 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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