Carolina Ixta’s YA debut Shut Up, This Is Serious tackles complex issues surrounding abuse, intergenerational trauma, mental health, racism, sex work, and teen pregnancy through the lens of East Oakland, Calif., teenager Belén, the daughter of Mexican immigrants. After her father abandons the family, Belén struggles to balance school with a tumultuous homelife brought about by their precarious financial situation. Things get even more complicated when her best friend Leti finds out that she’s pregnant by her boyfriend, a Black classmate whom Leti’s ultra-Catholic and racist Mexican immigrant parents vehemently disapprove of. In a conversation with PW, Ixta discussed how her upbringing, education, and discovery of various literary luminaries influenced her writing, and her desire to help young people think critically about their racial identity.
What drove you to write Shut Up, This Is Serious?
When I was 18, I was in a creative writing program at UC Santa Cruz where I started writing short stories about these two Latina friends. Originally, the protagonist was a very reticent, quiet, humble girl, and her best friend was very rambunctious and rebellious. I think I started writing it because I was homesick. Santa Cruz isn’t that far from where I grew up in Oakland, but it’s still very, very different.
University was also my first time ever really reading work by Latino writers; in my entire K–12 education, I hadn’t read anything by writers like me, except for maybe a poem or two. I carried a lot of shame around that for a long time. I’d been writing a lot through high school and all my characters were white, and it just never occurred to me to write Latino characters. In college, I took a Latino literature class, and I read this really impactful article by Daniel Alarcón, who’s the host of the NPR podcast Radio Ambulante, and he talked about how Latinos are represented in media. So I took all that resentment and homesickness, and I started writing the stories that would become the basis of Shut Up, This Is Serious.
Still, I couldn’t really make them work. There was always tension between me and the protagonist. I couldn’t relate to her; she was too quiet. But I really related to her best friend. So, I took a step back from it and experimented with different narrative forms. After I graduated, I immediately went to graduate school at UC Berkeley for a masters in education. After that, I started teaching. I was a fifth-grade teacher, and I was honestly miserable my first few months because it’s a really hard job. I needed an outlet, and I truly had a lightning bolt moment where I thought, “Remember when you were writing these stories? What if you just reversed the characters and made the best friend the protagonist? And then the quiet girl was the best friend.” And then I thought, “Well, if I reverse that, then I kind of want to reverse everything else.” I immediately sat down and wrote the first chapter in maybe 10 minutes.
Do you feel that your experience as a teacher informs your writing?
I don’t think I could have written this book without having been a teacher. Both universities I attended have very progressive, radical ideas surrounding education and how to make the space be transformative and liberatory, specifically for children of color. So, I learned a lot about critical race theory. And I read a lot of James Baldwin, Gloria Ladson-Billings, all these great educational scholars. For years, I was made to think very deeply about my identity, particularly as a white-passing Latina. When I finally got to work, I was a bilingual teacher in a class full of only Latino kids. And, you know, there was something really beautiful about that, because we just got each other very quickly—we had the same language, the same cultural references, and very similar family backgrounds. We also had a lot of conversation around religion, and so I understood the morality that my students were brought up with.
There was—and still is—a lot of racial tension in the school around the kids in the bilingual class and the kids in the English-only pathway, because they were never integrated. One of the biggest problems I had as a teacher was talking with my students about race and saying, “You can’t talk to your Black classmates that way. You can’t use that word. You can’t call them this.” And they really had no idea why, because children are usually mimicking what they’re hearing at home. It really opened my eyes to how much anti-Blackness exists in my culture, and specifically how it’s reinforced through children. I did a lot of work with them around it. I had to be the voice of reason.
I’ve always known about these issues, but being a teacher and being forced to be in those situations, and to think very pragmatically around how to handle them—how to responsibly talk to children and their parents, how to gently tell them that racism is learned and that we are not born hating or feeling better than other communities—really prepared me to write this book. I hesitated for a while on whether I wanted to speak about race that heavily. Yes, there’s stuff around mental health and sexuality and Catholicism, but I think race is perhaps the central theme of Shut Up, This Is Serious. I wanted to write a book that made Latino kids think deeply about their own racial identity, and how their racial identity affects other people, specifically Black youth, because I don’t think it’s something that they’re asked to consider. I wanted to use Leti’s parents as an example: look at this Catholic family that’s very discriminatory and prejudiced toward their own daughter, and who go on to do this to a different community. Had I not studied very deeply to become a teacher with this specific type of pedagogy, I don’t think I could have written about any of that.
Was it difficult to balance all the interweaving plotlines?
Overall, the biggest thing I worked on with my editor, Jennifer Ung, was making sure that Belén had enough of her own plot regarding her relationship with sex, race, and her mental health with all these messy dynamics happening around her. When I was originally writing Shut Up, This Is Serious, I felt at times like I was just building a soapbox. So I tried to be careful to make sure that the issues I was addressing were talked about a lot more subtly. But Jennifer really pushed me. She would say, “Hey, you know, you write for children, and sometimes, we have to hand it over.” I think a perfect example was how I wrote about sex work. Oakland is a large hub for sex trafficking, so sex work in general was something that I always knew about, and the way that the community can talk about sex work is usually very dismissive and misogynistic.
Can you talk a bit about what you’re working on next?
I’m writing about a community in Southern California that’s struggling with a lot of environmental racism and injustice. It’s been a very different process than writing Shut Up, This Is Serious. And while it’s a departure, it sticks to the theme of talking about social issues, which I love, especially since my backbone is in academia. I love being a student and researching and learning—I think it’s why I became a teacher—and I hope that shows in this book, which is currently slated for 2025.
Shut Up, This Is Serious by Carolina Ixta. Quill Tree, $19.99 Jan. 9 ISBN 978-0-06-328786-0
