Invoking a Mexican slang term that translates roughly as “white girl,” Güera considers how the body’s meaning as a racialized, gendered, and sexualized surface shifts as it crosses linguistic and national borders. Rebecca Gaydos’s disarmingly direct addresses slip between the spaces of story and reality, traversing the many meanings of “appearance”: not only the physical image and its attendant assumptions, but also the act of arriving or becoming visible.

Moving between Los Angeles, Oaxaca, Mexico City, and Talcott, Virginia, Güera traces the way touristic desire, folklore, and stereotype transform the languages we speak and the bodies we inhabit.

The author was a Townsend Fellow in 2013-14.