“It was apparent to anyone with eyes that hers was not the life she dreamed of.” So Karla Cornejo Villavicencio describes Fernanda, the grandmother of the titular protagonist in her brilliant novel, Catalina. A woman with unfulfilled aspirations, Fernanda worked and worked and worked and put all of her hope on her granddaughter, Catalina. “I knew in my heart that anything I had done or could do in America,” Catalina admits, “my grandmother would have done more and better if she had only had the opportunity.” In these few words, Cornejo Villavicencio tells us about the grandmother’s legacy and the sacrifices those who came before us—namely, our matriarchs— have often made in the name of our futures. In fact, Catalina admits—in a novel that is, after all, called Catalina—“You’re actually here to see her, not me.”

You, the reader, are actually here to see Fernanda, the grandmother, not Catalina. Because through Catalina’s actions and accomplishments, you can glimpse Fernanda’s lived and imagined lives—her sacrifices as well as her unfulfilled dreams. Is this the abuelita legacy, then? Fragments of their unfulfilled dreams made visible through the lives of their kin? It seems like a lot of pressure, pressure that Catalina invariably feels in Cornejo Villavicencio’s novel; that Luciana invariably feels in Melissa Mogollon’s novel Oye; that the sisters in Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s novel Candelaria invariably feel. That many of us, grandchildren of immigrants, invariably feel, too.

Seeing our grandmothers this way raises the stakes of our own realities. How do we measure if our lives, our accomplishments and our choices, have made their sacrifices worthwhile? And don’t their lives mean anything on their own? Shouldn’t they? These are questions Catalina seems to be asking herself, and that she suggests to the reader.

We—millennial Latines like Cornejo Villavicencio, Mogollon, and Lozada-Oliva in their fiction, and me, here—are finally telling our own stories, and in doing so, building a new abuelita canon, beyond tropes. We’re shedding light on the lives of the women who came before us: writing them into full human existence, beyond caricature. Through intergenerational dialogue and deft, emotive narration, the new abuelita canon gives a sense of interiority and agency to our abuelita’s lives. It suggests the possibility for healing and progress from generation to generation without reducing the abuelita to stereotype.

In pop culture, the abuelita is often an immigrant, though sometimes she remains in her country of origin. She is almost always painted as one-dimensional: as sweet and nurturing, as an excellent cook, and as the grandchild’s primary connection to their culture. And we usually remember our abuelitas for what they represented to us in childhood—namely, they were the purveyors of the kind of food that brought us closer to our cultures. But, for those of us who have known our abuelas into adulthood, we may remember them as more than that. We got to know them as real women—in all their complexity. As these authors demonstrate, abuelas do not fall neatly into these pop culture stereotypes. In writing from lived experience and through an intergenerational lens, these writers are creating complete abuelita characters that actually resemble the abuelas we know.

I’d like to think that this new abuelita narrative also demonstrates a deep love that often lies under criticism: Our grandmothers may not always agree with us, but they may see it as progress that we are able to get pixie cuts, tattoos, and PhDs on obscure subjects unknown to them. If we’re lucky, they hope that we may be able to make our bodies our own. These three contemporary authors teach us that it’s up to each of us, as granddaughters, to revel in our relative freedom and to forge our own paths, even if (especially if), they go against traditional expectations or norms.

Cornejo Villavicencio’s Catalina Iturbide is a restless rebel and reluctant overachiever. As the summer before her senior year at Harvard draws to a close, Catalina is listless—she hasn’t lived anything significant. “Nothing had happened to me,” she says. That’s when her grandmother, Fernanda, steps in, encouraging Catalina to stay out late with her internship crush, a Mexican boy named Camilo. With a 20-dollar bill for cab fare, Fernanda suggests, Catalina can have fun and get home safe, without relying on a man.

Reading this, I’m taken back to my late Colombian abuelita’s kitchen, and a conversation we had there. When I was in my mid-twenties, I would see her, my father’s mother, a few times a year. My work took me to Bogotá, and we would talk in her room over the loud buzz of the always-blaring, terrifying TV news, or in the kitchen, while she insisted on tidying up. “It’s amazing that you’re working and traveling alone. You don’t need a man. Don’t ever depend on a man,” she said, casually, as she swept the kitchen floor.

She was indirectly admitting what I could have imagined: that her life—spent in codependence with my philandering grandfather—was one she wouldn’t have necessarily chosen for herself. But at 16, in late 1940s Colombia, it was her path.

My Colombian abuelita was born in a small town north of Bogotá, high in the mountains. By 30, she had given birth to five rambunctious boys. Growing up, I snuck candy from the hidden closet drawer in her room and played with the poofy dresses and chiffon accessories in her bridal shop. After my family moved to the US, though, I only saw her every few years, when my parents could scrounge up funds for a trip to Bogotá. It wasn’t until I was grown that my abuelita became a real person to me.

It was during these visits in adulthood, through these seemingly banal conversations, that my abuelita revealed herself to me: where she let herself be vulnerable; where she espoused wisdom not for the sake of wisdom, but as a consequence of self-reflection. She was no longer trying to nurture me. Instead, she was in conversation with me as an adult. As an equal.

My abuelita was in awe of the independence that my life seemed to be built around. She wanted me to live as she hadn’t been able to. In Catalina, Fernanda intimates the same for her granddaughter:

“Mira, Catalina,” she said in a low, grave voice. “You are never going to have to ask a man for money. You will never extend your hand and ask a man for a coffee, or a sanitary napkin, or a home. You have to promise me.”

To have fun with the boy, but to never rely on him.

Catalina’s descriptions of her grandmother are sparse, and mainly relational. Maybe it’s this sparsity that makes Fernanda feel so real. A scene of Fernanda instructing Catalina to go down to the bodega to buy her a lottery ticket once per week, for example. A ritual. As instructed by Fernanda, Catalina fills in the ticket with the family’s birthdays. Fernanda trusts and hopes for the best, putting her stock in Catalina: her little miracle.

With one sentence about Fernanda, Cornejo Villavicencio acts as a witness to the reality of so many women of our abuelitas’ generation: “She remained at home restlessly juggling the duties of a housewife with the ghosts of what could have been breathing down her neck, never giving her a moment of peace.” The hyperbole and metaphor of the description seems to make it all the more real. Catalina’s abuelita lives not in the past, but in what could have been, just as mine did. Articulating those emotions, however implicit, is what the new abuelita canon is achieving, giving a sense of interiority to the lived and unlived lives of our abuelas.

In Melissa Mogollon’s Oye, the abuelita character, Abue, is anything but passive. She’s a seriously stubborn matriarch who refuses to evacuate her home, even when Hurricane Irma is headed directly toward her. She’s also an immigrant with a complicated past from her childhood in Colombia, one that the novel’s protagonist, Luciana, finally learns about at her sick bed.

Rather than stick to abuela tropes, Mogollon’s Abue completely defies them. Abue doesn’t hand out wisdom knowingly, nor does she seek to share family history for posterity’s sake. Instead, she holds it all in, both figuratively and literally. (Many allusions are made to her plastic surgery, including tummy tucks that she attempts to keep intact even after invasive stomach surgery.) Rather than articulate advice directly, Abue models the kind of behavior she hopes her granddaughters, Luciana especially, will be able to emulate. She has an undeniable I don’t give a fuck attitude, one that she expresses through her defiant, larger-than-life behavior and her absolute resistance to the natural aging process. As Mogollon told Writing Latinos, the wisdom Abue transmits is loaded with clarity: “How to put yourself first sometimes or speak for yourself or rewrite your own story if you need to.” To rewrite your own story if you need to.

Abue’s backstory is an intergenerational drama filled with deceit, violence, and classism in the high Andes of Colombia. As a storyteller, Mogollon closes the loop, bringing Abue’s childhood trauma into the 21st century with vivid specificity. Mogollon charts how unspoken trauma can have lasting effects, illustrating how Abue’s decades-long silence kept her daughter and granddaughters from fully empathizing with her and from fully claiming their own traumas. But when Abue decides to tell Luciana everything, she leaves her with a piece of her pain, one that, now that it’s been shared, has a better shot of healing. The new abuelita canon is just as much about defying tropes as it is about highlighting the potential for healing and progress that comes with intergenerational dialogue.

Luciana’s biggest conflict throughout the novel is with her mom, and mainly, with her queer sexuality. The fact of it is known, but unspoken: a don’t ask, don’t tell policy but within the family itself. Though she has been honest and tried to come out, Luciana feels like she’s still halfway in the closet, and she’s frustrated by the pressure she feels to hide herself.

“Oye,” as in, “listen up.” Coming from her abuela, “oye” is a term that might be followed by a nagging comment, a fact that Mogollon tugs at playfully through her chapter titles, each one of these imagined comments (i.e.: “Bájame el tono,” “Deja el show”). And though Abue fills Luciana’s ears with plenty of jabs and complaints, she ultimately chooses to fill them with her life story, a trauma she needed to get off her chest. She does it for her own sake and for the sake of healing intergenerational wounds. “Oye,” coming from Abue, is a cry to be heard. Without saying it directly, she tells Luciana something like, Hey, listen to me, because what I have to say will heal us all.

After Abue tells Luciana all the secrets she had been storing away, as she’s preparing to go on a big trip, she tells her: “I know. And it’s okay. I think it’s rather obvious, but I understand why you haven’t said something for so long. I know this world can be unforgiving … Just know that I love you. And I’m proud of everything you are.” By keeping this narrative thread as subtext, Mogollon accomplishes something subtle, both heartwarming and honest. Because for many of us—myself included—there may not be a complete, in-your-face coming out to our abuelas.

Shortly after this declaration of unconditional love, the novel ends. Still, it’s clear that Abue’s vulnerability has opened up a path for Luciana to live her life more openly. Thankfully, the novel does not read as fodder to feed a corporate hunger for diversity á la Julio Torres’s satirical “How I Came Out to My Abuela.” Instead, it meaningfully shows how a grandmother’s processed trauma can impel her granddaughter’s liberation.

We’re shedding light on the lives of the women who came before us: writing them into full human existence, beyond caricature.

Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s electrifying horror romp, Candelaria, takes the abuelita canon to another level with genre-defying storytelling that quickly take its plot into zombie apocalypse territory. Grandmother of three sisters, as well as the family matriarch, Candelaria is complicated. Rather than present Candelaria as the untouchable namesake of her novel, Lozada-Oliva writes a real person into existence, someone who asks her granddaughter to interpret doctor’s visits but also someone who, in her later years, is in love with a man she describes as “a little dumb.” She is self-aware and multidimensional.

In this intergenerational story, Lozada-Oliva characterizes the abuelita independently, as well as through the eyes of each of her granddaughters. They look out for her, even as they are too wrapped up in their own lives to notice the unreality of what her life has become. Lozada-Oliva’s novel delves into violence against women, both on a domestic and societal level: what the grandmother carries from Guatemala to Boston, and what each granddaughter carries through their varying levels of assimilation as young Latine women of the diaspora.

Through fantastically written scenes of apocalyptic gore, Lozada-Oliva’s abuelita tries to protect her own. “This novel is very much about women and the things that they come up against and how … they fight with and for each other,” Lozada-Oliva told Writing Latinos. Yes, it’s a novel about a grandmother at the end of the world, and there’s blood and cannibalism, and absurdity, but at the same time, it’s a novel about how that grandmother’s granddaughters might rebuild when there is nothing left. The eldest is a cultural assimilationist who’s isolated herself from her family and joined a maternity-obsessed cult. The middle sister has turned to academia to try understand where she comes from, and the youngest is the rebel, whose past with drug addiction and whose passion for independent film collide as she tries to fight against what consumes her. Each granddaughter comes from a different micro-generation and has a different relationship with her grandmother, representing the spectrum of our diverse, imperfect experiences with our families.

“The abuelita is an icon, and I think I wanted to complicate that,” Lozada-Oliva told Writing Latinos. “I wanted to show that … someone who’s had a long life has made a lot of mistakes … and that makes them have agency and makes them a three-dimensional person,” she continued.

I’ve been charting the three-dimensionality of my other abuelita, my mother’s mother, for the last few years, most recently, in a piece for the documentary podcast Chesspiece: The Elián González Story. She was born in Cárdenas, Cuba, in the late 1930s. By 23, she would leave her homeland in a rush and live the rest of her life as a Cuban exile in Miami. As the family’s unofficial historian and storyteller, I’ve interviewed her several times, eager to understand how our specific story fits into a larger historical context.

At the end of an hours-long interview—one featuring personal reflections on the life my abuelita did not live—I ask her a series of questions: “What are your hopes for the future of Cuba? What are your hopes for the children of the Cuban diaspora? For me?” She chuckles, exasperated by my eager line of questioning.

“I don’t have hopes for you, I know you’re going to keep doing amazing things.”

“No pressure,” I joke.

My abuelita has never been back to Cuba and has only left the US a few times since 1962, all to go to Colombia. She went three times, first when I was born there, in 1991, then again shortly thereafter, and then a final time for my fifth birthday. This was completely unexpected, she tells me. “Colombia wasn’t even on the map, in my head.” She had just never considered it as a place she would visit.

But, through a series of unlikely events, my Cuban-American mom met my Colombian dad and, eventually, they settled in Chía, a small town just north of the capital. This was the early ’90s—decidedly not a popular time for travel to Colombia. And yet, my abuela enjoyed it. It exposed her to a different-sounding Spanish with clear consonants and a melodic tune, to the beauty of the chilly Andes, and, ultimately, to my other abuelita.

My Cuban abuelita—who is not one for the saccharine—tells me it was special to share granddaughters. I imagine it would be, not just because of a shared love and pride, but because of a shared, embodied legacy. Thanks to my existence, my abuelitas traveled, met, and learned from one another. And, thanks to conversations with both of them through the years, I have a greater understanding of what they lived through, of how we got here and, maybe, of where we can go from here.

Honest intergenerational conversations are what make the writing of this new abuelita canon possible. It’s a dialogue and connection, both in life and in literature, that allows for the writing of a more complete abuelita character: one who has trauma, who has made mistakes, who isn’t perfect, who feels regret and loss, but also, one who has some amount of agency. She believes that your life will be better. That progress has been made.

Ultimately, the millennial Latine authors of Catalina, Oye, and Candelaria—a stunning slate of contemporary novels—portray abuelas as complex immigrant women who exist as individuals. I agree with Lozada-Oliva—the abuelita is an icon—but not for the reasons childhood perceptions or pop culture might suggest. Her life is worth writing about on its own, even if inherently relational. We may adore her but we may also have a complicated relationship with her. She’s a matriarch whose lived and unlived lives inform our own fears, choices, and ambitions. She wants us, her granddaughters, to have more choice, more opportunity, and more independence.

The new abuelita canon shows us that shared vulnerability and intergenerational dialogue can lead to a greater understanding of our abuelitas and of what might motivate them: the belief that their lives—full of sacrifice, trauma, but also, everything else that makes up a full life—will lead to greater agency for the women they leave behind.

The least we can do, for our matriarchs and for ourselves, is write it all down. 

Featured-image photograph courtesy of Tasha Sandoval.