Writing Her Own Book: Hispanic Heritage Month Spotlight on Stephanie Jimenez

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Stephanie Jimenez on her Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Program international exchange in Colombia, 2012-2013

Doing a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Colombia had special meaning to Stephanie Jimenez. The New York City-born author and communications professional not only got to meet family members she’d never met before, but she also felt rooted in seeing where her ancestors came from. The international exchange experience wasn’t much of a culture shock, but she found herself in a new place culturally.

“I grew up within the context of Colombian music, Colombian songs, the food, certain phrases…All of that had been familiar to me growing up as a Colombian-Costa Rican American in New York City,” she says. “I grew up going to bakeries that sold Colombian pastries and Colombian bread.…There were parades I went to as a kid where I could partake in the culture, or at least the identity of what it means to be Colombian-American.”

I grew up within the context of Colombian music, Colombian songs, the food, certain phrases…All of that had been familiar to me growing up as a Colombian-Costa Rican American in New York City,” she says. “I grew up going to bakeries that sold Colombian pastries and Colombian bread.…There were parades I went to as a kid where I could partake in the culture, or at least the identity of what it means to be Colombian-American.”

While in Medellin, Colombia on her international exchange, Stephanie helped university students hone their English language skills and learn more about the culture of the United States. But she found herself somewhere culturally in between her students and where she grew up. Even her experiences of growing up Colombian and Puerto Rican-American in Queens, New York, made her “as much of a gringa as most Americans.” Even so, she says that she does identify as Latina, and that there’s something very specific about growing up as a person of color.

In Queens, she says that lots of kids who were ethnically Colombian or from different Latin American countries in the late 1980s to 1990s called themselves “Spanish.” That term is no longer in use, and she says it’s a factor of language evolving – and to her, what’s more interesting than the debate around calling oneself Hispanic, Latino, or Latinx are current debates around what it means to be a “white Latino” or white-passing.

“Those conversations are really helpful because they shed a light around what racism actually looks like in Latin America and within our own Latin American communities, both in the US and in the countries we come from,” she says. “There is a lot of entrenched racism that we have a responsibility of addressing and talking about and not just putting away.”

Conversations like these were especially meaningful to her during the Alumni TIES (Thematic International Exchange Seminar) in Minneapolis, Minnesota, themed around “American Identity” in March 2022. There, she served on a panel that centered around the topic, “Exploring the Foundation and Examining the Implications of the ‘American” Identity.’” Throughout the seminar, Stephanie met others doing work around race and preserving erased histories in the American context. 

During that week, what was most interesting to her were the discussions from other writers, journalists, and academics on how to ensure that stories from communities that have been traditionally underrepresented, marginalized, and oppressed are told – whether through restoring historic gravesites, making sure burial sites are acknowledged, and tourism.

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Author and ExchangeAlumni Stephanie Jimenez

A writer’s and mentor’s path

In her writing life, Stephanie credits her time in the publishing industry with giving her an insight into the process that she didn’t have growing up. Her debut novel, They Could Have Named Her Anything (Little A), came out in August 2019 and was a work that came together while she was working different day jobs.

Working while writing is more common than not these days, but Stephanie says that if early on in her career she hadn’t had her job as an assistant at Penguin Random House – known as one of the “Big Four” publishing companies that dominate American publishing, she wouldn’t have known the process of getting published, let alone the conversations that took place in that sort of space. Not only that, but her work there demystified who could be an author.

“As I was starting to meet authors, I was like, these are just real people, these are flawed human beings just like anyone else,” she says. “They are not gods. They haven’t been bestowed this special light that makes them better than all of us and more capable of getting their work read. And more, worthy of having their words read.” 

That insight, as well as her own feelings of being lost in the publishing process, gave her the confidence to send her work out and inspired her to give other people that same confidence and access to the system.

Anyone can be an author, she says, no matter what age they are. Her newsletter on her website is meant to inspire just that, especially for those who come from middle class or working class backgrounds, as well as underrepresented communities.

“As many people who come from working class or middle class backgrounds, there is this fear of studying the arts, because we all understand the trope of the starving artist and we all are worried about not making enough money in this capitalistic society,” she says.

Her antidote was to build her own community through writing classes and now in guiding others to become authors themselves. She says there are people in the industry who are trying to get more representation in the literary arts, especially with windows of free submissions to literary magazines for BIPOC (Black and Indigenous people of color) writers, but that the efforts are ongoing.

“How do you incentivize creative writing for people if that can’t actually sustain them? It’s constantly a question of if we look at the industry and we look at writers in general and they tend to skew disproportionately white, you can’t divorce that statistic from the fact that this is just not an industry that most people can make a living in,” she says. "If you don’t come from a lot of means, your first priority will be, how do I survive."

Stephanie is more than finding her way and she’s shining her light for others to find their way as well, both on her own and through the writers she holds dear.

One of her favorite quotes about where the drive to keep writing comes from is from the writer, Toni Morrison, who once wrote about writing, “I like the fact that other people like what I write, and I suppose that if the publishers had disappeared, I would have written it and Xeroxed it and passed it around. But writing was a thing that I could not not do at that point—it was a way of thinking for me. It still is; I don't have any choice about that.