LAS MUSAS BOOK BIRTHDAY - Taco Tuesdays

Today we celebrate the new year with a brand new book birthday! Help us cheer for Taco Tuesdays by Musa Mónica Mancillas. We sat down with Mónica to learn more about this book.

Tell us about Taco Tuesdays:
This is Nacho average foodie WISH book! Mónica Mancillas explores themes of family, food, and identity wrapped up in a sweet, commercial title.

Dulce doesn’t want to spend the summer helping at her family’s restaurant, but with the business needing all the help it can get, she doesn’t have a choice. Julian doesn’t want to be in California. But his food vloger parents have relocated the family as part of an attempt to keep their marriage going, so he doesn’t have a choice, either.

When the two literally crash into each other, it’s so not the beginning of a beautiful friendship. But as they’re both forced to enroll in a cooking class together and slowly get to know each other, things get heated—and not just the tacos! Julian and Dulce each have something to learn from the other about friendship, family, community, and food.

Read more after the link...

What 3 words would you use to describe your book?
Family, food, and identity.

How would you describe your main character? Why did you create your character that way?
The story is told from the point of view of two characters – Julian Demarco and Dulce Díaz. Julian is a cute, introspective Brooklyn skater boy from a foodie family who finds himself unhappily transplanted to California after his parents separate. Dulce is (as her name implies) sweet, pretty, loyal, and staunchly dedicated to her friends, family, and her great-grandmother’s under-threat restaurant and legacy. While the two seem to come from strikingly different environments and cultural backgrounds, their strongest character traits (tenacity, dedication to family, and a talent for cooking) play against each other in a way that provides readers with both dramatic tension, humor, and romance.

What message are you hoping readers will take away from this story?
While this story is outwardly a book about two kids navigating friendship, summer crushes, and family drama, when you peel back the layers, it’s also about identity and how we can all push back against the labels society places on us. The taco has long been held in American pop culture ideology as the gold standard in Mexican cooking, but through Dulce and Fidelia, we learn that (while tacos are undoubtedly delicious) the landscape of Mexican cuisine is rich in history, complexity, variety, and elegance. In much the same way, both Julian and Dulce are so much more than what they first appear to be.

What comes next for you as an author?
I have a middle grade non-fiction book called Leyendas/Legends: 60 Latine People Who Changed the World coming out with Chronicle Books on August 26th of 2025. I am also working on two unannounced projects – a middle grade dystopian and a picture book, both tentatively scheduled for release in 2027.

What books are on your to-be-read list?
Like most enthusiastic bookish people, my TBR grows endlessly, but at the moment, I’m looking forward to finishing Erin Entrada Kelly’s First State of Being and then jumping into EL
Shen’s Queens of New York, Andrea Beatriz Arango’s Something Like Home, Malia Maunakea’s Lei and the Fire Goddess, and Kekla Magoon’s The Secret Library (to name a few).

On the adult side, I’m looking forward to reading Margaret Atwood’s The Testament, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, and Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I am also trying to make a point of enriching my library with non-fiction titles this year and have started my year with A Brief History of Misogny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice by Jack Holland. I plan to dive into The Age of Revolution by Erik Hobsbawm (who, cool fact, is my great-uncle on my mother’s side).

Photo credit: Cathyrn Farnsworth

​Mónica Mancillas is an award-winning author of books for children of all ages. Her work includes Mariana and Her Familia, The Worry Balloon, How to Speak in Spanglish, Sing it Like Celia, Taco Tuesdays, and Leyendas/Legends (Fall 2025).

Her work focuses on themes of identity, culture, and mental health, while challenging the outdated tropes that have historically left Latine voices on the margins.

Find her on social media:
Facebook: monica.mancillas
IG: monicamancillasauthor
TikTok: monicamancillasauthor
Threads: monicamancillasauthor
Bluesky: monicamancillas.bsky.social
Website: monicamancillas.com

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​Donna Barba Higuera grew up dodging dust devils in the oilfields of Central California. She was a daydreamer, constantly blending life experiences and folklore into stories. Now she weaves them into novels and picture books. 

Donna currently lives amongst the spiraling mists of the Pacific Northwest with her husband, four children, three dogs, two frogs, and hundreds of wild birds who flock to her backyard bird feeders every day.

You can find her online at www.dbhiguera.com

Like Quijana, I’m the product of two people from different cultures who fell in love and forged a new life.  ​My father is from a small town in Cuba and my mother is from a small town in Illinois. They met in Miami in high school. Growing up, I was surrounded by the loud staccato of Cuban Spanish and the slow drawl of English. Thanksgiving meant roasted turkey and lechón, stuffing and frijoles negros, pumpkin pie and arroz con leche.

Like Quijana, I was never explicitly taught Spanish by my family. Growing up in Miami, it was assumed it would be acquired by osmosis.
​Upon going to college in the midwest, I took my first formal Spanish classes.

Children from bicultural families are always confronting the concept of ‘enough.’ Quijana feels like a fraud when she attempts to speak Spanish with her cousins. ​She wonders why she should deny her mother’s culture when the kids at school call her a coconut, a person with brown skin who acts white.

​Will she ever be latinx enough, will she ever be white enough?

She exists in a no man’s land between two cultures, not feeling like she fully belongs to either.
Just as my story is reflected in Quijana’s, my own son’s is as well.
He is the product of two people from different cultures who fell in love and forged a new life. 

Ellia Ana Hill is a Puerto Rican cut paper illustrator and artist. She creates hand cut illustrations from a mix of vintage and modern papers. Her work is influenced by her familia, pop culture, toys, retro goodness, curly hair, and childhood adventures. Ellia earned a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design with an emphasis on illustration and creative writing. The No Boy is her first published children's book and is based off one of her children.

Instagram: @greenbeanbaby

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​Anika Aldamuy Denise is an award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction picture books. Her book Planting Stories: The Life of Librarian and Storyteller Pura Belpré won a Pura Belpré Author Honor, an NCTE Orbis Pictus Honor, and the Arnold Adoff Poetry Award. Anika draws inspiration for her stories from her multicultural upbringing, family, and her cuddly orange tabby, Charlie—who will surely be impossible to live with once the book is released and he becomes a minor pet celebrity. You can follow Charlie on Instagram @TheGatoGuapo. And you can find Charlie’s human (Anika) online, too.
  
​https://www.anikadenise.com
IG @Anika_Aldamuy_Denise
Twitter @AnikaDenise

Zara González Hoang is an obsessive scribbler, daydreamer, and doodler. She grew up in a house full of stories, where imagination was encouraged and one could never be sure what was truth and what was fiction. In addition to illustrating Gato Guapo, she is the author and illustrator of A New Kind of Wild and the illustrator of Mi Casa is My Home. She lives outside of DC in a magical suburban forest with her Mad Man husband, human-shaped demons, curly coated corgi, and a jungle of plants.