I was scrolling through Threads when I came across a conversation about a white author releasing a book with two Latine leads during Latine Heritage Month.

And listen, I am not going to offer the usual disclaimer that writers should be free to write whatever characters they want. Writing outside your lived experience is not inherently wrong, but making someone from another culture the protagonist of your story should give you pause. Main characters drive the story. Readers experience the world through their eyes, inhabit their fears and desires, and trust the author to render their interior lives with care. If you have not lived that experience, then you should be asking yourself some difficult questions before claiming the authority to tell it.

Are authors from that community already writing these stories? If they are, why not uplift them? Recommend their books. Share their work. Help create opportunities for them to tell the stories born from their own communities instead of stepping into the limited space they are already fighting to occupy.

And if you remain adamant that you are the person who must write this story, what have you done to understand the people at its center? Have you lived in community with them? Have you listened without treating them as research material? Have you read their literature, learned their history, paid cultural consultants and authenticity readers, and created room for them to tell you when you got something wrong?

Because changing a white character’s name, appearance, food, or language does not make that character Latine. Without cultural understanding, you have not written a Latine protagonist. You have written a white character wearing a Latine identity.

But the post unearthed a memory I thought I had already made peace with.

Spoiler alert: I had not.

Years ago, when I first decided to invest in myself and this ridiculous, persistent dream of becoming an author, I paid to attend a writers’ conference. I wanted to learn. I wanted to network. I wanted to be in community with writers and other bookish people who understood why someone might spend years creating people who did not technically exist.

During one of the classes, the facilitator asked if anyone wanted to share an excerpt.

The nerd that I am, I raised my hand enthusiastically.

Me.

I went through the logistics of sending him the excerpt, and when my turn came, I read it aloud. My voice shook because, although I wanted to be brave, sharing your writing can feel like peeling off your skin and asking a room full of strangers to tell you what they think of everything underneath.

I finished reading.

Silence.

You know that saying about being able to hear a pin drop?

Yup. That was me.

Then the facilitator spoke.

“There’s absolutely too much Spanish in your manuscript.”

I will never forget those words.

Not because they were thoughtful. Not because they helped me strengthen a scene, clarify the context, or better serve the reader. They stayed with me because of everything they implied.

Too much Spanish.

Too much of the language that shaped me. Too much of the rhythm I heard growing up. Too much of the way my characters would naturally speak to one another. Too much of the culture from which the story had been born.

Too much of me.

Once the facilitator said it, the room seemed to take it as permission to join in.

Someone asked, “Why are you publishing in the United States? Why not Latin America?”

I froze.

My mouth went dry. Sweat gathered against my skin. My eyes burned as tears began to form, but I could not make the words come out fast enough to defend myself.

I looked around the room, hoping someone might intervene.

No one did.

It was me, my Spanglish manuscript, and all of them.

Then someone began talking about how difficult it would be to find readers in Latin America because, according to her, there were not that many. I think she believed she was helping.

Another person said she tried to learn a few Spanish words so she could communicate with her maid, but the Spanish in my manuscript was simply too much.

Her maid.

That was the point at which the physical discomfort became so unbearable that something inside me finally pushed back.

“Well, you are not my target audience,” I said.

My voice broke, but I said it.

And the room became quiet again.

A co-facilitator tried to reassure me that my writing was good. The problem, she explained, was that the publishing industry would not accept that much “foreign language” in a book. She also said the Spanish needed to be italicized because that was the industry standard.

I told her I would not put it in italics.

Spanish was not foreign to my characters. Why should the language become visually foreign on the page simply because an English-speaking reader might not understand it?

After that, they moved on to another writer. They raved about his all-American story while I pretended to take notes.

When the session ended, I packed my bag as quickly as I could. The woman who had told me about her maid tried to speak to me, but I told her I had to go. My voice was hiccupping by then from the effort of holding back my tears.

I walked to my car, climbed inside, and sobbed.

Not delicate tears, either. I mean ugly, body-shaking grief.

I cried as if someone had died because, at that moment, it felt as though something had.

My dream.

If I could not write the stories burning inside my heart, I did not want to write. I did not want to carve pieces away from my characters until the people remaining on the page were comfortably digestible. I did not want to translate every sentence, italicize every Spanish word, or interrupt the story to reassure an imagined white reader that nothing in the book would remain beyond their immediate understanding.

But, eventually, I stopped crying.

Eventually, I realized my dream had not died that day. I simply needed better armor, more resources, and better people around me.

Almost a year later, I decided to pursue an MFA in creative writing. I was going to write those stories, and I was going to write them in my own authentic way. After all, I intended to break the rules the co-facilitator had told me about, so I might as well learn about them before I break them.

I have since published the books they made me believe there would be no space for and I have so much more to write.

Still, reading that Threads conversation brought the memory back because it exposed a contradiction I have never been able to let go.

The publishing industry frequently describes itself as risk-averse. Publishing a book costs money, and most books do not become runaway bestsellers. Publishers therefore look for projects they believe they can position, market, and sell.

I understand that publishing is a business.

What I question is how that business defines “safe.”

If the industry considers culturally specific stories by Latine authors too difficult, too niche, too foreign, or too full of Spanish, but considers similar stories commercially promising when written by white authors, then the culture was never the risk.

We were.

Or, more accurately, the industry’s assumptions about us were.

A watered-down ethnic story may be considered safer because it can be marketed to the readership the publishing industry already knows how to reach, a readership it has historically imagined as predominantly white. The book can offer culture as atmosphere: the food, the names, the Spanish sprinkled carefully throughout the dialogue, perhaps a grandmother dispensing wisdom from the kitchen.

Just enough Latine identity to make the story distinctive.

But not enough to make the presumed reader uncomfortable.

And that creates an ugly cycle.

Publishers invest in the kinds of books they already know how to market. Those books receive publicity, placement, distribution, and institutional support. Their sales are then used as evidence that these are the stories readers want.

Meanwhile, Latine authors writing more culturally specific stories are told their work will be too difficult to sell. They receive less investment, fewer opportunities, and less time to build an audience. Their struggles are then treated as proof that publishing them was risky.

Rinse and repeat.

Risk aversion becomes a convenient explanation for maintaining the same readers, the same decision-makers, the same ideas of marketability, and the same narrow versions of our stories.

Then, when a white author writes Latine protagonists, the work can be positioned as ambitious, edgy, immersive, or an exciting departure. The author is celebrated for crossing cultural boundaries while Latine authors may still be asked to reduce the amount of ourselves on the page.

That is what hurts.

It is not merely that someone outside the culture was given permission to write Latine characters. It is that authors from within the culture are so often asked to dilute those same characters before anyone will consider giving us that permission.

The message becomes:

Your culture is marketable.

Your voice is not.

Of course, no community owns a single experience, and no author automatically writes a truthful book simply because of their identity. Latine people are not a monolith. We are Dominican, Haitian, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Cuban, Colombian, Salvadoran, Afro-Latine, Indigenous, white, Black, queer, immigrant, multilingual, monolingual, and so much more. Authenticity is not a stamp granted by ancestry.

But proximity matters. Lived experience matters. Research matters. Who receives the largest platform matters. Who is allowed to make mistakes matters. Who gets marketed during Latine Heritage Month matters.

And if an author genuinely cares about representing a community, that care should extend beyond placing its people inside a book. It should include hiring readers and professionals from that community, advocating for their work, sharing opportunities, and questioning why the publishing ecosystem can find money for Latine stories while continuing to overlook Latine storytellers.

Give them the mic.

Or, in this case, the typewriter.

The question is not simply whether writers should be permitted to write across identity. Of course, no one can physically prevent them from doing so. The better question is whether they have earned the trust required to tell that particular story, and whether their opportunity is coming at the expense of authors from the community they are representing.

Writing across identity should require humility, proximity, sustained research, community engagement, and the willingness to be corrected. It should also require an honest examination of power. Who already possesses the platform? Who will receive the advance, the marketing budget, the bookstore placement, and the praise for bringing this culture to the page? And whose manuscript was rejected for being too specific, too foreign, or too difficult to sell?

We must confront a system that treats white authors as universal storytellers while treating authors of color as niche, even when we are writing about our own communities. We must also question the choices of writers who benefit from that imbalance without doing anything to challenge it.

You cannot refuse to cultivate Latine readers and authors and then point to the absence of sales as evidence that investing in us would have been too risky.

You cannot call our language excessive inside our own stories and then use that same language as decoration when it becomes commercially convenient.

And you cannot celebrate representation without asking who was given the opportunity to create it.

That day at the conference, they tried to convince me that there was too much Spanish in my manuscript.

What I understand now is that there was never too much Spanish.

There was too little imagination in the room.