Los Angeles Times

Column: Diaspora Baby: What makes U.S. Latinos so hard to define?

In the spring of 2021, I was riding the high of my first big break. I had just settled into a tiny bungalow in East Hollywood — my first L.A. apartment — when I began fielding calls from a slew of agents, managers and producers about optioning my life story for a script.

At the time, I felt like a hot commodity. The year before, I had become the first Latina to write a Rolling Stone cover story — a pandemic-era profile of Bad Bunny. By January 2021, I published a personal essay in Vogue about growing up tropigoth in 2000s Florida.

As I wrote in a previous edition of the Latinx Files, the seemingly discordant state of being a gloom-and-doom Latina was hardly that complicated to me. As the eldest daughter of Latino parents, I led a double life of sorts: I worked through high school to help out my family, yet still indulged in mischief at the mall, played in bands and experimented with witchcraft

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