FOR AGENTS & EDITORS

MEXICAN HOOSIER

A Memoir

Status: In progress · Seeking representation

Logline

Mexican Hoosier is a lyrical memoir exploring identity, ancestry, land, and the in-between space of growing up Mexican American in the Midwest, where a girl learns to live as a bridge between Jalisco and Indiana, inheritance and becoming.

Overview

I grew up hearing that I had to choose: American or Mexican. Indiana or Jalisco. Cornfields or volcanic earth. But the truth is this—I was always both.

Mexican Hoosier traces my coming of age in the cultural in-between, where language, land, labor, and lineage collide. Through memory rooted in place—Midwestern cornfields and ancestral Mexican soil—the memoir explores how identity is shaped not only by borders and migration, but by the quiet negotiations that happen inside a body learning to belong to more than one world.

This is a story about becoming whole without erasing any part of where you come from.

Themes

  • Bicultural identity

  • Land, inheritance, and migration

  • Shame, belonging, and reconciliation

  • The Midwest as an overlooked immigrant landscape

Why Now

At a moment when immigration, citizenship, and national belonging are deeply contested, Mexican Hoosier offers a human-scale narrative of what it means to live between cultures in the American heartland. Rather than arguing ideology, the memoir centers lived experience—how borders are felt in daily life, memory, and place.

Audience

This memoir will resonate with:

  • bicultural and first-generation readers

  • children of diaspora

  • Midwestern readers seeking themselves reflected

  • anyone who has been told they are “too much” of one thing and “not enough” of another

Comparable Titles

  • Reyna Grande, The Distance Between Us

  • Javier Zamora, Solito

  • Sandra Cisneros, A House of My Own

  • Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

Public Writing Practice

Mexican Hoosier is currently being written in public through a daily sentence practice and weekly “Sunday pages” shared on Threads. This practice reflects discipline, voice development, and sustained engagement with the work.

Author

Isabel Vazquez Hernandez is a MexicanAmerican memoirist writing about land, lineage, and the in-between. She lives between the Midwest and Mexico.

Contact

For representation and editorial inquiries:
isabelvaz723@gmail.com