Buzz Words & Don't Date Rosa Santos
Designed by Mary Claire Cruz. Photography by Michael Frost.
Don’t Date Rosa Santos is a romantic comedy centering Rosa Santos, a Cuban teen living in South Florida, as she struggles with what she thinks is a curse from the sea on the Santos women—stopping them from having romantic success.
The cover evokes a South Florida feel—although Don’t Date Rosa Santos is set in a fictional town of Port Coral, it closely emulates Miami towns like Coral Gables—with its bright colors and use of yellow as an accent color. (Comparatively, many people associate places like Seattle with gray and rain, while Florida and Miami are frequently associated with yellow and sun, being the Sunshine State.) The wave mural not only acts as a way of evoking the role the sea plays in the story, but also the costal feel of the setting.
This contributes to the coding of this book being an #OwnVoices Latinx story, as indicators of the setting lead to a further conclusion and association of Miami and coastal South Florida with a large Cuban population.
But even further than this, the novel’s explicit use of Latinx-coded words on the dust jacket and cover evoke clear ties to the story inside the packaging.
The author’s name, Nina Moreno, itself suggests the #OwnVoices nature of this novel. “Moreno” and its derivatives were surnames historically popular in 16th century Spain and Portugal and later in the areas these countries colonized, specifically Latin America [7]. Similarly, the name Rosa Santos suggests a Spanish, Portuguese, or Latin American background, given its history [8].These elements combined, featured on the spine and front cover of the dust jacket, suggest the Latinidad of both the author and protagonist and the #OwnVoices nature of the story.
This can be further verified by examination of the blurbs on the back of the cover. One of the blurbs, from Lily Anderson, author of Undead Girl Gang and Not Now, Not Ever, reads
The blurb mentions the diasporic nature of the story, as well as name-dropping a popular Latinx celebrity in America, Lin-Manuel Miranda, while the interior flaps of the book explicitly cite Rosa’s Cuban heritage and Nina Moreno writing about “Latinas chasing their dreams, falling in love, and navigating life in the hyphen.”"Don’t Date Rosa Santos is magical in every sense of the word. Moreno deftly sails her readers through huge swells of emotion, highlighting the confusion and longing of both love and diaspora. If Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote YA, it would feel like this."
The explicit appearance of Latinx-coded names on the cover are active signals for consumers to understand the book’s contents and #OwnVoices Cuban story.