MFA student revisits high school in first novel

“I definitely didn’t set out to write a novel,” said Liza Monroy, a current nonfiction MFA student in Columbia’s creative writing program.

Monroy looks young enough to be an undergraduate, yet Mexican High, which she wrote five years ago, was published by Spiegel & Grau last summer, and it will be released in paperback on June 9.

Mexican High is about an American high school girl who is uprooted from her life as a cheerleader in Washington, D.C. and thrown into chaotic Mexico City for her senior year. Although Milagro (Mila) Marquez is placed firmly behind the gates of a maximum security international high school and told to stay put, she immediately begins to explore her new environment and takes up with a large cast of sometimes-questionable characters. The book, brimming with drugs and high school drama, chronicles a constant struggle with identity. “I just love novels and teenage protagonists,” Monroy said.

Like Mila, Monroy also spent her high school years in an international school in Mexico City—“but that’s where anything autobiographical ends,” she added. Autobiographical or not, however, Monroy never intended on writing a novel. She had originally attempted to write a non-fiction piece about her experience in Mexico. It was only after she concluded that her life “didn’t really have a cohesive plot” that she decided to unleash her imagination.

But Monroy’s novel takes on a little more than it can handle. In the span of 334 pages, Mexican High tackles mother-daughter relationships, love, rape, and an environment of corrupted politicians and affluent high school kids skilled in the arts of bribing guards and police. At times, the fast-paced plot overwhelms the novel, and Mila is the only thread that attempts to hold everything together.

To Monroy’s credit, Mila reads as a true-to-life teenager who is often prey to her own uncontrollable sense of curiosity. Mila’s character embodies transitions and liminal spaces—not only is she half-Mexican and half-American, but she has also moved more than six times throughout her years in school. Monroy explained that she wanted to reach an audience of people who grew up crossing borders, and to address “the idea of always having to go from one place to the next and never really feeling sure of where their roots or where their home was.”

One of the most memorable scenes in the novel is Mila and her mother’s encounter with an armed man at a country club pool. The man, holding a long black machine gun, literally commands Mila and her mother to strip so that he can rape them, and the two women barely escape. When Mila and her mother return the next day to ask if anyone had been arrested, Monroy writes: “The woman at the front desk just looked at my [Mila’s] mother up and down blankly. ‘Señora, I have no idea what you are talking about,’ she said, as if nothing had even happened.”

Despite having published a fictional novel, Monroy ultimately decided to join the small group of non-fiction writers in Columbia’s MFA creative writing program. “It was interesting to have a book before in a different genre, ... and coming here has deepened my experience of literature and my understanding of the craft of writing,” she said.

In “The Unnameable,” one of her MFA classes, Monroy has been reading “books that defy the notion of plot and character building, and any conventions that have to do with story-telling. ... It’s about decentering your center and not just reinventing the idea of a narrator in your story.”

Just as Mila Marquez embraces her fluid identity as a student in Mexico City, so Monroy embraces her fluid identity as a writer at Columbia. She admits that she is interested in transcending the barriers between fiction and non-fiction, and literature and philosophy, but says she still has much to learn about writing. This, if anything, she said, is why she applied to Columbia’s MFA program. “My one mission was to become a better writer.”