Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

It’s the summer of 2010, Instagram has just launched, and Catalina Ituralde is spending the break before her senior year at Harvard with her grandparents in Queens. There is a cricket infestation, and their incessant sound reminds Catalina’s grandfather, Fransisco Ituralde, of the loud summer nights in his hometown in Ecuador. Catalina has never been to her grandfather’s hometown, and she cannot return to Ecuador because she is undocumented.

Catalina spends the summer as an unpaid intern at “America’s third-most-prestigious literary magazine” (4). She thinks this “sound[s] like a setup for a romantic comedy” and spends her daily subway commute waiting for Woody Allen to “discover” her (4). She is about to enter her senior year at Harvard, knowing she cannot legally work after graduation due to her immigration status. However, unpaid internships don’t ask for papers, so Catalina takes full advantage of her ability to live with her grandparents. Since she was a child, Catalina loved newspapers and magazines, but her desire to be a writer came from somewhere else. She was named after a song by Manuel Vallejo called “La Catalina” and nursed a soft spot for songs named after women.