What we Did To Each Other
- Vanessa Bettencourt
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Genre: YA ContemporaryPublishing date: January 1, 2025
Rep: Latine/x, Mexican
5 reasons to read...
Synopsis:
It’s the early 2010s, and seventeen-year-old Yesenia Rivera hates everything about her brown skin and wide nose, her curly hair and hand-me-down clothing, and her inability to fit in with either the Mexican girls or the white girls at her school. So when her mother’s new job requires them to uproot their lives and move to the Pacific Northwest, Yesenia devises a plan to remake herself completely. Cloaked in skin lightening cream, blue contact lenses, dyed-blonde hair, and a “whiter” name, Yesenia’s–aka Jessie’s–newfound ability to pass as white in her new school gets her the popularity she’s always dreamed of. Yet as her brazen confidence morphs into hubris, all it takes is a couple of slip-ups for someone to take notice.
Guillermo Rivera—aka Willy, an easier-to-pronounce nickname bestowed upon him by his classmates—is no stranger to sticking out at their predominantly white high school, right down to his too-small wrestling shoes. Bothered by how little he’s able to help his low-income mother and seduced by the prospect of financial stability, he reluctantly settles into a flattened, stereotyped version of himself in exchange for being needed by his white peers. But when selling to Jessie’s new friends pushes him farther out of his comfort zone and, dangerously, into theirs, both he and Jessie begin to suffer the mounting cost of what whiteness demands of them. The more they’re forced together, the more their tenuously crafted double lives threaten to crumble. Until one day, when those lives collide . . .
Content Warning: Racism, colorism, drug use, emotional trauma, self-hate, violence
Josuee Hernandez is a writer based in Portland, Oregon. His debut YA novel, What We Did to Each Other, will be published by Flux in fall 2025. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the University of Oregon, a Master of Arts in English Literature from Portland State University, and a Master of Arts in Education, also from Portland State University. When he’s not writing, he serves as an educator for K-12
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