Ella Cerón Ella Cerón is an editor and writer from Los Angeles, California. She lives in New York City with two black cats.
Ella’s work has appeared in Bloomberg, InStyle, Teen Vogue, GQ, and other major publications.
At no point while Ella was growing up did she ever think that she was going to become a writer. When she was a kid, she wanted to actually become an actor. She auditioned for Juilliard and Carnegie Mellon. Then she thought she might be a teacher. Maybe she’d be a personal trainer. She had no clue what to do in college. Part of this is because she had to work her way through college. She had a full-time job throughout her college experience in order to help her pay for living in New York City.
So after graduating, she became…show more content… Social media editor, and an actual editor at MTV News and Teen Vogue.
Ella was born three days after Halloween. So growing up with a Halloween birthday party every year and that will inform a lot of who you are. Then you mix that in with her heritage, as a Mexican American, and Mexicans have this different tradition than Halloween, they have Dia de Muertos, and that’s a celebration of their ancestors and the people that are gone.
She always grew up with the best of both worlds, and then given it was her birthday, it was a triple celebration. She loved all of the Dia de Muertos celebrations, the Halloween costumes, and she loved the fact that it was her birthday.
So it makes perfect sense she is the way she is, as she is a little macabre and a little bit goth. She was called Wednesday Addams when she was a kid, and is still called that to this day.
Earlier drafts of “Viva Lola Espinoza” were much more rooted in magical realism, really playing with this idea of fantasy and what we know to be reality and bending these times. In the novel, there is a lot of playing with how magical realism events and things that seem otherworldly will be treated as very normal. The Gomez family believes they have a curse and people treat this as normal across various degrees of the spectrum. Some folks are very fervent about believing it. Some people treat it like it’s
