through.
So in Lola, there is some playing with that. The background is that this family, the Gomez family, believes they have a curse, and people treat that as normal along various degrees of the spectrum. Some people are very fervent about believing it. Some people treat it as like, okay. So my family says this is a curse. It's kind of ridiculous. It's not going to stop me from living my life.
Being able to explore those different relationships with this one central belief system, because my relationship to Catholicism is going to be different from somebody else's relationship to Catholicism. There can be overlaps. You could call them different Catholicisms. You can call them the same Catholicism, because at the end of the day, it's still the Roman Catholic Church in the middle of it. But because it's our personal relationships, that creates the colors and the contours. And so exploring this one family's relationship with a curse, which, by the way, it’s like normal. It's like saying my family has struggles. My family has red hair, my family [has a] curse. Nobody's going to blink an eye if you say that. So I was really excited to explore that.
Over the drafts, of which there were many, the curse became far more muted, and it became far more of the real side of magical realism. It became far more mundane. It became far more everyday. It really did become like, okay, you have freckles.
JK: I love that, and that expansion on its place in magical realism. It makes me think of the description of the book where you're positioning it in relationship to Pride and Prejudice, for example, and that this is like Pride and Prejudice, just that this is the family problem. They don't have an overbearing mother. They just have this curse!
EC: I mean, they got that [the overbearing mother], everyone’s got that.
JK: They have that, also.
EC: Pride and Prejudice is my favorite book of all time. I think it's so funny. I think there's so much in it.
I think it was only on my third read through that I finally picked up on the passages where Austin's like, and Darcy was falling in love with her! I had never picked up on that, even when reading it in high school. It’s got the gigantic, overbearing family. It’s got enemies to lovers, but really, he's loved her all along. It's catnip for me. I watch the movie — the 2005 movie. My apologies to all the BBC diehards.
JK: I love the 2005 movie. It's grown on me over the years. I'm with you on that.
EC: I was talking with somebody about this the other day, and the thing that really sells it for me is that scene when he's proposing to her like a complete jackass. And they’re like this close to angrily making out, and you're like, Oh, of course, people in the 1800s had the exact same kind of emotional arc that we do. They were just in corsets and we’re not.
Being able to really use modern emotions, because we haven't evolved as people that much over the course of 200 years, and being able to see that they break through the repression. I love it so much.
JK: It's so good. And what I think of as the difference between a Regency book versus this really wonderful YA novel that you've written is just, what's the societal constraint on the book? That’s really all it is
EC: Right. Which is why I was so excited with Lola to explore this. Societal constraints are different. For example, Lola's aunts and cousins, are basically pushing her at — if we're going to use the Pride and Prejudice allegory all the way through — the Wickham. Someone called [my] Wickham a “Wickham sun, Bingley Rising,” and I was like, yes, that's perfect.
JK: Oh my god, yes.
EC: Because you do have to sell it. You do have to understand why she wants to go for Wickham.
I'm not spoiling the book in any way, because Pride and Prejudice is 200 years old, and if you don't know who she ends up with, that's not a spoiler at this point.
JK: Also, like saying that it's Pride and Prejudice-esque. It's like, we still have read Bridget Jones. It’s a tale that has a lot of appeal for a lot of reasons.
I do want to ask about the writing process of this book, because you were writing and drafting a fair bit of the book in Mexico City where it takes place — also, to bring in the family component, surrounded by a lot of extended family!
EC: By my gigantic Mexican family!
JK: And obviously, the book is not autobiographical, but in the general thematic sense of writing about family dynamics, you're surrounded by family, and also just the sense of getting to go to places that then you're writing about. How was that experience for you?
EC: It was really formative in a lot of ways. I've been to Mexico City almost every single year of my life. Certainly when I was a child, we would go every summer. So Lola and I kind of had that part in common. Everything else was a sharp left for her. For example, I was never sent to Mexico for the summer because I got a C in Spanish. I was just sent to Mexico for the summer period.
When I was a kid going there, we would do some things. We would go to the pyramids, which is my favorite patch of land on the planet because it is so old and it is so imbued with history. But there were other things like the Chapultepec Castle that I had never seen. I had never seen Frida Kahlo's house until August 2021, when I went while I was writing Lola. Part of that was because I would go and visit family, and my family is so giant that that's the only thing I had time for, and I experienced Mexico as somebody who lives there is experiencing it because my family still had lives and jobs. Just because their kid cousin from the States was around didn't mean [they] changed.
So this was really critical for me to experience a lot of these more touristy things that I was writing about, because the touristy stuff is also what makes Mexico beautiful, but so does the quotidian everyday stuff that I've known literally since birth.
I also wanted to do a service to the reality that Mexico City is changing. There’s a lot of gentrification happening, and really doing my responsibility and my stewardship. How do you present this city that is so fast paced and so changing and so at the cutting edge of so many things in a way that really honors the people who have been there all along?
The Mexico City I know, and I've said this before, and I'll say it till my dying breath, is different from the Mexico City of somebody who lives there all the time, who has lived there their entire life. My Mexico City is also very different from somebody who is a tourist going for a weekend. Mine is probably somewhere in the middle, and Lola's is somewhere in the middle as well. Obviously, all of those different Mexico Cities have to coexist just for the sake of economy and how a city survives and thrives. But just being very responsible with that specific space that you're taking up is important.
JK: I love how you talk about that sense of stewardship. I often hear folks talk about that sense of stewardship of a place that you and your family or ancestors are from. But when there's a more liminal relationship, there can be that knee jerk, oh, I'm a transplant here. So I just kind of have to back off and not have any say in anything. It’s like, no, you can still have that care and stewardship relationship, obviously depending on what the nature of the relationship is. It's good to hear it articulated as well as you did.
EC: Thank you. I also think a lot about how for so many years, there's been so much work by Latinx authors and other authors about the immigration experience. I think that is a really important thing for people to process through. It is also not the only thing, and I might be personally sensitive to this, but sometimes I do worry that Latinx authors get kind of stuck in this box of immigration is the issue.
You see it during debates during presidential election years. They're like, so let's talk about immigration, and the first thing anybody ever says is about Latino Americans. There's more people who immigrate than that. And also, it’s a yes and.
Lola, in a lot of ways, is a homecoming narrative of sorts. It's not fully the opposite of immigration, because Lola is a Mexican American. She is an American citizen. There is a lot of privilege in that still. The book is bookended by her growing up in Oxnard, California, which is a very Mexican part of California. I did that partially so that she doesn't have some sort of broader culture shock when she goes to Mexico, because she's been around Latinos her entire life, and that also does shape how you view the world.
But I do think there is a wave of authors who are exploring what it means to go back to the country where you have your roots and where there is so much lore. If somebody meets me within five minutes, I'm going to say something like, Well, as somebody of Mexican experience. It's so much of who we are. And how do you interact with that?
Being able to go back is also a privilege. There are people in my family who cannot go back because of their documentation status. I don't take the fact that I have a passport lightly. I really do think it's a responsibility of blending both of these to be able to tell like yes and experiences.
JK: I appreciate you expanding on that a lot because as we have discussed over the years, publishing is not known for its nuance. It's not known for honoring the, as you so beautifully put it, yes and stories of folks who are not at the very center of the media etcetera narrative, the Reese’s Book Club demographic, that they’re aiming to hit. So the fact that you fought so hard for this story. It’s been an honor and a privilege to watch. As your friend, it's also been horrifying to watch. Can you expand a bit on how you’ve navigated that, and fought for it?
EC: So, there is a lot of Spanish in Lola because if you go to Mexico City, people are going to speak Spanish. And I made sure that the Spanish is not italicized. Like there's literally two words in [the] Spanish [language] that are italicized. And it's for emphasis and not for the traditional italicization and othering of a language.
[In Lola], there’s no parentheses or asides of, that's what this means. There's no footnotes. It just is what it is. I hope that people who have a small grasp of Spanish pick up things and learn things again and tap back into that. I also hope that people who don't really know Spanish come at it with a sense of, this is immersive. Again, go to Mexico City. People are going to speak Spanish around you. And being able to really hold space for that, you'll be able to understand the rest of the book within context clues. I was very intentional with where I placed the Spanish so that people could still understand it.
I do think that there is this broader push of how we treat Spanish and other languages within the American English language publishing industry not to italicize it. To understand that it's the second most spoken language here in the US.
And even then, I had to study! I got a tutor. I went on Duolingo. The Spanish I knew growing up, I learned from my grandma who has a third grade education. My dad was learning English when I was in kindergarten, and he would speak Spanish to me and I would respond in English, because I was just a snot nosed little kid. I've always been very self conscious about my Spanish, but writing this book really did help me grow in that I did the work and finally studied this language.
At the same time, making space for the fact that there's a very interesting tension in that people will say, or you'll see on TikTok, people will be like, How are you Mexican and you don't speak Spanish? Number one, there's a history of assimilation here in this country. It's why my mom's family doesn't speak Spanish. My mom didn't speak Spanish until she met my dad. And they did that to survive. But at the same time, too, Spanish is also a colonial language. And the indigenous languages like Nahuatl, like Zapotec — they still exist in Mexico! Not everybody in Mexico speaks Spanish! And there's at least one character who's Zapotec in the book, explicitly.
I’m just doing my best to make sure that the story I write exists within [my lane], but also pushes myself further technically and artistically and also just personally.
JK: Absolutely.
I also do want to ask about your writing and about your relationship to writing. How has your writing practice evolved over the course of Lola?
EC: At no point when I was growing up did I think I was going to be a writer. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an actor. I auditioned for Juilliard and I auditioned for Carnegie Mellon. Then I thought, maybe I'll be a teacher. Maybe I'll be a personal trainer. I had no idea what I wanted to do in college. Part of that is because I had to work through college. I had a full time job throughout college to help pay for just living in New York City.
So after I graduated, I became a nanny, and while I was a nanny, I started submitting articles for free. I was not getting paid to [write for] websites. Then one of the websites wanted to hire me. I was like, oh — I can get paid to do this? That's fun! Why not? Let me try.
From there, you know, I've had many different roles. I was a social media editor. I was an actual editor, including at Teen Vogue and MTV News. Now I'm a reporter. I've learned about SEO, I've learned about interviewing, I've learned about profiling.
I have a background in entertainment journalism in particular. I've always said that editing has made me a better writer, and writing has made me a better editor. You draw from everything all the time.
Lola is my first fiction attempt. And even seeing the way that book has evolved and how you learn about pacing and how much dialogue to have on a page and when to foreshadow and when to not.
YA, I think, is also very special. Lola's seventeen-and-a-half, and that's a time in your life where you're realizing that you are your own person. You're also realizing in many ways that your parents are their own people. So even the small things about flipping back and forth between Lola's parents first names and her calling them like Mami and Papi, is really important because it shapes this broader confusion of like, they're my parents, but they're also their own people and that makes them fallible in just very human ways. I wish I’d had more of a roadmap for that when I was a teenager, so being able to kind of do that in Lola was really important.
But at the same time, the technical writing process is still — I turn on a movie I've seen a trillion times just so I have some sort of background noise. I write a scene or a chapter or try to plot something out. It's loose in some ways. It's regimented in other ways.
I have learned, however, not to try to wake up at 5:00 in the morning and write a thousand words. If that system works for people, that's amazing. As somebody who has a full time writing job that is separate from this, it would burn me out so quickly. So I really do have to let things marinate in my head. And then when the scene is ready to come out, I trust that it pours out.
JK: Tell me you have a Capricorn third house without telling me you have a Capricorn third house.
I am so in awe of people who — it can just marinate and then come out fully formed. I don’t know how you do that. I’m so in awe of it.
EC: I think on some level, it's also just like a survival instinct, being able to compartmentalize because you have a day job. Especially when your day job is also words. And my day job is very different from fiction. So then when I get to sit down and be like, I'm going to play with my imaginary friends in my head.
JK: My last question for you is if you've had any particularly magical creative moments this year or any moments of creative inspiration that really felt like you were locked in and in the zone and just like, Oh, this is why I do this.
EC: I do think it's the everyday mundane magic of me doing a workout and being like, Oh, that's where this scene needs to be.
But at the same time, not to betray my hubris too much, but, I know I'm a good editor. I've been able to make a living at writing for as long as I have, which is no small thing. And so there is that level of trust [with] even the messiest first draft of, it's all going to be okay at the end. I also don’t want to go too deep into the schematics for me, you know? I don't want to think too critically about the scaffolding. The scaffolding is important. I always draft out, like, this chapter needs to ultimately get us to like the act two low or whatever. There's just that very basic sense of plotting and pace. But leaving space for the surprise is where the magic happens, because you'll be able to unlock things in your own imagination that you didn't even realize were there.
JK: The surprises are the best part.
EC: That also creates a lot of space for you to, like, make jokes with yourself that you think are funny. Like I fought very, very hard to keep a dialogue between Lola and her brother where they talk about Taco Bell for no other reason than the jokes about Taco Bell by Mexican Americans. Like, it’s not Mexican food. It is its own third thing.
JK: It’s a third space.
EC: Taco Bell is Taco Bell. And I will go on record and say that you put tequila on a Baja Blast, and I am a happy human being. That is a perfect margarita.
JK: At midnight, Taco Bell tastes great.
EC: Taco Bell knows its purpose.
JK: It’s purpose is the fourth meal.
EC: And like, I love Mexican food. I would go to war for the lady in my neighborhood that sells tamales. I have made very good friends with the men at the taqueria around the corner from my apartment. I am very lucky that I live in a very Mexican heavy part of the city. But also, I love Taco Bell.
JK: Also, that’s just a very American thing!
EC: Yes, exactly. And so being able to kind of really hold space for that was really important for me in Lola because I was like, this is hilarious. Like, Taco Bell is its own culture and I need to hold space for that. There's a lot of little things in Lola that make me really laugh. She has two cousins who are twins, and their names are Juana and Gabriela. And for people who don't know, I’ll give you the Cliff Notes that Juan Gabriel is one of the most formative Mexican singers of all time.
And it was funny to me. But it also tells you a lot about who their mother is as a character and who Lola's aunt is as a character, if this is a woman who named her twin daughters after Juan Gabriel.
JK: Yes.
It just speaks, I think, again, to like magic, to the real, to the humor, to the high, to the low. To all to all of it. That you're like, I will fight my publisher to not translate nor italicize the Spanish, and also? I will fight for Taco Bell jokes. *both laughing*
EC: I was just making myself laugh as I went. And then you forget the big picture, that other people think it’s funny, too.
I really did want to just find a balance for YA. Romance is a part of coming of age. Lola is very much a coming of age novel, and romance is a part of that. But it's also a matter of how you define who you are as yourself. How, not to be too corny, but how you fall in love with yourself. What's your romance with yourself like?
Romance is fun. I read romance all the time. But it’s not a book [that’s just funny], or [that’s] just steeped in magical realism, it's also the third thing — the Taco Bell of romance!
You can buy Viva Lola Espinoza wherever you most like to buy your books.