Rating: 4/5, good
Imagine The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants but make all the girls Latina women in their late 20s and you have The Girls Social Club by Alisa Valdes.
The Dirty Girls Social Club is about six women who call themselves the sucias: Lauren, Usnavys, Amber, Sara, Liz, and Rebecca who met in college and meet up once a year to talk about their lives.
Lauren describes the term sucia like this:
“Sucia means ‘dirty girl.’ Usnavys came up with it. ‘Buena sucia’ is actually pretty offensive to most Spanish-speaking people, akin to ‘big smelly ‘ho.’ So Buena Sucia Social Club is, how do you say, irreverent. Right? And obnoxious. It’s a pun, too, see, taken from the name of those old-as-dirt Cuban musicians who record with Ry Cooder and star in German documentaries, who every non-Latino I know thinks I am genetically predisposed to like. (I’m not.) We’re clever and, like, hip when it comes to pop culture, we sucias. Okay, fine. Maybe it’s stupid. Maybe we’re stupid. But we think it’s funny, okay? Well, Rebecca doesn’t, but she’s about as funny as Hitler’s hemorrhoids. (You didn’t hear that from me.)”
For those who don’t know, Buena Sucia Social Club is a riff on the album Buena Vista Social Club released in 1997 by the ensemble of the same name.
Anyway, you can kinda get the vibe from that extract. The Dirty Girls Social club has a light, sarcastic tone that makes it pretty easy and fun to read. Because I was expecting chick lit, though, I wasn’t prepared for how dark it would get. Where Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants has a relationship between a camper and counselor, Dirty Girls has an abusive spousal situation that gets pretty disturbing, so here’s your trigger warning. Honestly, that scene put me on edge the whole next day, so seriously… beware!
The sucias meet in the first chapter and then the other chapters alternate between their different points of view. Each woman has a different background and faces different challenges in her life. Lauren is half-Cuban and half-white, but she has to represent the Latinx community at her newspaper job, which means having to fit in the box set for her by white culture, though she tries to push the edges out little by little by educating people through her writing.
Rebecca is Catholic and identifies as European Spanish though Lauren insists she looks like a Pueblo Indian. She’s from an established family in Albuquerque and is married to Brad, the lazy critical theory PhD-candidate son of an extremely wealthy (and racist) white family. She started a fashion magazine and is very successful in her professional life, but her personal life is unfulfilling.
Usnavys is Puerto Rican. She’s an executive with United Way and is trying to resist marrying her longtime boyfriend Juan because she thinks he’s not rich enough for her. She’s struggling to overcome the mindset of poverty that she internalized in childhood.
Sara is Cuban and Jewish. She married her high school sweetheart Roberto and has two boys, but things aren’t as picturesque as they seem as she and Roberto’s fights are escalating.
Elizabeth (Liz) is the co-host for a network morning show. She’s a black Latina from Colombia with a secret that gets outed in the second half.
Amber is a rock en Español singer who’s on the brink of stardom. She’s heavily into the Mexica movement, though Lauren says she was a pocha in college: “’Pocha,’ for the uninitiated, refers to the kind of Mexican-American who speaks no Spanish and breaks into a sweat if she eats anything hotter than Old El Paso mild salsa.” She had a middle-class upbringing in San Diego. She’s my favorite sucia and the idea of the Mexica movement has me kind of curious so I might look for books or videos about that in the future.
There are two things I took away from this book that I didn’t really think about before: how diverse the Latin community is, and how the typical Mexican you think of is an indigenous American. I guess those are pretty obvious when you think about it, but white people (or at least myself) don’t know much about Latinx people in general. Lauren also brings up a couple times how white people tend to assume that Latin people are poor and how that isn’t always the case. If you’re white and you want to start learning about the Latinx community, this isn’t a bad place to start. It is accessible (though the sarcastic tone probably won’t win over more conservative readers).
The characters are great. The plot could be better. The gay rep I think is kind of a weak point… this was published in 2007 and the gay male side characters seemed stereotypical to me. Liz seemed pretty good but I didn’t really connect with her as a bi woman. Maybe it’s just because I mostly interact with the LGBT community online, or maybe things have changed since this came out, but something about her seems off and I can’t quite put my finger on it… Her arc feels more like it’s about her being persecuted by the world for being gay and not about her as a character. Another thing that really bugs me about her is [spoiler: she mentions a couple of times how she’s wary of straight girls because they don’t want a committed relationship, but she’s in love with Lauren while carrying on a relationship with Selwyn. Selwyn can sense Liz’s heart is elsewhere but Liz never confesses to Lauren or gets over her. It feels like Liz is using Selwyn as a stand-in for Lauren.]
There’s a little bit of romance, though not much, as a lot of the relationships are… not great. It was a little shocking honestly how many different kinds of bad men there are out there. Some people might say Ms. Valdes is being misandrist but… I believe it. Two of the men turn out to be surprisingly good, though! I feel like our culture pushes a lot of simple love stories when it seems like most people go through a couple partners before they find someone they really like. I think the narrative of going from bad partners to better partners is a meaty enough theme to hold many stories, and Ms. Valdes uses it to great effect.
It’s not perfect, but I’d still definitely recommend it! It’s fun and will expand your world a little bit. 😊
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