The Essential Xochitl Gonzalez Reading Guide
Xochitl Gonzalez, a staff writer for The Atlantic, has been named a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary for her essays on how inequality shapes identity, and how gentrification warps the physical and emotional terrains of our lives.
Gonzalez, the author of the best-selling and the forthcoming , has a novelist’s eye. She gives life to socioeconomic issues, and is brilliant at describing what gentrification like. It’s not just about rent and real estate; it’s more personal and visceral than that. In “Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?” she portrays gentrification as a sonic phenomenon: Silence is something expected from and imposed upon working-class communities by whiter and wealthier newcomers. She is especially attuned to the peculiar dislocation of gentrification, which makes people outsiders in their own homes.
