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_WebResourceTextEncodingName_WebResourceData^WebResourceURL_WebResourceMIMETypeUUTF-8OQChicago Tribune: The Latina Terry McMillan?http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/showcase/chi-0208220026aug22.story
The Latina Terry McMillan?
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez wrote her first novel, 'The Dirty Girls Social Club,'
in six days, and it set off a bidding frenzy as publishers eye the prodigious,
yet neglected, Hispanic market. Her sudden s
By Patrick T.
Reardon
Tribune staff reporter
August 22, 2002
ALBUQUERQUE -- Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez is irritated. "I hate this ghetto,"
she says, her brown eyes sharp and hard.
She's not talking about the
upscale diner where she has just about given up on her half-eaten chicken salad.
And she's not talking about the neighborhood of offices, stores and small
factories around the restaurant. Or about the flat aridness of her hometown of
Albuquerque.
It's her name -- more
specifically, the tendency of many Americans, as she perceives it, to categorize
her on the basis of her Hispanic heritage.
"There's a part of me that
wants to vomit to be called a Latina writer," she says. "Why am I identified as
part of a Latino movement and not by my mother's Irish background?"
The
irony, of course, is that Valdes-Rodriguez is nearly half a million dollars
richer because book publishers believe that Latinos as an ethnic-cultural group
do exist, that they share common experiences and enthusiasms, and that many of
them -- maybe hundreds of thousands of them -- are going to be willing next May
to plunk down $20 or so for a copy of her first novel.
Written by
Valdes-Rodriguez over an intense six-day period in February, "The Dirty Girls
Social Club" is the story of six upwardly mobile Latinas -- of a variety of
ethnicity, language, religion and skin color -- who meet at Boston University
and, after graduation, gather every six months to update each other on the
stories of their lives.
The bidding war in June for the rights to the
novel lasted nearly as long as it took the neophyte author to write
it.
Although she had six years' experience as a journalist,
Valdes-Rodriguez had never published a work of fiction before -- not a novel,
not even a short story. Yet, during a telephone auction that spanned four days,
five publishing houses duked it out, and the winner, promising Valdes-Rodriguez
an advance of $475,000 on royalties, was St. Martin's Press.
While that
was far from a record advance for a first novel -- Yale law professor Stephen
Carter was given $4 million from Knopf last year for his initial two novels --
it was a hefty sum nonetheless, according to Michael Cader who tracks such deals
in his digital newsletter Publishers Lunch. "Clearly, it was a hot read," he
says.
What made it especially hot was the belief among publishers that
Valdes-Rodriguez could be the long-sought "Latina Terry McMillan" -- a writer
whose work would jump-start Hispanic book buying in the U.S. and create a new
profitable publishing niche, the way McMillan's 1992 "Waiting to Exhale" did for
African-Americans, selling more than two million copies.
"We'd love to
have her lead the way," says Elizabeth Beier, Valdes-Rodriguez's editor at St.
Martin's.
Such talk may make the 33-year-old writer uncomfortable, but
the book advance has certainly eased her money worries.
On this
particular Thursday, she's learned that the $145,000 offer she and her husband
Patrick made on a two-bedroom home overlooking an arroyo in Albuquerque's West
Side neighborhood has been accepted. In addition, some of the advance will be
used to pay off student loans and to buy a new car. And much will be socked away
for college for the couple's 16-month-old son, Alexander.
More important,
the sale of "Dirty Girls Social Club" has resurrected a writing career that had
been all but destroyed by an ill-conceived 3,400-word e-mail with which
Valdes-Rodriguez resigned her reporter's job at the Los Angeles Times. In the
missive -- written a year and a half ago when she was in the midst of a
difficult pregnancy, and sent to four editors -- Valdes-Rodriguez accused the
newspaper of genocide, racism and sexism, and also ridiculed four of her
colleagues by name.
Like many things digital, the e-mail found its way
onto the Internet where, described as "marvelously snotty," it became the topic
of fevered gossip and commentary.
It also crippled for more than a year
Valdes-Rodriguez's efforts to find another job in journalism. (It wasn't until
last March that she finally landed a newspaper job in Reno which she resigned a
few weeks later for the post of features editor of the tiny [circulation:
30,000] Albuquerque Tribune. She left that job a month and a half after her book
was sold. "There's so much crazy stuff going on, I couldn't focus," she says. In
addition, the final draft of her nearly 400-page manuscript is due St. Martin's
on Sept. 1.)
Valdes-Rodriguez's finances grew so low during this period
that she was on Medicaid when Alexander was born.
She did public
relations work, for a time, for Hispanic entertainers, while her agent, Leslie
Daniels, was shopping a proposal for a book on Latino divas. That effort came to
nothing, but several of the editors who saw a sample chapter asked Daniels if
Valdes-Rodriguez had a novel in one of her desk drawers.
Daniels didn't
know so, around the first of the year, she asked her client. And
Valdes-Rodriguez said, well, yes, she did; she just needed to polish
it..
In fact, she didn't. But she had made several attempts at novels
since high school, and, using those drafts as raw material, she began working up
a list of characters and an outline.
"After I wrote out the list of
characters, then I went through my life, trying to think like each of them," she
says. "What would Amber do in this situation? Sara? I tried to live the
character before I sat down to write."
Finally, in February, she sat down
to write at a local Starbucks, and, for six days straight, she created the book
on her laptop, writing for as many as 15 hours a day. "It was a process of years
leading up to those days," she says. "A lot of it was sort of cut-and-paste from
the other books I had written."
And, four months later, after some
editing by Daniels, the book was sold.
Many of her former co-workers at
the Times, stung by her e-mail remarks, shake their heads at her reversal of
fortune.
"It was novelistic in itself," says one who asked not to be
identified, "to have her come back that way."
Much of Alisa
Valdes-Rodriguez's life reads like a novel.
Her father, a sociology
professor at the University of New Mexico, is one of those rare Cuban exiles who
admires Fidel Castro. Her mother was "a beautiful 20-year-old hippie" when the
couple married. They divorced when their daughter was 12.
In an article
that ran a few days before Christmas 1998 in the Boston Globe where she was then
a feature writer, Valdes-Rodriguez contrasted the middle-class stolidity of her
father with her mother's relatives -- a side she described as "white
trash."
One cousin on her mother's side was in prison for stealing cars
and checks. Two other cousins were in jail for murder. "My brother and his wife
are crack addicts and high school dropouts. My mother, when money was tight,
worked as a prostitute," she wrote.
Valdes-Rodriguez says she hung out so
much of her family's dirty laundry to make a point: that, contrary to American
cultural expectations, it was the "white" side of her family that had social
problems, not her Latino side.
But, today, as she's driving to her
father's home, she says she's not sure if she still would be quite so baldly
honest in print about her family's troubles, particularly those of her
mother.
"I don't think it's a child's responsibility to protect a parent
who hurts her," she says, steering her '99 Neon through Albuquerque traffic.
"When she was doing that, I was 14. She'd say: `That's all they want anyway.
They might as well pay for it.'"
Still, it was a long time ago, and her
mother now works as a legal secretary and has a master's degree in creative
writing. (Her brother and sister-in-law have also cleaned up themselves, she
says.) "I was young," she says about writing the piece. "I have a little more
respect for my mom's feelings now."
Valdes-Rodriguez spent the first 17
years of her life in Albuquerque. In high school, she raced 12-speed bicycles
and was also elected freshman class president.
"But I got impeached.
Well, actually, they asked me to step down," she says, her dark hair pulled back
in a ponytail and covered by a white baseball cap. "For our prom, I suggested
having an anti-nuclear sit-in at the mall." That, she says, didn't sit well with
her classmates, most of whose parents worked in the military or government
research. "The football team moved my car -- a little Honda Civic -- out to the
middle of the football field," she says.
"They knew I was
trouble."
Valdes-Rodriguez left Albuquerque for Boston where she obtained
a bachelor's degree in saxophone performance from the Berklee College of Music.
Later, in New York, she earned a master's degree in journalism from Columbia
University. In June 1994, she joined the Boston Globe.
"As a writer, she
obviously had a huge talent," says Nick King, a features editor at the time whom
Valdes-Rodriguez describes as her mentor. "Her stuff was infused with energy.
There was a lot of pop to it."
She was still learning the craft of
journalism and needed a strong editor, says King, who now heads the Globe's
Sunday magazine. "Because of her [strong] opinions, you just had to be sure that
she was giving every story a fair shake, that she was objective."
In the
newsroom, King says, Valdes-Rodriguez was a volatile colleague. "She had a lot
of anger and unresolved issues, particularly having to do with race and gender,"
he says. "She would speak out in ways that would make you cringe,"
One of
those moments came in August 1998 amid a controversy over misdeeds by two Globe
columnists, one white, the other black. In a story the Globe ran on the mood of
its newsroom, Valdes-Rodriguez was quoted as saying the white writer had been
retained, unlike the black writer, "because of the color of his skin." She also
said the Globe was "a racist institution" that paid only "lip service to
diversity."
Six months later, she had left the Globe and was working at
the Los Angeles Times, covering Latin pop music. And, there, the story was the
same.
Oscar Garza, editor of the Daily Calendar feature section, says
Valdes-Rodriguez was a strong writer. "Her voice -- it's pointed," he says. "She
has a nice writerly style that she's able to paint pictures with." But editors
also had to make sure that her strong opinions didn't get in the way of her
reporting, he said.
And, as a Latino and a woman, "she always felt she
was being held back," Garza says. "I'm Latino, and I would counsel her about it.
But the whole cycle would start again. She'd get something under her craw, and
there'd be another hullabaloo."
Then came the resignation
letter.
There's already interest in Hollywood in "Dirty Girls Social
Club." Daily Variety reports that Jennifer Lopez is interested in developing the
book into a movie in which she would star.
But, at this particular
moment, Valdes-Rodriguez is annoyed about other speculation -- that among the
actresses whose names have been suggested by moviemakers for the book's six
major characters are the Spanish-born Penelope Cruz and the Mexican-born Salma
Hayek.
"They'd be wrong for the parts," she says. "These women [in her
novel] don't have accents."
Her goal in writing "Dirty Girls,"
Valdes-Rodriguez says, was to shatter what she believes are the stereotypes of
Latinos -- that they're brown-skinned, poorly educated and
Spanish-speaking.
Indeed, Valdes-Rodriguez didn't know how to speak
Spanish until she taught herself in her mid-20s.
"My mission in the
book," she says, "is to prove that the [Latino] category does not exist. Without
being preachy, I want to educate.
"It's the American disease --
stereotyping. I really wanted a chance to change the prevailing notion of what
and who Hispanics are."
A complicated market: untapped,
misread
Marcella Landres went into publishing, vowing to find the Latina
Terry McMillan.
"Prior to Terry McMillan, people in book publishing
didn't think black people read books," says Landres, an editor in the trade
paperback division of Simon & Schuster. But, after McMillan's 1992
mega-seller "Waiting to Exhale," mainstream publishers realized that
African-Americans, particularly those in the middle class, were hungry for a
wide range of fiction and non-fiction about their cultural experience -- from
mysteries to romances, from self-help to chick-lit.
The result: a
proliferation of titles, authors, editors and imprints over the last decade,
geared specifically to serve this black audience.
"Latinos haven't had
our own Terry McMillan who's sold enormous numbers of hardcover books -- someone
who will make the publishing industry stand up and say: Latinos buy books," says
Landres who grew up in New York, the daughter of Ecuadorian
immigrants.
In June, Landres, bidding on behalf of an affiliated imprint,
Scribner, took part in the auction of "Dirty Girls Social Club," Alisa
Valdes-Rodriguez's English-language novel of six Latinas who meet in college and
keep in touch during their young adulthood.
Scribner didn't win the
bidding for the book, which fetched nearly half a million dollars from St.
Martin's. But Landres wishes Valdes-Rodriguez well: "I very much want to see her
succeed because it will make my job easier."
New market
waiting
The American book industry, with total sales flat over the past
several years, has been searching for new markets to nurture and exploit. And
the nation's nearly 39 million Hispanics -- whose buying power this year is more
than half a trillion dollars, according to the Selig Center for Economic Growth
at the University of Georgia -- seem to be a community ready to be
tapped.
But, so far, things haven't clicked -- in English or in
Spanish.
Efforts to reach Latinos date back at least to the mid-1980s
when Bantam brought out a string of mass-market paperbacks of best sellers
translated into Spanish. ("Princess Daisy" by Judith Kranz, for example, became
"Princesa Daisy.") It didn't work. Expectations of profits were too high, and
money to support the titles in terms of advertising and staffing was too
low.
Today, publishers say they recognize the difficulty of reaching a
segment of the population long-ignored and little-understood. "We're looking to
sell tens of thousands [of a particular Spanish-language title], not hundreds of
thousands or even millions," says one high-ranking executive. "We're a little
more earthbound."
While African-Americans form a distinct cultural
community, albeit with a wide range of economic status, Latinos comprise a much
more complex market. There are Hispanics born in the U.S. and those who have
come from more than a dozen countries. There are also Latinos who speak only
Spanish, and others who speak only English.
Lisa Alpert, the publishing
director of Random House Espanol, one of three Spanish-language imprints of the
giant Random House Inc., says a key strategy for reaching the market has been
the hiring of a Spanish-speaking sales staff and publicity
director.
Bookstores, too, have taken on buyers specifically assigned to
books in Spanish, such as Amanda Schilling at Barnes & Noble. By next year,
Schilling says, all of the chain's 600-plus stores will have a substantial
"Libros en Espanol" section with a wide range of titles representing "a little
bit of everything."
Random House Espanol imports translations of Tom
Clancy, Stephen King and other best-selling novelists from its Barcelona-based
corporate cousin Random House Mondadori.
But Alpert's main thrust is the
development of non-fiction books on practical subjects for Latinos, especially
those newly arrived in the U.S. -- with titles such as "Esperando a mi bebe," a
forthcoming pregnancy guide that will also be published in English by
Ballantine, another Random House imprint, as "Waiting for My Baby."
Juana
Ponce de Leon, publisher of Siete Cuentos Editorial, says her Spanish-language
imprint, initially a part of Seven Stories Press, has been breaking
even.
But the publishing house is seeking non-profit status in order to
be in line for foundation grants and to be in a better position to work in
partnership with grass-roots organizations within the Hispanic community to
provide books for specific needs. Already, Siete Cuentos has published books on
such nuts-and-bolts subjects as maneuvering through the labyrinth of special
education ("Educando a mis papas") and coping with AIDS ("Amores locos y los
peligros del contagio").
English-language readers
Yet, attempts to
reach Latinos who prefer to read in English have been much less
focused.
Most publishers include such books in their regular lists as
Knopf is doing this fall with "Caramelo," the first novel from Sandra Cisneros
since her 1982 "The House on Mango Street." A Spanish-language version is also
being released by the imprint. (More than two million copies of "Mango Street"
are in print, making the book a major Latino best seller -- but not the kind
that makes the best-seller lists. For one thing, the book was initially
published as a paperback. And, for another, its sales have taken place over a
two-decade period and have often been in bulk to schools and
libraries.)
On target
Rayo, an arm of HarperCollins, is the only
imprint of a major publisher geared specifically to the English-reading Hispanic
audience. "Latinos who read in English are book-buyers. That's the demographic
we're going after," says Rene Alegria, Rayo's editorial
director.
Sixty-one percent of Hispanic-Americans were born in the U.S.,
according to the Census Bureau. "Even though we speak Spanish at home," Alegria
says, "we still have to function outside the home in English." And then there
are the English-only Latinos who make up about 11 percent of the total Hispanic
population.
Rayo attempts to reach both audiences, publishing its titles
in English and in Spanish. The goal is to release the two versions
simultaneously, but, if the translation is held up, Alegria goes ahead with the
English version alone.
It's the English-language Latino market, he says,
that has the greatest potential.
Landres agrees."If there's going to be a
Latina equivalent of Terry McMillan, she will be writing in English," she
says.
Actually, for Landres, there's no question.
"At some point,
some Latino writer is going to break through," she says. "It's only a matter of
time."
-- Patrick T. Reardon
A growth industry?
Over the
last 12 years, the nation's Hispanic population has grown 74 percent to nearly
39 million, and that group's buying power -- its total income after taxes -- is
$581 billion. Latino buying power is rising at more than double the rate of the
rest of the U.S. population.
YEAR U.S. HISPANIC POPULATION BUYING POWER MARKET SHARE
1990 22.4 million $223 billion 5%
2002 38.9 million $581 billion 8%
2007 50.2 million $926 billion 9%
Source Selig Center for Economic Growth
Copyright © 2002, Chicago
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