The Essential Xochitl Gonzalez Reading Guide

Xochitl Gonzalez, a staff writer for The Atlantic, has been named a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary for her essays on how inequality shapes identity, and how gentrification warps the physical and emotional terrains of our lives.

Gonzalez, the author of the best-selling Olga Dies Dreaming and the forthcoming Anita de Monte Laughs Last, has a novelist’s eye. She gives life to socioeconomic issues, and is brilliant at describing what gentrification feels like. It’s not just about rent and real estate; it’s more personal and visceral than that. In “Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?” she portrays gentrification as a sonic phenomenon: Silence is something expected from and imposed upon working-class communities by whiter and wealthier newcomers. She is especially attuned to the peculiar dislocation of gentrification, which makes people outsiders in their own homes.

Her outsider’s sensibility brings nuance and complexity to coverage of Latino issues, including whether there is a real Latino voting bloc, what Spanish means to Latino people who don’t speak it, and the persistence of anti-Black racism in Latino communities. More recently she has brought her wry humor and moral clarity to other stories about class, labor, and culture: the Hollywood writers’ strike, the plight of librarians, the meaning of exercise in the age of Ozempic, the political and biological history of New York City’s rat infestation.

Gonzalez doesn’t just write with outrage about the exploitation of the working class and the disdain for their culture and history. She writes with love about that culture and history—about the parades and the parties and the people in their shops and the grandmothers with their Clorox. She brings that world to life and makes you love it too: summer in the city through an open window, with “motorcycles revving, buses braking, couples squabbling, children summoning one another out to play, and music. Ceaseless music.”

Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?

The sound of gentrification is silence.

I Refuse to Gentrify My Cleaning Products

The cultural legacy of Windex

New York’s Rats Have Already Won

I thought having a rat czar would be an easy win for the city. I was wrong.

‘The Whole Thing Starts With Us’

The stories we love to binge don’t come from nowhere.

In the Age of Ozempic, What’s the Point of Working Out?

The idea that we exercise to get thin may be more dangerous than ever.

The Librarians Are Not Okay

“I’ve been called a pedophile. I’ve been called a groomer. I’ve been called a Communist pornographer.”

The New Case for Social Climbing

Meritocracy is make-believe. It’s all about who you know.

Selena Didn’t Know Spanish Either

Language—even its loss—is part of what makes Latinos Latino.

Salman Rushdie, Offense, and Artistic Expression

Would we defend The Satanic Verses if it were published today?

Democrats Still Have a Latinx Blind Spot

The victory of the ultraconservative congresswoman Mayra Flores in South Texas shows what Democratic campaigns are doing wrong.

America, the Sucio

How a Spanish idiom perfectly encapsulates the U.S.’s relationship with Puerto Rico

Enough With Latino Anti-Blackness

Latinos’ racism can reaffirm white supremacy.