Tomas Moniz is a writer who spends a lot of time thinking about what it means to be Latinx. In a new essay titled “We Are the Medicine: Recommendations on the Ever Growing List of Latinx Literature,” he offers a personal, chaotic tour of the genre — one that refuses to settle on a single label for himself or anyone else.
The essay opens on the Fourth of July, 2026, in Northern California’s redwoods. Moniz notes that the phrase “250 Years of Independence” is everywhere on social media, but most posters are mocking it, pointing out the contradictions in the euphemism. He agrees with them completely.
And yet he is excited about watching the U.S. men’s soccer team play Belgium in a few days. His key requirement for the venue: loud and friendly, but not full of the kind of supporters shouting “USA! USA!” That ambivalence — loving the game while rejecting the nationalism it represents — is the whole point.
Label Chaos Is the Point
Moniz’s central struggle is linguistic. He wants to call himself Chicano, Hispanic, Latino, Latinx, or Latine, and he shifts between them without apology. He quotes Gloria Anzaldua, who refused to translate or kowtow to one kind of reader, to one language. He loves the discomfort, the confusion, the chaos that those words engender, so he mixes and matches consciously, whimsically.
He also knows this is disrespectful. He knows it minimizes the importance of self-definition, of pride, and arms those in power with ways to chide or ridicule the discourse. And he agrees with this critique.
But he doesn’t.
“I love the discomfort, the confusion, the chaos that those words engender, so I mix and match Latino, Latinx, Latine consciously. Whimsically.”
The essay is structured around this tension. Moniz wants to honor the specificity of identity while also celebrating the multiplicity of experience. He wants to be precise and inclusive at the same time, which is impossible. He embraces the impossibility.
The Statistical Case
For those who need proof beyond his anecdote, Moniz cites Fernanda Figueroa, who researched U.S. Latinos for AP News in 2025. Her conclusion: “this growing community is far from being a monolith. From shifting identities, increasing educational attainment and growing political influence, Hispanic Americans continue to be a major part of the nation’s tapestry.”
That diversity is the whole argument. Latinx literature, in Moniz’s telling, should reflect the many Americas, not just the one.
Meeting Luis Rodriguez
The essay takes a personal turn with a story from the LA AWP 2024 conference. Moniz sat down at a cafe table next to an unassuming elder sipping coffee. He realized the elder was Luis Rodriguez, whose book Always Running had deeply affected him as a young father in his early twenties.
Moniz waited to share his gratitude. Instead, they chatted about conferences and LA freeways. Then they shared stories of becoming grandfathers, of wild and unruly families, of lessons and survival. At that point, Moniz thanked Rodriguez for his writing. He told him how it helped him.
Rodriguez nodded but then said: “to be honest, the medicine you need is always within.” That became Moniz’s mantra: his note to self, his reason for reading, his desire to write. Unearthing the medicine.
The New Novel
Moniz’s 2024 novel All Friends Are Necessary aimed to create characters who could accept all their complexity and contradictions, revel in the fluidity of identity. He imagined communities of friends and lovers who resisted the need to define each other in static ways. With his new novel, The King of Aloe Vera, he focuses on Rey, an amalgamation of all his elders back in the day joking about glass ceilings in a way that belies a rage and a futility.
Brown enough to get the job but too brown to get promoted. That is just a small part of the novel. It is really about the beautiful messiness of living in the western United States, in the Bay Area, land that was once Aztlan, always indigenous, and as Anzaldua reminds us: will be again.
The Reading List
For “His Panic” Heritage Month, Moniz recommends works by fellow Latinx writers. He wants to show not the singular way but the multiplicity of ways to celebrate and love ourselves in all our glorious and uncomfortable messiness. He wishes he could do what Bad Bunny did in the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show, proclaiming “God Bless America” and then listing every nation of the Americas, decentering the commonly understood meaning of that word “America” as specific only to the United States.
Instead, he says, “I love Latine Literature, and instead of referencing the well-known expected names, start with these.” Then perhaps we can attempt to name each and everyone of us picking up the pen, scribbling away our stories, building the narrative.
Because we need you.
Because we are the medicine.
Here is the list:
| Author | Work |
|---|---|
| Michael Nava | The Death of Friends (or any of the Henry Rios novels, 8 in total) |
| Cherríe Moraga | Loving in the War Years |
| Tomás Rivera | …and the earth did not devour him |
| Ron Arias | The Road to Tamazunchale |
The Mantras
The essay is built on mantras. There is Anzaldua’s reminder that Aztlan will be again. There is Rodriguez’s “the medicine you need is always within.” There is Moniz’s own insistence that we are the medicine.
These are not abstract concepts. They are prescriptions for how to live. They are reasons to read and reasons to write. They are the chaos that Moniz loves.
The Postcard
Moniz invites readers to keep the list going. He asks for postcards with recommendations, addressed to POB 3555 Berkeley CA 94703.
The essay ends with a plea. We need each other. We need the stories. We need the multiplicity. We need to stop pretending that any one of us speaks for all of us.
That is the point of the list. It is not meant to be exhaustive. It is meant to be a beginning. It is meant to show that there are many of us, and we are all necessary.
The essay is a celebration of ambivalence. It is a refusal to choose. It is a love letter to the discomfort of identity. And it is a recommendation for a reading list.
It is also a reminder that the labels we use are not fixed. They are tools. They are weapons. They are bandages. They are mirrors. They are all of these things at once.
Moniz is not settling on one. He is refusing to settle. That is the medicine. The essay’s final line is a prescription, not a summary. It tells the reader to hold on to the discomfort, to keep naming themselves, to keep reading, to keep writing — and to send a postcard with a recommendation for the next installment.
Source material: “We Are the Medicine: Recommendations on the Ever Growing List of Latinx Literature,” Literary Hub.
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