The first Luisa may have passed away, but that won’t stop her from giving her granddaughter unsolicited advice from beyond the grave.

GRINGAS
by Manola Gonzalez Rosillo
Bloomsbury, Winter 2028
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

In 1950s Mexico, Luisa is a sheltered young woman who jumps at the chance to escape her hometown of Obregón for a bustling Mexico City. There, she meets and falls in love with Victor, a handsome lawyer with grand political ambitions for improving the future of their country. But as Luisa ascends the social ladder into the opulent, treacherous center of Mexico City’s elite, Victor’s behavior becomes increasingly suspicious, just as Luisa’s roles as wife and mother grow ever more claustrophobic. As her marriage fractures, Luisa must decide how to wield her power within a patriarchal society—and makes a risky choice to go behind her husband’s back.

Decades later, a tragic incident endangers Luisa’s family, forcing them to flee to Tijuana and try to obtain American visas. During this upheaval, the third and final Luisa is born, the last in a line of proud Mexican matriarchs. Over the next decade, the first Luisa, now Abuela, discovers what the price of crossing the border will mean for her family as they move between Mexico and America, navigating the opaque immigration process while raising the third Luisa as an Americanized border child and, much to Abuela’s mortification, slowly losing the privilege and identity to which they’d become accustomed. But only Abuela knows that she’s the one who caused the family’s downfall, and must confess her secrets before it’s too late.

Moving between the past and the present, GRINGAS explores the sacred bond between grandmother and granddaughter while navigating questions of class privilege, family loyalty, and assimilation. It has the intergenerational, wisecracking family dynamics of Elizabeth Acevedo’s Family Lore and the playful perspectives of Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s Calendaria—with a dash of the pithy humor of a Mexican Gilmore Girls, if Emily Gilmore had grabbed the reins of the story.

Manola Gonzalez Rosillo is a Mexican-Spanish-American writer originally from San Diego, California. She is a Reese’s Book Club LitUp Fellowship Finalist and Columbia M.F.A grad, where she received the Fondation Femme Debut scholarship and the Writing Program scholarship. She has been published by The Bare Life Review, Columbia Magazine, Philadelphia Magazine and Longreads.