The instinct, when writing as a Peruvian-American, is to annotate. To explain the food (which is delicious, by the way—trust me and try it), to footnote the mythology, to make sure no reader feels left out. I've been learning to resist that. The best way to do so is to trust the reader and trust the specificity of the writing to carry its own meaning.

This shows up differently for me depending on the genre I am writing in. In the magical realism story I set in the Upper Peninsula (family trip that I highly recommend taking your little one to), the magic doesn't announce itself as Andean. It doesn't need to. It arrives the way it would in life, woven into the fabric of how a family moves through space together, what the family notices, and what goes unsaid at the dinner table. The Lake Superior shoreline and the mythology aren't in tension. They're just both true.

In horror-adjacent work, the temptation is the opposite. Horror loves its explanations. The backstory monologue, the expert character who exists to contextualize the threat. But the most frightening thing about folklore is its refusal to explain itself. La Llorona doesn't need a footnote. She needs weight. I have planned a full fractured story about La Llorona, and it is next in line on my docket.

Short fiction compounds the problem because there's no room to build a reader up. Every word is load-bearing and is expensive real estate. The choice is to write for a hypothetical uninitiated reader, which flattens everything, or to write for the story itself, which means the caldo de gallina is just caldo de gallina. The reader will know or will feel what they need to feel without knowing.

What I'm finding is that the annotation instinct isn't really about the reader. It's about my own anxiety, the worry that specificity will read as exclusion, that the work will land only in certain hands. But the stories I return to as a reader don't accommodate me. They assume me. That assumption is its own kind of welcome.

Heritage in fiction isn't background. It's not the seasoning on top of a story that works without it. When it's doing its real job, it's structural. It determines what the characters believe about luck, about obligation, about what gets spoken aloud. A thirteen-year-old who carries that in her bones doesn't stop carrying it because she's also navigating a magical academy, or a grief, or a portal to somewhere else entirely.

The work is letting it be there without staging it.