Lorraine Avila’s debut YA novel, The Making of Yolanda La Bruja (Levine Querido, April 11), follows Yolanda Nuelis Alvarez, a Black Dominican American, as she comes into her own as a leader within her Bronx high school and as a bruja within her family’s spiritual tradition. Both journeys are disrupted when a new White student named Ben sends ripples through the school and joins Yolanda’s activist group, the Brave Space Club, leaving her uncertain how best to protect her beloved community. We spoke to Avila, a 31-year-old lifelong Bronxite, over Zoom while visiting family in the Dominican Republic. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

This book defies easy categorization. What genre do you consider it?

I consider it realism. Many of the spiritual practices in this book, and in our real lives, are shoved into the genre of the supernatural. The stories I use in the book came from experiences I had with my own family, but the West, at least, doesn’t have the space to hold all of that. I was excited to read Ingrid Contreras’ The Man Who Could Move Clouds; it’s a memoir that brings to the center lived experiences that are usually put to the side as magical realism. I read it while I was working on Yolanda, and it made me so glad to see folks who are coming from the spaces of Latin America and Africa, saying, Call it what you want, but we know what it is.

How much of Yolanda’s religious tradition is taken from existing practices?

It’s based on a religion that exists in the Dominican Republic, which is Afro-descendant and has veins all over the Caribbean. However, I changed the name of the religion, and I changed the names of each particular saint. I’d been on my own journey, trying to trace the lines of my paternal family with the religion. The more I learned about it, the more I realized that the elders who practice are private about it, and that’s one of the reasons there aren’t more folks in the younger generations who practice. It’s a vein of Vudú, and many folks are open about the work they do with Vudú, but because of the stereotypes the religion has faced, I wanted to protect it.

That’s something I was thinking about for the Bronx, too. It’s the last frontier of gentrification in New York. Folks in the Bronx are private about our practices in Van Cortlandt Park or Pelham Bay Park—we have the best parks in the city, but we are private about how we use those spaces because we didn’t want to become another Brooklyn or another Washington Heights. Now that gentrification is coming forth, I think about how we can protect the spaces where we’ve created safety for ourselves. I hope kids and younger folks who read this book get that message, because especially with social media, we want to share so much. We should listen to our elders when they tell us we need our safeguards.

Can you tell me about building your rich ensemble of characters?

All of these folks came from the community I see in the Bronx. Even though the Bronx has been low-resource for ages, it’s a community where if someone doesn’t have, someone else will jump in and do that work. I grew up on a block where if one of my friends didn’t have food, they could come to my house and my grandmother would feed them. Oppressed folks, marginalized folks: The way we survive is by being in constant community.

You taught middle school for several years. How did your time teaching shape your writing of the book?

I remember reading The Hate U Give with my eighth grade class and seeing which chapters the kids were motivated by. They were compelled by Starr’s relationships with others but also by the points of conflict that mirrored things they were seeing in their own classrooms. That’s when I realized I had to put Ben in the Brave Space Club—I didn’t want to, because I wanted it to be a protected space, but I had to have more of those interactions. I saw that the more teachers wanted to implement transparent lessons in terms of what was happening socially, the more White students started to feel isolated. When there are no White adults willing to have those conversations with White students, because they haven’t sat with their own stuff yet, it becomes the problem of everyone else. We see Ben going through all of this, and who is supporting him? No one. He’s definitely the antagonist, but the reality is he should have had an adult supporting him through all of the tensions he was feeling.

The book starts on a powerful note, with Yolanda taking responsibility for the narrative she’s about to share.

The prologue was one of the first things I wrote down, but I didn’t come back to it until the first draft was done. Somewhere in 2020, I got stuck because I was wondering, Why am I writing this story about a Black girl who wants to befriend this White kid? I realized she’s not trying to befriend him; she’s trying to keep herself and her community safe. If that means she has to swallow what she wants to say or be a damsel in distress when she’s not, that’s what she’s going to do. I think the reason I wrote the prologue first is because, subconsciously, I was already finding a way out of that thinking for Yolanda. She realizes that trying to befriend him was the thing that made the whole situation worse than it had to be. She is also thinking about the ways in which women and femmes are told to make themselves small for safety. Basically, she’s taking accountability for the ways she’s betrayed herself.

What elements of your earliest drafts survived to the final manuscript?

The moments when Yolanda is just observing her face and her body are the earliest ghosts in the manuscript. I wrote so much of it alongside my students as they were writing their own stories, and they were very connected to the physicality of their characters. I got sucked into that through them. Young adults are so aware of their bodies and then, somehow, we force them to disconnect from themselves.

So many students in the Bronx are living with PTSD, carrying trauma in their bodies. For Yolanda, she has these experiences of being catcalled and harassed from a young age. There’s a toll that takes on the body. I’m glad Yolanda’s initial connection to her body is something that lived through to the final draft.

Ultimately, this is an optimistic book. Yolanda retains her connection to herself and to her community.

I took a workshop with Daniel José Older in 2020, and he told me, “You need to put some healing in this book.” I had to sit with that, because 2020 was a shitty-ass year. We were seeing Black and brown kids dragged on video and killed. I know how it looks when terrible things happen in communities, and I also know that Dominicans are funny as fuck. Even when someone has just died, folks will crack jokes at funerals. What else is there to do? We can sit here and cry, but we’re always seeking some sort of gusto. There’s also the friendship between Victory and Yolanda. Black sisterhood has shown me that no matter what happens, whatever’s left, we’re gonna make a celebration out of it. My optimism comes from believing that the joy I know exists in my community will persevere.

Ilana Bensussen Epstein is a writer and filmmaker in Boston.