Six questions to Melissa Rivero, author of Flores and Miss Paula
By Natalia Chamorro
It was in the Lower East Side where I met my Peruvian best friend in a bar before going to the book launch of Flores and Miss Paula by Peruvian-American writer Melissa Rivero. The novel is now a finalist for the Gotham Book Prize. Rivero is also the author of The Affairs of the Falcóns, which won the 2019 New American Voices Award and a 2020 International Latino Book Award.
As a poet and writer, I was intrigued by the blend of Peruvian heritage, literature, and New York that the winter night offered. It was a lovely book launch in P&T Knitwear Bookstore, which included delicious alfajores brought by the author. What a treat!
In Flores and Miss Paula (Harper Collins, 2023), Melissa Rivero has written a novel in which many daughters and Peruvian-Americans can identify through its depiction of life in New York, immigrant family challenges, and the journey of finding one’s path while continuing to live and grow after the loss of a loved one.
I left the Lower East Side and headed back to Queens with my copy of Flores and Miss Paula. After reading it, I had questions for the author about the characters, their mother-daughter relationship, the use of code-switching in the narrative, and the role of memory in the characters' construction.
What follows are six questions for Melissa Rivero about Flores and Miss Paula, Latinx literature, and being a writer.
NATALIA CHAMORRO: Flores and Miss Paula is a novel that parallels the perspectives, memories, and thoughts of mother and daughter and how they deal with the loss of Martin, Paula’s husband, and Flores’ beloved father. As we delve into the minds of these women, we zoom in and out of their memories, gradually learning a little more of them each time. Why did you decide to intertwine your character’s present-time movements with their memories?
MELISSA RIVERO: Much of what we do now, in the present, is influenced by our past. With these two characters, I wanted to understand why they behaved the way they did. I knew that Martin’s absence loomed large, but I wasn’t exactly sure just how it impacted Flores or Paula until I began to mine their past. With Paula, in particular, I needed to delve deep. For many reasons, sometimes things are simply too difficult to relay when they are actually happening or not communicated at all because we think the silence is what’s best for everyone. Here, I wanted to give each woman a chance to be as open as she felt comfortable being—both with herself and, in Paula’s case, with her daughter.
CHAMORRO: In the novel, we see mother and daughter going through parallel struggles, yet they don’t quite connect emotionally. What made you explore the complexities of mother-daughter relationships in your novel, especially in the context of immigration?
RIVERO: Initially, I thought this book would be solely about Flores. The more I wrote, however, the stronger Paula’s voice became. I knew I had to devote more space to her on the page. I don’t set out to write a novel with a theme in mind. I listen for a character to come to me and I follow them. The characters and their story reveal themselves to me organically in that sense, and the theme emerges from there. I do write characters that I would know in real life, if that makes sense. Meaning, I know mothers and daughters who are immigrants or first generation, and so as the story came to me, I took into account the complexity that immigration adds to that relationship. I’m also an immigrant from Peru, and frankly, I can’t—nor do I want—to ever exclude those parts of my own identity from my work (fiction or otherwise).
CHAMORRO: Spanish comes up in the narration, both as a topic and in the characters’ voices. What guided you in deciding when to use code-switching and when not?
RIVERO: The shift between English and Spanish was based on what felt right in the moment. Meaning, if I hear Spanish in my head as I’m writing, particularly in Flores’s chapters, it usually went in. I almost never take it out or change it if it’s something that feels fluid. That being said, I do think of Paula as speaking to her daughter in Spanish, even though I wrote her chapters in English.
CHAMORRO: In a scene, Flores articulates the experience of feeling signaled for not being “Peruana, Peruana” because she thinks her Spanish is not excellent. She is soon to clarify that she was born in Brooklyn and that her parents are the ones from Perú. Flores’ feelings highlight a reaction against the expected performance of children of Spanish-speaking immigrants. Interestingly, the expectation to speak fluent Spanish comes from first-generation Latin American immigrants, who seem to think of themselves as judges of Latinidad. Can you elaborate on why this was an important topic to include in the novel?
RIVERO: I think that, for many immigrants, language plays a huge role in how we maintain our connection to the homeland, which is understandable. We always spoke Spanish at home, and I remember my parents telling me how embarrassed they’d be if we went back to Peru to visit family and couldn’t speak Spanish! The pressure! Certainly, language is one way to keep that connection, but it isn’t the only way. There is of course a major benefit to knowing it — the more languages one knows, the more the world of literature, music, travel, etc opens up to you. Still, I struggle sometimes with the question of, “Am I Peruvian?” because what does that even mean? Who defines it? Does knowing Spanish make me less Peruvian than my cousin who has a richer vocabulary, but more Peruvian than my kids who understand it, but don’t always speak it? I think we put too much weight on it, to be honest. And to quote Flores, Spanish is “just another colonizer language” anyway!
As a poet and writer, I was intrigued by the blend of Peruvian heritage, literature, and New York that the winter night offered. It was a lovely book launch in P&T Knitwear Bookstore, which included delicious alfajores brought by the author. What a treat!
In Flores and Miss Paula (Harper Collins, 2023), Melissa Rivero has written a novel in which many daughters and Peruvian-Americans can identify through its depiction of life in New York, immigrant family challenges, and the journey of finding one’s path while continuing to live and grow after the loss of a loved one.
I left the Lower East Side and headed back to Queens with my copy of Flores and Miss Paula. After reading it, I had questions for the author about the characters, their mother-daughter relationship, the use of code-switching in the narrative, and the role of memory in the characters' construction.
What follows are six questions for Melissa Rivero about Flores and Miss Paula, Latinx literature, and being a writer.
NATALIA CHAMORRO: Flores and Miss Paula is a novel that parallels the perspectives, memories, and thoughts of mother and daughter and how they deal with the loss of Martin, Paula’s husband, and Flores’ beloved father. As we delve into the minds of these women, we zoom in and out of their memories, gradually learning a little more of them each time. Why did you decide to intertwine your character’s present-time movements with their memories?
MELISSA RIVERO: Much of what we do now, in the present, is influenced by our past. With these two characters, I wanted to understand why they behaved the way they did. I knew that Martin’s absence loomed large, but I wasn’t exactly sure just how it impacted Flores or Paula until I began to mine their past. With Paula, in particular, I needed to delve deep. For many reasons, sometimes things are simply too difficult to relay when they are actually happening or not communicated at all because we think the silence is what’s best for everyone. Here, I wanted to give each woman a chance to be as open as she felt comfortable being—both with herself and, in Paula’s case, with her daughter.
CHAMORRO: In the novel, we see mother and daughter going through parallel struggles, yet they don’t quite connect emotionally. What made you explore the complexities of mother-daughter relationships in your novel, especially in the context of immigration?
RIVERO: Initially, I thought this book would be solely about Flores. The more I wrote, however, the stronger Paula’s voice became. I knew I had to devote more space to her on the page. I don’t set out to write a novel with a theme in mind. I listen for a character to come to me and I follow them. The characters and their story reveal themselves to me organically in that sense, and the theme emerges from there. I do write characters that I would know in real life, if that makes sense. Meaning, I know mothers and daughters who are immigrants or first generation, and so as the story came to me, I took into account the complexity that immigration adds to that relationship. I’m also an immigrant from Peru, and frankly, I can’t—nor do I want—to ever exclude those parts of my own identity from my work (fiction or otherwise).
CHAMORRO: Spanish comes up in the narration, both as a topic and in the characters’ voices. What guided you in deciding when to use code-switching and when not?
RIVERO: The shift between English and Spanish was based on what felt right in the moment. Meaning, if I hear Spanish in my head as I’m writing, particularly in Flores’s chapters, it usually went in. I almost never take it out or change it if it’s something that feels fluid. That being said, I do think of Paula as speaking to her daughter in Spanish, even though I wrote her chapters in English.
CHAMORRO: In a scene, Flores articulates the experience of feeling signaled for not being “Peruana, Peruana” because she thinks her Spanish is not excellent. She is soon to clarify that she was born in Brooklyn and that her parents are the ones from Perú. Flores’ feelings highlight a reaction against the expected performance of children of Spanish-speaking immigrants. Interestingly, the expectation to speak fluent Spanish comes from first-generation Latin American immigrants, who seem to think of themselves as judges of Latinidad. Can you elaborate on why this was an important topic to include in the novel?
RIVERO: I think that, for many immigrants, language plays a huge role in how we maintain our connection to the homeland, which is understandable. We always spoke Spanish at home, and I remember my parents telling me how embarrassed they’d be if we went back to Peru to visit family and couldn’t speak Spanish! The pressure! Certainly, language is one way to keep that connection, but it isn’t the only way. There is of course a major benefit to knowing it — the more languages one knows, the more the world of literature, music, travel, etc opens up to you. Still, I struggle sometimes with the question of, “Am I Peruvian?” because what does that even mean? Who defines it? Does knowing Spanish make me less Peruvian than my cousin who has a richer vocabulary, but more Peruvian than my kids who understand it, but don’t always speak it? I think we put too much weight on it, to be honest. And to quote Flores, Spanish is “just another colonizer language” anyway!
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CHAMORRO: What are your thoughts on contemporary Latinx/e literature in English and Spanish in the United States? Who are you reading? Who is on your radar? Are there any specific authors or books that have influenced your writing style?
RIVERO: I hope we see more work about, and by writers from or with roots in, Central and South America. I have Cristina Henriquez’s The Great Divide on my nightstand. I love poetry, and am excited to read Nilton Maa’s ¿Qué bestia escoges hoy para morir? and Darrel Alejandro Holnes’s Stepmotherland. Writers like John Manuel Arias (Where There Was Fire) and Melissa Mogollon (Oye) are also on my radar. And I can’t wait to share Natalia Sylvester’s latest, A Maleta Full of Treasures, with my kids. CHAMORRO: Flores and Miss Paula is your second book as a writer. I’m curious about what it means for you to be a writer and how you identify as a writer. RIVERO: I’ve been a writer for as long as I can remember, but didn’t always identify as one. I remember writing my first poem when I was about five or six, then writing short stories in elementary and middle school. My teachers would submit my work to contests, and I’d win some. In high school, one teacher asked me to read a story I’d written aloud to the class, which was very intimidating at the time. Another told me to keep writing, but frankly, I would never have called myself a writer. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties, when I went to a writing workshop for writers of color—and someone called me a writer—that I actually felt comfortable identifying as one. That’s because I used to think a person needed to be published to call themselves a writer. I don’t think that anymore. A writer writes. |
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