{"id":355548,"date":"2026-06-11T01:24:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T01:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/355548\/"},"modified":"2026-06-11T01:24:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T01:24:12","slug":"an-oakland-union-researcher-wrote-a-book-her-characters-brought-class-into-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/355548\/","title":{"rendered":"An Oakland union researcher wrote a book. Her characters brought class into it"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve known Cynthia G\u00f3mez for about nine years through the labor movement, where she uses her formidable research skills to support mostly hotel workers in San Francisco. The past few years have been extremely prolific for her, with the publication of a book of short horror stories, a novella and now, Mu\u00f1eca<\/a> (G.P. Putnam\u2019s Sons, $30). The city that we both live in, Oakland, is going through a nice literary and cinematic renaissance in which authors like G\u00f3mez are leading the charge, subverting old themes, and entirely rewriting others. Through it all, she remembers to let the reader have fun, despite the horror. Cynthia will be in conversation with Tamika Thompson, Fri\/12, 7pm at Pegasus Books Downtown, Berkeley (more info here<\/a>). <\/p>\n

48HILLS Tell me a little bit about yourself and your writing.<\/p>\n

CYNTHIA G\u00d3MEZ\u00a0I am a union researcher and writer who lives in Oakland, California. I have lived in Oakland for the better part of the last 27 years. It\u2019s my adopted home. My writing is what I would call feminist, anti-capitalist, dark horror, with fantasy streaks in her hair. I really love writing about resistance, rebellion, resistance to oppression, and the occasional revenge. I\u2019ve wanted to write since I was seven. I remember how I would take my little handwritten sheets and fold them over and draw a picture and staple together the whole thing and call it a book. I copied a blurb from one of my older sister\u2019s books because I knew books had blurbs, but I didn\u2019t really know anything more than that. I just copied the actual text of a different blurb and pretended it was a blurb for mine. <\/p>\n

And I didn\u2019t know what the word \u201chilarious\u201d meant, but that\u2019s how I described my book! I started writing seriously in 2019. My partner at the time just kept saying, \u201cHey, you\u2019re talking about all these ideas you want to do, but you don\u2019t ever do them.\u201d \u2029At a certain point, that landed. And then COVID came, and all of a sudden, I had a lot more solitude and a lot more time to do nothing. And I started going to workshops, and that was kind of the push I needed.\u2029 I\u2019ve been seriously dedicating myself to it for about six years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

48HILLS\u00a0That sounds like one of the best uses of the lockdown ever. You\u2019ve got two books written during that time, right?\u00a0<\/p>\n

CYNTHIA G\u00d3MEZ\u00a0Technically two-and-a-half! My first book was a novelette in this really cool series called\u00a0Split Scream<\/a>. Novelettes are stories that are too long for most magazines, but too short for stand-alone. Then I had a short story collection that came out two years ago, and then\u00a0Mu\u00f1eca.<\/p>\n

48HILLS\u00a0In addition to your book being a horror novel, it incorporates a lot of East Bay history, and especially around the themes of land theft and loss. What other events and places shape this world?\u00a0<\/p>\n

CYNTHIA G\u00d3MEZ\u00a0It\u2019s fascinating how much the\u00a0Oakland Museum<\/a> was actually a seed for this book in two completely different ways. \u2029One was that they had this exhibit on 1968, and it really just underscored my wish to write about that year. I was describing this in another source by badly quoting what\u2019s apparently a\u00a0misleading translation of Gramsci<\/a>, the one about this being a time of monsters when the old world is dying and the new world is struggling to be born.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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You saw that in \u201868 in really wild ways. You saw Martin Luther King gaining class consciousness and then getting murdered, and then people uprising in response to it, right? You saw student rebellions, and then we saw student rebellions being massacred. It was a really pivotal year.\u00a0I always wanted to write a book set in that time. I remember reading this bit of the California history exhibit in the museum about land theft and loss. And I remember just being struck by how, yes, it was really unfair and racist and wrong that all these Californios, these people who\u2019ve been living iin what\u2019s now the state of California, had their land just stolen from them wholesale. At the same time, there was no room for the irony that they\u2019d stolen the land in the first place. I wanted to write about that, but couldn\u2019t figure out a way to do it.<\/p>\n

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48HILLS\u00a0What is the function of horror fiction when real life horror is so in our faces today?\u00a0<\/p>\n

CYNTHIA G\u00d3MEZ I myself don\u2019t tend to like extreme horror. Some people really find extreme horror comforting when life is extreme, because it can be kind of cathartic. It can be kind of like a microdose, when to exist and walk around in the world is a macrodose.\u00a0For me, that\u2019s not comforting, but I completely get why people find that comfortable, and more power to them. For me, what\u2019s more comforting is a tiny fictional version of the bad guys getting a little bit of what they dish out. I wrote an essay about [Stephen King\u2019s]\u00a0Carrie<\/a> where I said the bullies get turned into ash in the book, but in the real world, they get elected president. We can pour all of our wishes into that! The reader can get really excited about the possibility that the bully might get turned into ash in real life, even when we know that that may not happen.\u00a0<\/p>\n

48HILLS How do you approach weaving themes of class and queerness into your work in such a nuanced and compelling way?\u00a0<\/p>\n

CYNTHIA G\u00d3MEZ\u00a0In terms of queerness, when I was first cooking up this book, I knew that I was gonna have a woman who was paralyzed in her bed.\u2029 How did she get that way? Is it possible to save her, to release her, free her? And I realized pretty quickly, okay, we\u2019re in Sleeping Beauty territory. I actually wrote that in my notes. In Sleeping Beauty, the one who goes in to rescue the damsel is a dude, and I decided I was not at all interested in that. That\u2019s been done. That was a chance to bring in queerness. That let me kind represent the opposite pole to the\u00a0Miramontes\u00a0family in every possible way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They are the nuclear family and the bloodline being used to pass on property through their class. They\u2019re doing that, but also, her family represents, like, all that is perverse and awful about the heterosexual nuclear family. \u2029At a certain point, I also realized that I was writing a book about class. You have the Miramontes family as the dying breed, the dying class of like, the landed aristocracy. And then you have Andr\u00e9s representing the ascendant bourgeoisie, with all his capitalist investments. He\u2019s got his fingers in various different investment pies around the world. And they\u2019re both monstrous. \u2029Their whole class are monsters. And then you have [Nati\u2019s] mother, who represents the moral pole of the whole book, even if, in my mind, she\u2019s a little rigid in some places. She is the moral core. It\u2019s not an accident that she\u2019s the proletarian.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And then you have Natalia, who is still a little bit class conscious, although, you know, we know she\u2019s not a movement person. She doesn\u2019t have the same level of politics that her mom did. But that\u2019s what informs her worldview.\u2029And she\u2019s got, you know, this slightly revolutionary edge. I think we think that she might, like, open up a\u00a0Red Book<\/a>\u00a0every once in a while\u2014everyone\u2019s carrying them around, but she\u2019s not.\u00a0And then you also have Grandma, who\u2019s the lumpen. She\u2019s a hustler, right? She just wants to get ahead. \u2029She doesn\u2019t live in a fancy house. She\u2019s got an ancient Chevrolet. She has got her little one-bedroom apartment. She\u2019s only in it for herself.<\/p>\n

It was really fun to realize that that\u2019s what I was doing. You know, the Gothic is about class tension. Not every single Gothic book is about that, but you have these stock characters. You have the liminal class figure. You have the companion, the governess, the figure who\u2019s not part of the family, she\u2019s definitely not considered part of the working class. Class was already there, but it was really fun to be explicit in my mind that I was contrasting the different moralities of the different class figures. The reason why Andr\u00e9s is monstrous is not just because he\u2019s a monstrous person. His whole worldview actually demands seeing everything as profit and loss.\u00a0<\/p>\n

48HILLS I noticed how you approached class from the first few pages, when you are talking about stealing. That\u2019s a form of class conflict.\u00a0<\/p>\n

CYNTHIA G\u00d3MEZ When I was talking about her stealing, I actually just wanted to give her something that was a little bit, uh, self-destructive and a little bit interesting, and it wasn\u2019t until later that I thought, well, yes, but [the class angle] too. Like, that wasn\u2019t conscious at all. I wanted to give her a character trait that I thought would be fun to write about.<\/p>\n

48HILLS\u00a0I think it would have been really easy for a different writer to under-develop Violeta by making her only stand in for the rich, but she\u2019s actually really well fleshed-out. \u2029How do you develop a relationship to the characters that you have the least in common with?\u00a0<\/p>\n

CYNTHIA G\u00d3MEZ Mrs. Miramontes was also originally just supposed to be a stand-in for the monstrousness of her class. I thought, it\u2019s more interesting for me if I\u2019m going to spend time in this woman\u2019s head. \u2029I wanted to ask how she justifies to herself what she\u2019s doing?\u00a0Even if I, of course, wouldn\u2019t ever do the same things; I wouldn\u2019t be faced with the same set of choices. If I got parachuted into her brain, I would make different decisions, but I did want to explore how she justifies her choices to herself. I think that that\u2019s more interesting for those of us who encounter people like Mrs. Miramontes in our lives. We sure as hell have scenarios where people try to justify privilege, and they make decisions that will bolster privilege rather than weakening it. \u2029And they justify atrocities to themselves because, well, who wants to make a fuss, right?\u00a0<\/p>\n

So that was how I made her more interesting to me. And then Violeta\u2026 I wanted to root for their relationship. And if Violeta\u2019s loyalties lie only with her own class, she isn\u2019t that interesting of a person, because she\u2019s been raised to just marry rich. I don\u2019t think that the readers would root for the relationship, but I wouldn\u2019t either. <\/p>\n

48HILLS\u00a0What are you working on next? \u2029<\/p>\n

CYNTHIA G\u00d3MEZ\u00a0I\u2019m working on historical fiction, because I just really love historical fiction. The heart of it is going to be about a dress that is possessed by the spirit of the woman who made it. And she lived in 1913 and was a garment worker and unit organizer, and in 2013, a woman buys the dress and starts getting increasingly psychically connected to the spirit of the woman who\u2019s haunting it and has to figure out how the hell she\u2019s gonna get free.\u00a0<\/p>\n

CYNTHIA G\u00d3MEZ: MU\u00d1ECA in conversation with Tamika Thompson. 7pm, Fri\/12. Pegasus Books Downtown, Berkeley. More info here.<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve known Cynthia G\u00f3mez for about nine years through the labor movement, where she uses her formidable research…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":355549,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-355548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=355548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355548\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/355549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=355548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=355548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=355548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}