Let me tell you about my family.

If you arrive late to the party, you gotta say hi to everybody.

Always compliment the cooking.

And if my tías asks for a dance, you better say yes.

A family is like its own little world - with its own very particular culture.

But our families are also a place where we absorb ideas and expectations about the world around us.

And in Latin American literature, the family isn't just personal... it's political.

Hi!

I'm Curly Velasquez and this is Crash Course Latin American Literature.

[THEME MUSIC] Don't you just love a romance novel?

Give me all the tropes; I'll eat 'em up like a little chocolate flan.

Enemies to lovers.

Love triangles.

Love quadrangles.

Yes.

More!

Back in the 19th century, romance novels in Latin America weren't just about meet-cutes.

They were about nation-building.

You see, after Latin American countries fought for and won independence from European nations, they had a lot of rebuilding to do.

Political leaders across many countries gained power by uniting different regions, races, and people under one national identity.

And romance novels posed a unique vision for how to get it done: maybe love could conquer all?

Take Brazilian author José de Alencar's 1865 novel "Iracema."

It follows two star-crossed lovers in the early 1600s.

Imagine Romeo and Juliet, but with colonialism, power imbalances, and fewer cute balcony scenes.

Here's the set-up: She's an Indigenous woman named Iracema; he's a Portuguese colonist named Martim.

They're into each other, but of course - the odds are against them.

It's giving "Love Story."

"This love is difficult, but it's real!"

On one hand, this is an Indigenist novel, in that it's concerned with Indigenous people.

But it's also a kind of Brazilian creation myth - a tale of tragic passion that's also, like, super-charged with patriotism?

Clear as mud, right?

We'll unpack it.

For starters, Iracema's name is an anagram for "America."

Which is referencing Latin America, not the United States of.

And remember, Latin America at this time was a fairly new idea, focused on unifying different countries.

Now, Iracema dies after giving birth to a son, Moacir, whose name means "Son of Pain."

Many scholars have argued that Iracema's death symbolizes the idea that Indigenous people's way of life needed to be destroyed in order to create this new, unified nation.

On the other hand, scholar Doris Sommer argues that Iracema's son represents the point "where an unmistakably Brazilian past blends with an unpredictable future."

In other words, rather than being Indigenous or Portuguese, Moacir is something new, a mix that Sommer calls "quintessentially Brazilian."

For this reason, she calls this book - and other romance novels like it - foundational fictions: stories that present romance across social divides as the bedrock for building a country.

She argues that this tale of tragic yearning is really about encouraging readers to "be fruitful and multiply."

'Cause in case you don't already have your tías on your back about when you're gonna have babies, DO IT FOR YOUR COUNTRY.

See what I mean about "the family is political"?

And with all that "have kids to save your country" business in the air, it's no surprise Latin American literature also has explored another type of family bond: parenthood.

Take Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, who's often called "la madre de la patria," or "mother of the homeland."

For real though, her face is on postage stamps and everything.

In 1945, she went down in history as the first Latin American writer ever to win a Nobel Prize in Literature.

And even though Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship tried to claim her as a quaint, traditional poet in the 1970s and '80s, today she's often celebrated as a feminist and an LGBTQ icon.

Mistral became especially well-known for her writing for and about children.

Although she never had kids of her own - which was unusual for most Chilean women at the time - she was a teacher, and she raised her nephew.

So she cared about kids deeply, and often wrote about motherhood.

Like, "Poemas de las Madres," "The Mothers' Poems" is written from the perspective of someone who's pregnant, expressing how her body is being made strange and different - a new pulse echoing her own.

But even though Mistral revered motherhood, she refused to reduce women's lives to that role alone.

When she was just seventeen, she wrote an article defending women's access to education.

And throughout her life, Mistral advocated for the rights of people with less power in her society: women, Indigenous people, and kids.

I think about that when I read her poem, "El niño solo," "The Lonely Child."

In it, the speaker hears a crying baby - not her own - and rushes into the house to comfort him.

Holding the baby, the speaker says, "trembling, a lullaby arose from within me."

And we could read that as someone who longed to be a parent, letting herself experience what that might be like for a moment.

But when I consider how Mistral educated and advocated for kids her whole life?

I think about how having biological kids isn't the only way to have kids in your life or care for them.

Fiercely cool tía or tío?

Inspiring teacher?

Also options!

And that's what I love about books, right?

Our interpretations can reinforce our expectations... or challenge them... or even help us imagine new possibilities for how we might live.

And when it comes to new possibilities, families are often the place where the next generation develops - the young people who have to blaze their own paths, sometimes in contradiction to their parents' expectations.

Let me give you the Curly Notes about a book that tackles these tensions: Erika L. Sánchez's 2017 novel "I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter."

This book follows Julia, a 15-year-old in Chicago and the daughter of Mexican immigrants - much like Sánchez herself.

And like a lot of first-gen kids, Julia feels pressured to make her family proud: "It's not that I'm living life for them, exactly, but I have so many choices they've never had, and I feel like I can do so much with what I've been given.

What a waste their journey would be if I just settled for a dull, mediocre life."

Oof, baby girl, that is so real!

Julia feels indebted to her parents for the life she has - especially her Amá, who cleans houses all day, then comes home and keeps cleaning.

But she also feels trapped by her mom's traditional expectations.

She wants to smooch boys!

Go to the top of the Eiffel Tower!

Become a famous writer!

And so do I!

*gasp* Sorry.

Back to it... On top of it all, Julia feels like she's constantly being compared to her older sister Olga, the actual perfect Mexican daughter, who recently died in a car accident.

As far as Julia can tell, Olga never swore or talked back or did anything more exciting than occasionally watching a rom-com.

But okay, here's the chisme.

Julia's sister and her mom had stuff going on Julia never imagined.

Like: Olga owned lingerie.

So scandalous!

Amá was once a teenager with a rebellious streak.

And they both had secrets, like Olga's private life outside the family and Amá's traumatic border crossing experience - which of course shaped her fears for her own daughters.

These truths shatter Julia's one-dimensional view of the women in her family.

Forget "perfect."

They're just as real and complicated as she is!

Just as full of desires and contradictions under the weight of cultural expectations.

And understanding this actually helps Julia feel closer to her mom and her sister, even after her sister is gone.

We love to see a family grow closer together.

But literature lets us explore all kinds of scenarios.

And in some cases, novels contemplate making a new family outside our family of origin.

We see this theme in Justin Torres's 2011 novel "We the Animals," which follows an unnamed narrator whose father is Puerto Rican and whose mother is white.

At the beginning of the book, he's six years old, roaming wild around his upstate New York hometown with his two older brothers.

The three boys move together like a pack, "a three-torsoed beast."

They're a unit, always calling themselves "we" and "us."

But there's trouble at home.

Their dad, Paps, is a volatile guy - sometimes affectionate, but often abusive.

On the narrator's seventh birthday, Ma implores her son never to grow up: "She whispered it all to me, her need so big, no softness anywhere, only Paps and boys turning into Paps."

You get the sense she's begging her son not to become the kind of man his dad is.

And when the boy replies, "I won't," it's the first time in the book he sets himself apart from his brothers, switching from "we" to "I."

And as he grows up, he realizes he is different from his dad and brothers' tough, aggressive brand of masculinity.

The narrator is sensitive.

He's also attracted to men, but he keeps that a secret.

All the while, he's figuring out what his version of masculinity looks like.

And just by existing, he challenges his family's expectations of what it means to be a man.

The narrator says his brothers "smelled my difference-my sharp, pansy scent" and didn't know what to do with it: "All at once they were disgusted, and jealous, and deeply protective, and deeply proud."

But it all comes to a head one night when Ma snoops in her son's journal, outing him, and the whole family rejects him.

It's a dark ending, but there is a light of hope in the last chapter.

Though the narrator has cut ties with his family, he hints that he's found a new intimacy among people like himself.

We're left with the idea that sometimes becoming who we are means seeking kinship outside of the family we started with.

Family: it's where we first learn how to be people.

It's hugs and hand-me-downs, generational trauma, and unsolicited relationship advice.

It's messy, it's powerful, and in Latin American literature, it's a window into bigger questions: about nationhood, identity, and belonging.

Next time, we're talking about other members of the family: animals.

See you then.