“Urban Theater in Chicago has given me a contract to write a musical that’s a prequel to my first novel, The Dirty Girls Social Club. In fact, she’s a saxophonist and a composer. Valdes-Rodriguez is currently writing her first stage musical, which makes total sense since her undergrad degree is in music. Never stalling on her growthīeing ever-eager, she throws herself into projects. But suddenly in Boston, I’m a what,” she said. “No one ever asked me ‘what are you?’ in New Mexico. People were asking her “what” she was rather than asking her “who” she was. Yet in Boston, she became a phenomenon but not in a way one might enjoy. People were interested in knowing about her as a person in her hometown. The Latinx population in New Mexico validated her existence. However, once she was accepted to Columbia University, she had to walk on territory unfamiliar to her as she was growing up in New Mexico. He instilled in his daughter the significance of risk-taking and it paid off. He endured what it meant to be uprooted from his homeland, but he made it work - because that was his only option.
Her father, who is an immigrant from Cuba, is an exile. Valdes-Rodriguez said it was crucial for her to have a supportive father. “I was living in New York at the time, so I was planning on going to NYU, but remember my father saying: Why are you going to stop there? You should go to Columbia.” “I didn’t think in a million years I could get into an Ivy League school,” she said. Nevertheless, she defied disheartening statistics and made her way into Columbia University School of Journalism. The acceptance rate for a Hispanic and/or Latinx student into an Ivy League school has been historically low.
In our conversation with the remarkable Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, we discussed her multi-hyphenated career, the challenges she faced after having a celebrated and top-selling book, and the need to advance the Latina voice in the media, among other things. It was no surprise that it became a guide of strength and perseverance - attributes that are often missing from the narrative pertaining to the Latinx community. Though a fiction book, a subculture of readers was born out of it (it’s not just me) and people sewed themselves into the storyline. I’d love to gush on a particular character, but Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez is so effective and knows her women so well, that I found myself identifying with most of the friends in the book. The book does a phenomenal job at punching you in the heart, but amazingly enough, making you laugh even if you had sobbed into your partner’s arms moments before because of the storyline. Unless, you do read naked - no judgment here. It’s almost as if you are reading it naked, if that makes sense. It’s hard not to when there’s a character or characters that will act as your mirror. The sucias, the name of the girls’ friend group in The Dirty Social Girls Club, outgrew its setting and made its way into the reality of our society. And, somehow, it still is ahead of ours, now. Without a doubt, this book, published in 2004, was ahead of its time. “And the majority of them are like:‘Okay, so you all don’t just talk about being Latino?’” “Now, people are starting to notice the importance of these topics,” she told BELatina News recently. Valdes-Rodriguez knew it then and certainly knows it now. She knew this way before pompous scholars decided to act “woke” enough to denounce the perceived uniformity of our community.
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