For her newest YA book, Solis, Paola teamed up with co-author Abby Sher to tell the story of a near-future America where undocumented people are forced into labor camps in service of an autocratic regime, and the four courageous rebels who decide to start a revolution. Paola shares the process of co-creating, what she had to say "no" to in order to say "yes" to YA fiction, and reflections on her own quest for freedom.
Follow Paola on Instagram @paolamendoza . Find her new book Solis, here and her book tour dates here. If you enjoyed this episode, listen to her first episode on Latina to Latina, Paola Mendoza Teaches Us That Joy Is an Act of Resistance.
Alicia Menendez : Paola Mendoza was one of our earliest Latina to Latina guests. And that conversation about her work as an artist and an organizer became a listener favorite. Paola's latest expression of her creativity and advocacy is her work as a young adult author. First with her book Sanctuary and now with her newest book Solis in which she and her co-author, Abby Sher, envision an America less than a decade from now where undocumented people are forced into labor camps in service of an autocratic regime. The story is told by four narrators turned revolutionaries who must fight for their freedom. Paola and I talk about the process of partnering with a co-author. I found that really interesting. How her relationship with her own mother is reflected in her characters and the freedom that she has fought for in her own life.
Friend, welcome back.
Paola Mendoza : So happy to be here. It's been a long time. The world is very different.
Menendez: Paola, we know you as an artist and as an activist. Why the expansion to YA?
Mendoza: I wrote my first book Sanctuary in 2018 with my co-writer, Abby Sher, and it came to me during a very dark time in our history and that was right after family separation. And I was very involved in family separation, fighting back against it. I was helping a handful of families be reunited with their children. And in that darkness I imagined what would happen if we weren't able to stop family separation. Where would this country go? What would we then be capable of doing in our lifetimes if we allowed family separation to continue as it was continuing? And I started to imagine the world of Sanctuary. And Sanctuary is the first book, and it is a world in which is a near future of the United States with an undocumented 16-year-old girl at the center and a government that is unnamed, but one can imagine is an extension of the Donald Trump regime at the time.
And what would the world be like in 2032 if Donald Trump would've won 2020, would've stayed another term and ushered in a new authoritarian after him. And that was the basis of Sanctuary and Sanctuary is a story of a 16-year-old girl running away from a government that is hunting her. And it was a release. It was a way in which for me as an artist to say and show the inhumanity of the times that we were living in, it was a way for me to take that pain and anger and sadness and frustration both from 2016, but even more so from family separation and put it into something that was a clarion call, that was a call to action to readers to say, we have to stop this.
And so Solis is a companion tale to Sanctuary, a sequel, but also you don't have to have read Sanctuary in order to fully understand Solis. And what I say is that Sanctuary was a story about running away and Solis is a story about fighting back. And I think the questions in Solis that I raise, that we raise is how do we fight back and what are we fighting back to create? Early voting's already started, the election is a few weeks away and soon we will know where this country is headed. And again, I think what do we build? What do we continue to build in this pathway forward? What do we rebuild in that moment?
Menendez: Why do you think you keep coming back to mothers and daughters, both books, future mothers and daughters?
Mendoza: Yeah, I mean all my work is mothers and daughters, I am an immigrant. I came to this country when I was three with my mother who struggled with my brother and I. We were both very young and my father abandoned us when we first arrived in this country. And so my whole childhood was seeing my mother accomplish the impossible every single day.
We were homeless at times, lived in government housing for a long time. My mom's first job was Jack in the Box. And so I have seen my mom my entire life do extraordinary, amazing, incredible things. I feel deep obligation to my mother and my mother's sacrifice for what she sacrificed in order to come here to, not give back to her, but for myself to say that that sacrifice was so worth it and what I can create as an artist, what I can gift back to my mom is a reflection of love stories between mothers and daughters. And as a mother of a son, I now think of it in a slightly different way as well, as like it's a reflection of mothers and children and there's just so much to [inaudible 00:05:24] in there.
Menendez: Trying to get into the mind of teenage characters. Were there any memories of your own that were unearthed or ways that you revisited memories from your own teen years in the process of drawing out all of these strong female protagonists?
Mendoza: My teenage years, I think probably as many people, are so foundational to who I became at the age of 14. My mom sent me back to Columbia, and going back to Columbia to be with my family, I lived there for two and a half years. At 14, it changed my world completely. It literally was a 360 in so many ways, emotionally, financially, culturally. I came from the United States in a town, in a city where I was thought of as disposable and the worst and I was put in what they called self-contained classroom, which was literally a school-to-prison pipeline. And then I went to Columbia and was put into a school where they expected me to be nothing short of excellent. And it was such mind-fuck to have your world just turned around. Literally. My mom told me I was leaving on a Friday and I left on a Monday in a world where there was no internet, there was no phone calls.
I talked to my mom once every two months because it was too expensive and too hard to call. So I say all that to say is that I'm very connected to my teenage life and I have wonderful and terrible memories. And so the characters in the book, Rania is one of my favorite characters and she has this really beautiful love story. I didn't have a great teenage love, but the clarity with which she loves is very much the clarity and how I felt in certain scenarios in my teenage years.
And also the fear, being a teenager, being a girl, a woman, a young woman. There was a lot of fear. Those are for certain, Rania tapping into those emotions as a teenager, and though my son, he's 11 years old, I think there's a lot to be able to understand from him in the fear of the climate crisis that we're living in. We talk about it a lot and the book Solis deals with a lot of climate stuff as well. And so really tapping into those fears of what it means to grow up like that. I think we're now adults that are afraid of the world, but to only know that world I think does something to your psyche deeply. And Mateo has been a reflection of that for sure.
Menendez: I want to ask you a process question because while I've interviewed a lot of authors, I've interviewed fewer authors who have a co-author, even fewer whose co-author is cited on the front page of the book. As you know, a lot of big names will actually have someone else who does a lot of the writing of their book. So I'm curious how you found each other, if you could pull back the curtain and give us a sense of how you do the push and pull of writing narratively, getting stuff on the page. Because I think for people who are doing a lot of projects, it is a much more imaginable path forward to getting a project done.
Mendoza: Yeah. And that's really where it came down to. So in 2018, I was approached to write a book. Nonfiction, political thought process book of where we were in the moment. I kind of went down that path and I wrote the first essay and then I was like, "This is not me." It just wasn't authentic. And so I wrote my agent and I was like, "No, I'm a writer. I can write fiction, but I'm not going to do this." And she was like, "Okay." So it was actually her idea. She's like, "Why don't you think of a YA book that deals with Dreamers?" And I was like, "I never really read YA." So I read a couple of YA books and I was like, "Oh, I like this." There was an interest for me there. I got the idea of this dystopian, futuristic, crazy sanctuary world and I pitched it to my agent and she was like, "Oh, well I wasn't expecting that."
"Okay, let's find you a co-writer." I was like, because I also was super clear, it was 2018, I was like, "I can't disappear to go write a book for two years. This world in this moment requires me to be present." So I interviewed a bunch of different writers and I was super clear that I also didn't want a ghostwriter that felt like not authentic and lying to me. I wanted to find someone that I could collaborate with and I understood it was a very different weird process for writing a book and collaboration. I am an artist and I collaborate in all different kinds of ways. I'm not a traditional artist in any kind of way either. I've co-directed, I've co-written, I've directed on my own. I learned how to make movies on my own. I never went to film school. I went to theater school. My trajectory is very non-traditional, so I'm not scared to do non-traditional things.
Abby and I had a meeting and it went really well and it was more of an energy thing. I thought that we would be able to figure out the process together. I needed someone that was just as willing to be uncomfortable in the uncertainty of how we were working it out together. And she was great.
Sanctuary was one of the best collaborations that I've had. And so Sanctuary was very much Google Docs, pre-pandemic, so we did see each other in person. We plotted out the entire story together, outlined, knew everything that was happening in each chapter, backstory, and then it was like, "Okay, you'll write chapter one, I'll write chapter two." And then we would write, we would share, we would edit, and that's how we built Sanctuary. So by the end, it's very unclear who wrote what and whose idea is what. It's definitely a collaboration. With Solis, it was slightly easier in that there's four characters of Solis and so this was post-pandemic, and so we divided the characters and I wrote two characters and she wrote two characters and then we shared, we edited, we rewrote certain sections. It was a much easier process to understand and that has been really joyful.
Menendez: One of your four narrators is sort of formerly of the outside, which seemed like a really critical choice to me to have someone who has been part of the problem is now choosing to be part of the solution because if we're honest in a post first Trump administration, we've seen a lot of that, right? You see a lot of people who saw the light, you can say maybe too late, but I think that is one of the most interesting perspectives that exists in Solis, and I wonder how you were able to give that character grace while also holding space for the fact that there's a natural discomfort there.
Mendoza: Yeah. It was a very challenging character to write. And so the character is Jess and she's a former DF officer, which is the Deportation Force officer, and she was one of the foot soldiers and rounding up undocumented immigrants in this story and putting them in labor camps. This is all happens very early on in the book. She herself finds herself in a labor camp for X amount of reasons. So the question for us was how do we deal with truth and reconciliation in our fictionalized world and also a reflection in the real world? What do we do with people who have realized that they were wrong? They went astray, they hurt people. In the case of this book murdered people. How do we hold them? In the process of writing Solis, I read and listened to, I think it was six different books on genocides back to back.
I thought what I was listening for and I'm trying to research was to try and understand the depravity and the evilness of what human beings can do to one another. What I realized is actually what I learned the most was how life continues in these unbearable circumstances and the things that human beings hold onto when death is all around them, and also what do we do with the people that cause that harm? How do we reconcile? And so Jess is a question of that, and we tried really hard to make sure that she was always held accountable, that she wasn't a hero, a white savior, that she wasn't just accepted and we want to show a way forward.
I think the job of an artist, my job as an artist is to light a path. From my brain, what I imagine, I want people to see a pathway forward in real life and to me that's what Jess is. It's what do we do with our family members who supported, loved, voted for Trump, believed in Trump. What do we do with the border patrol officers that separated children in 2018 and still live in their own communities that are predominantly Latinos? What do we do with them? How do we reconcile? The first step is accountability, and that's something really important for Jess's character is the accountability and the process of her understanding. At first, it's selfish and I hope that it gets to something beyond just like her own personal needs and desires.
Menendez: I was re-listening to, you're on my first recorded conversation episode of Latina to Latina, and one of the things that struck me in terms of the passage of time is that you and I spoke about your partnership with your then long-term romantic partner. You guys have since split, and I wonder if this period of time has taught you anything about conscious uncoupling. I don't know if you like that term or you don't. It's the one that I hear thrown around the most often, but how as you co-parent and stay in someone's life, you do that with some mindfulness for what has been and what you want to be.
Mendoza: Yeah. When Michael and I, that's my ex, when Michael and I started the conversations around separating, I said to him that I wanted to do it differently than what we had seen out there. What I had experienced as a child through separation and divorce, that I wanted us not to end our relationship, but I wanted our relationship to evolve and that we got to choose what it evolved into. We say we're still one family. We are family. He is my family. And that doesn't mean, as we all know, family can be really beautiful and it can also be really challenging, but we are always and forever connected through our son and through the love that we have with one another. We were together for 17 years. We grew up together. We started dating when we were 21 years old and then dated into our [inaudible 00:16:43] together into our forties.
Our evolution into our new family dynamic has been so beautiful. He lives two blocks from me. We still do holidays together. We go on family vacations together because he is a great, great person, a wonderful person, someone that I love deeply and still a priority in my life, and yet very clearly not a romantic partner. And the reason that we were able to get to that place is because we both had Mateo front and center in making sure that it was what was easiest for him. It was a very, very hard process for Mateo. And so because it was so hard for him, we were able to put our own history of relationships aside and say he is the most important thing. I say that our separation was beautiful, but in reality it was almost beautiful because it hurt Mateo and so it's not allowed to be fully beautiful because of the pain we caused our son.
Menendez: I think though that's why people stay and then allow their kids to witness an unhappy partnership that goes, I mean, right. That's the tension and that's the trade off.
Mendoza: Yeah. And what we've shown Mateo is both Michael and I are so much happier. We're not living in the same house. We're much better parents, we're much better friends to one another, and we've shown Mateo that you don't have to sacrifice yourself and your happiness for your kid. And I had a friend, a mutual friend come up to me and she was like, "I've been in spaces, different spaces with both of you and you both publicly talk about one another with so much kind and care and love, and it's just really inspiring. I just wanted you to know that he does this as well.", and it was so sweet. I had no idea, and it was just the things that we were both doing individually.
Menendez: I give you so much credit and I thank you for indulging me in that question because it does seem to me to fit with your entire ethos, which is showing glimmers of hope and a path forward, not just in your art, but in the way you choose to live your life with such authenticity and such integrity.
Mendoza: Thank you.
Menendez: Paola. What did I miss about the book?
Mendoza: Oh, I'm going on book tour. I'm going to swing states with high Latino populations to talk about Solis in places that normally most likely don't get a lot of book tours. So I'm going to Miami, Orlando, Tucson, Phoenix, Las Cruces, El Paso, New York, Philly, LA. So come check it out.
Menendez: I will drop the link to the book tour along with a link to the book in the notes for this episode so you can find them there. My friend, thank you so much for doing this.
Mendoza: Thank you so much for support and for your incredible questions and for all that you are doing to make sure that the truth is out there for those that want and need to hear it.
Menendez: Thanks for listening. Latina to Latina is executive produced and owned by Juleyka Lantigua and me, Alicia Menendez. Virginia Lora is our producer. Kojin Tashiro is our lead producer. Tren Lightburn mixed this episode. We love hearing from you, email us at hola@latinatolatina.com. Slide into our DMs on Instagram or on Threads and TikTok @latinatolatina. Check out our merchandise at latinatolatina.com/shop. And remember to subscribe or follow us on RadioPublic, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Goodpods, wherever you're listening right now. Every time you share this podcast, every time you leave a review, you help us to grow as a community.
CITATION:
Menendez, Alicia, host. “How Paola Mendoza is Lighting a Path Forward” Latina to Latina, LWC Studios, October 7, 2024. LatinaToLatina.com.