Writing Between Cultures: Crafting Romance Through a Cuban-American Lens

I didn’t realize I was writing between cultures until I started questioning whether I was allowed to tell my own story. 

I grew up in a small apartment in a predominantly Hispanic city in New Jersey, surrounded not by a large extended family, but by a tight, complicated household: my parents, siblings, and a single branch of relatives. Many Latinx upbringings celebrate large, close-knit families. Mine was defined by absence rather than by the abundance most Latinx children experience. My parents had difficult and alienating relationships with much of our extended family, and that distance shaped how I understood my culture and how I felt I belonged, or didn’t. 

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In many ways, my experience of being Cuban-American was limited to what existed within our home. It showed itself with the meals my mother cooked, the music my parents played, and the telenovelas on the television. These pieces were my cultural inheritance. At the same time, I was growing up surrounded by late 90s and early 2000s American culture. This created a strange duality that left me feeling like I didn’t fully belong to either world. I was the only one in my family born in the United States, which made me feel like I was too American for my family and not entirely American when I stepped out of our little bubble. 

That in-between space, the feeling of being “not enough” either way, became the foundation of how I approach storytelling, even before I consciously understood it. 

For many writers, cultural identity shows up on the page through setting, language, or tradition. For me, it shows up most strongly in conflict. 

When I began writing More Like Enemigas, I wasn’t trying to write a cultural narrative. I simply wanted to write a romance. But the deeper I went, the more I realized that the emotional core of the story, identity, family pressure, and the weight of expectation, was inseparable from my experience as a first-generation Cuban-American. 

My protagonist, Isabella, carries the burden of proving herself in a way that felt familiar to me. Growing up, I constantly felt like I wasn’t enough. I wasn’t Cuban enough for my family or Hispanic friends. I wasn’t American enough for my white friends. And, of course, I wasn’t successful enough for my parents. As the only Cuban-American in my family, I felt like my accomplishments reflected not just on me, but on my parents. Their sacrifices, their expectations, their identity. That pressure shaped the way I saw myself, and it shaped the way I wrote Isa.

Writers are often told to “write what they know,” but what we know is rarely simple. It’s layered, contradictory, and sometimes uncomfortable. When you exist between cultures, that tension becomes a powerful tool on the page. It creates characters who constantly negotiate their identities, relationships shaped by expectations, and conflicts that extend far beyond the plot. 

In romance especially, this tension can deepen the stakes in ways that feel organic rather than forced. The push and pull between characters isn’t just about their attraction. It’s about what they represent to each other. In Isa’s case, her relationship with Valentina is complicated not only by their shared history, but by everything Isa is trying to prove and everything she’s afraid of confronting. 

Dialogue is another place where my cultural background appears.

Growing up, my siblings and I naturally blended English and Spanish, creating the informal and ever-popular Spanglish that reflected our dual identities. It wasn’t really something we thought about. It was just simply how we communicated. When I began writing dialogue, I found myself instinctively recreating that language. Not necessarily as a stylistic choice, but as a reflection of how these characters would realistically speak. 

For writers working across cultures, language can be a powerful marker of authenticity. It can also be a source of hesitation. How much is too much? Will readers understand? Will it feel forced? What I’ve learned is that authenticity often comes from trusting your instincts rather than over-explaining. Readers don’t need every word translated to understand the emotional context of a scene. In fact, leaving space for that understanding can make the experience more immersive. 

Of course, writing from a culturally specific perspective also comes with some vulnerability. 

Throughout the process of writing More Like Enemigas, I struggled with feeling like a fraud. I’m Cuban, but I’m pale. I move through the world in a way that often reads as white. I’m bisexual, but I’m married to a man. I worried that I didn’t “look” queer enough to tell a sapphic love story. I found myself asking questions that many writers with intersecting identities will recognize: Am I enough of this to write it? Am I representing this correctly?

These doubts didn’t disappear as I wrote. I had to learn how to write alongside them. 

This is one of the most important craft lessons I’ve taken from writing between cultures: You cannot wait for certainty to begin telling the truth. 

If anything, the tension you feel, the uncertainty, the questions, the fear of getting it wrong, is often a sign that you’re writing something meaningful. The goal isn’t to prevent a definitive version of a culture or identity. The goal is to present an honest one. 

In my case, that meant letting go of the idea that I needed to represent a “perfect” version of Cuban culture or a universally queer experience. Instead, I focused on writing something specific. I wrote a story about a woman who feels she doesn’t quite belong anywhere, is navigating a complicated family, and is trying to define herself on her own terms. That’s what ultimately creates connection. 

Readers don’t need a flawless representation. They need something that feels real. And often, what feels real are the messy, unresolved, and sometimes uncomfortable parts of identity that don’t fit neatly into expectations. 

Now, as both a writer and a mother, my relationship with my culture continues to change as I grow and heal. For a long time, I distanced myself from it because it was so closely tied to a difficult childhood. My relationship with Spanish faded, and I found myself losing parts of a language that was once the only one I knew. But having a daughter has made me feel the pull to reconnect. Not necessarily with the past as it was, but with the parts of my culture that I want to carry forward. 

That evolution is also shaping how I think about storytelling moving forward. 

Writing between cultures changes as you do. It’s something you will revisit, reinterpret, and sometimes reclaim over time. And that fluidity can be a powerful asset for writers. It allows your work to grow alongside you, reflecting not just where you come from, but where you’re going. 

My advice for writers navigating their layered identities is to lean into the tension rather than trying to resolve it. 

You should let your characters feel contradictory. Allow your dialogue to reflect how you actually speak. Let your conflicts extend beyond the obvious. And most importantly, give yourself permission to tell your story without proving that you belond. 

Because the truth is, the most compelling stories often come from the places where identity isn’t fixed and where belonging is uncertain. The act of writing itself becomes a way of making sense of both.

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