The 'First' Girlfriend

HAPPY HISPANIC HERITAGE MONTH: Why I changed Melody's Ethnicity.

09/30/2021

Happy Hispanic Heritage month! 

A few months ago I decided to share a sneak peek of the rewrite for The First Bodyguard, casually dropping that Melody is no longer British American and her name isn't Melody anymore. 

After much thought I realized that maybe I needed to explain why that was. 

For those who have been here from the start, you know I am not white. I am Dominican American. 

I started writing very young. When I started school in kindergarten, I didn't speak English. Spanish was my first language because that was the language my parents spoke to me in. Once I started going to school, like many bilingual children, I started only speaking English (while understanding Spanish but speaking it limitedly). 

And growing up, after struggling with reading in English so much, I developed a love for reading and read constantly. Soon that love for reading turned to a love for writing. 

When I first started writing in 6th grade, I wrote fanfiction, and it was High School Musical fanfiction. And the only reason I am admitting this embarrassing fact is because it plays a part in the creation of October - my first character and for a long time, my only latinx character. And she was only Latina because, in my young head, she was Gabriella Montez (a character in High School Musical for those who don't know). The only reason she wasn't white was because of this, no other reason.

When I decided to post on Wattpad, I did not start with October's story. I had her in my head for three years at that point, it should've be the natural course to start with a character I had spent a lot of time thinking and telling my friends about. 

But I did not. 

When I decided to post a story that was no longer "my eyes only" I went with my zombie story, You Can't Cuddle With A Zombie, which I had come up with about a week or two before actually posting. And You Can't Cuddle had a completely white main cast. 

So where am I going with this?

Subconsciously, when I decided to take writing "seriously" (using that word loosely), I thought that my characters all had to be white main characters. Why? Because that was what I was reading growing up. 

I didn't read spy stories with a Hispanic character fighting bad guys. I didn't read a Hispanic character with magic powers saving the world. I didn't read about Hispanic characters fighting zombies, robots, monsters or vampires. Those did not exist. 

If I wanted to write a book, a "real book" the characters had to be white. It was just what I thought was the "norm." 

I never saw someone like me as a main character so I did not create them. 

Flash forward to the past few years. I've learned a lot from the book community and the author community on social media and started questioning a lot of what was taught to me to be the "norm" and how that shouldn't be norm at all. I didn't even really realize much of it until my last year of college when I was asked to compose a list of zombie books I wanted to read as "research" for my senior project. 

And it was frustrating trying to find fantasy/sci fi/spy/assassin books that weren't written by white authors. Because, in retrospect, there weren't any. 

And that made me think about my own characters. Why were they all white? Because that was all I knew in the published book world. That was the default. And that was not okay.  

So as part of my writing journey I decided when rewriting everything, both The First Bodyguard and You Can't Cuddle, that I would have characters of color as my main characters. So Melody is now Paloma because I never saw a Latinx main in a spy novel. And my zombie characters are Latinx because I never saw a Latinx main in a zombie novel. And maybe a Latinx reader on here (and maybe one day in a bookstore) will see themselves fighting bad guys and saving the world.