In my debut MG book, UNDERCOVER LATINA, my villains come in three sizes: S-M-L. First of all, there’s a big villain, the white nationalist terrorist who is threatening an attack, somewhere in the Southwestern US. The Factory, an international espionage organization that works to protect people of color, calls the book’s protagonist, 14-year-old Andréa, to her first solo mission. She is called to straighten her hair and pass for white in an attempt to fight against this threat, because the FBI isn’t taking it seriously enough. She must travel to Arizona and infiltrate a high school, hoping to befriend the terrorist’s estranged son.
The terrorist, John Summer, is a worthy villain, whose threat maintains its lethality throughout the book. However, in the process of attending high school, Andréa encounters another villain: the high school mean girls.
Mandy is the queen bee of a group of thin, white, and commercially attractive girls who call themselves “First Class” at the high school. And while their threat is not nearly as lethal, it’s much closer and part of what makes them dangerous is that they want to recruit Andréa. They swoop her up and usher her to sit with them, giving her tips on dating and dieting. And make racist comments that she has to ignore, for fear of blowing her cover.
This is an opportunity to explore the intersection of racism and sexism. How young women are judged and appraised based on how they look. How beauty standards favor whiteness, and Andréa, who had always been proudly Latina, has to understand her own proximity to whiteness in ways she never had to see before.
And there are other problems. Once the First Class girls pull her into their orbit, Andréa needs to figure out how to distance herself from these girls in order to stand a chance of befriending the geeky white boy to whom The Factory has assigned her.
And then there’s the question of the son himself. His father left when he was still practically a toddler. If he seems nice, how do we understand his proximity to such racist violence?
In writing about racism for teens and tweens, I wanted to have villains of different sizes. The terrorist (L or possibly XL), the First Class girls (S), and later in the book, we have a medium sized threat, some drunken white guys.
Andréa can easily confront the First Class girls. Confronting the medium threat of the drunken white guys is a bit more challenging. And the terrorist threat requires a whole team of spies and the length of the novel to confront. But I wanted to explore various types of racism in the book, and show my characters fighting back at every level.
The reality of white nationalism is scary—for both adults and young people. I often see racism handled in YA and MG books as interpersonal conflicts, sometimes by adults with power. In depictions of institutional racism, I’ve read several books that show mistreatment of people of color by the police or the criminal legal system. When it comes to looking at white terrorist violence, I recall historical books like ROLL OF THUNDER, HEAR MY CRY, where the Ku Klux Kland and lynching is part of the story, although the violence is muted and while the spectre of lynching exists in the book, all the characters manage to stay safe. ROLL OF THUNDER… came out in 1977. I hadn’t seen anyone take on white nationalist terrorism in MG books that are contemporary and realistic. Rita Williams Garcia refers to it in passing in her trilogy that begins with ONE CRAZY SUMMER, but again, that’s a historical series (2009-2015) set in the Black Power era of the late 1960s and early 70s.
But I wanted to tackle contemporary white nationalism head-on for a younger crowd. We begin with the premise that the US government has historically underreacted to this threat, so the protagonist and her organization are poised to step in and pick up the slack.
Overall, the novel is fun and action-packed, with a bit of romance, as well. I want readers to enjoy the story and root for Andréa and her team, and to get an opportunity to think about racism along the way.
It’s a chance for young people to contemplate the threat of nationalism, while getting to see a group of young people working together—with adult support—to make things right. And above all, that’s what I want young people to get from the book—the understanding that we can defeat racism if we work together.
Aya de León is the Afro-Latina author of several suspense novels for adults, as well as The Mystery Woman in Room Three, an open-source online novel about two undocumented Dominican teens who uncover a kidnapping plot to stop the Green New Deal. She teaches creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley, and is active in movements for racial, gender, and climate justice. She lives in Northern California.