Summertime is my prime reading time, especially when I go on vacation. This year my family and I took a week-long road trip down to the Outer Banks in North Carolina, where I spent many days laid out on a hot beach reading for hours.
One of the books that I finished on this trip was Anita De Monte Laughs Last. After ordering it off of my Book of the Month selection a few months prior, it had been sitting on my shelf begging to be read.
To make a long story short, I finished it in one day, and I loved it. I thought the characters were interesting and inspiring, the story was both tragic and hopeful, so I gave it a solid four stars on my Goodreads.
It was only after looking more into the author, Xochitl Gonzalez, that I came to find out about the books inspiration that is the very-real story of cuban sculptor/artist, Ana Mendieta.
A Summary:
Xochitl Gonzalez’s 2024 novel, Anita De Monte Laughs Last, chronicles the lives of two Latina-American women in New York City, 20 years apart from each other, as they navigate as Latina women in a predominately white art industry. The book flips between Raquel, a Puerto Rican-American art history student at Brown University in the 90s and Anita De Monte, an emerging Cuban artist in the 70s-80s in New York City.
The two women’s lives are paralleled through the similar way they are mistreated by the higher-ups in the art community and their respective romantic relationships, both becoming victims of abusive relationships with older white male artists. How they deal with this over coming these challenges is what sets them apart, but also forms the connection between the two across a decade.
After Anita’s violent death at the hands of her ex-husband, Jack Martin, in 1985, her art is buried by him in an attempt to separate himself from her and ensure the case of his involvement in her death ceases to come up. However, Raquel becomes the one to revitalize the interest in Antia after discovering her while researching for her art history senior thesis.
The Inspiration:
Anita is based on real-life Cuban artist, Ana Mendieta, who is known for her body art, where she juxtaposes her body, or the lack of it, within nature in a series of photographs to explore our connection with nature and place within the universe. Many of the struggles that Anita goes through in the book, were actually felt by Ana.
She was, a famed cuban artist in New York City at a time when the art world was overwhelmingly dominated by white artists, and at 36 years old she met the same fate as Anita, falling to her death out of her 33rd floor-apartment window in a suspicious “accident” while her husband was present.
Controversy:
Before the novel was released, Gonzolaz gave Raquel Mendieta, Anita’s niece and overseer of her art and estate, an early copy to read before it was released to the public.
However, Mendieta was not pleased, unapproving of the supernatural elements added to her aunt’s story, and how closely the fictional book followed Ana’s real-life experiences with very little actual acknowledgment of her in the book. She was also unappreciative, as with many other adaptations of her aunt’s life, with the focus on Ana’s death rather than what she achieved during her life.
Mendieta stated in an article in The New York Times, “Not only are we forced to relive her death over and over again, but we have no say in how she is being portrayed. How many times does she have to fall?”
Gonzalez then took to PBS to share her input on the controversy surrounding her novel saying that she didn’t feel that artists should have to ask permission to make their art and that she felt her adaptation of Ana’s story was respectful. She felt that her novel was not focused on Anita’s death, as Mendieta had insinuated, but rather around how her art has influenced generations who have come after her.
“I don’t think that artists should ask for permission to make their art. To me, I felt that I was respectful to the story. I was very clear about how I felt about what happened to her legacy in the aftermath,” said Gonzalez. “And I felt it was also about the influence that she’s had on other generations, including myself and my generation. And so, to me, that was the highest form of respect that I could probably pay.”
Although she says her adaptation was out of respect, I can’t help but now see how, as a relative of Ana, Raquel may find that Gonzalez’s book is so closely similar to her aunt’s life that the lines of fiction and reality are truly being blurred to an extreme, and possibly insensitive, extent.
Others say that that Gonzalez is in the right to be able to write this story, as it adds some fantastical elements along with her own personal experiences, and is a new work of art, born out of Ana’s itself.
Her Legacy Lives On:
“My art is grounded on the belief in one
Ana Mendieta
universal energy which runs through all
being and matter, all space and time.”
Controversy aside, the book did have some great aspects that made me fall in love with it in the first place, and it mainly centered around the empowering sentiment of two underestimated women going after their passions and continuing to persevere, even in the face of their personal turmoil and the adversity thrown at them from society. Ana’s ideas behind her work are felt through Anita and Raquel’s rediscovery of her is characterizing how an artist and their ideas can never truly die if their work lives on.
The character of Raquel in the novel was loosely based on Gonzalez herself as well, as Puerto Rican and Mexican-American, Brooklyn native and a Brown University Alum.
“I really thought that we were going to be very different. And then, as I was walking [Raquel] through a day, I realized that some of the things that maybe I felt in college were inevitable,” said Gonzalez. “And I just felt there was a swathe of people, Latinas always first, but a swathe of people, of people of color, people from lower-class experiences that I know had walked this path that Raquel had walked.”
Ana Mendieta identified herself as a sculptor and was most known for her Silueta Series where she composed a series of photos of her outline in different landscapes, sometimes covered in flowers, mud, grass as well as photos without her in it, where the viewer can noticeably feel her presence, even in her absence. Much of her art focuses on her belief of a connecting energy that flows through the earth and us.
Her 1978 Untitled piece and parts of her Silueta Series also reflect on her Cuban heritage, with a dark silhouette of her body carved, burned, or sculpted into the earth, portraying her disconnect from her homeland after not being about to return to Cuba until the 1980s on an art exhibition invite.
With the jarring and suspicious circumstances of her death being sometimes overshadowing her work and legacy, Ana’s story can sometimes become watered down to a simple tragic tale of a star that burned bright and fast, when actually she has been inspiring artists, especially Latina artists, for generations past her death.
Her art continues to give voice to those feeling cut off from their native cultures, but also gives hope through her portrayals of connection to one another, our past and future, through our shared natural world.
For more information on Ana and her art visit Anamendietaartist.com