As the queer Chicana writer Myriam Gurba deftly notes in her essay “It’s Time to Take California Back from Joan Didion,” describing the way Didion’s settler colonial language inflects her writing about both Californian and Mexican landscapes: “México is something for gringos to do in their piyamas, o quizás en cálzon, on rainy days. . . . The further south [Didion and her family] drive, the more her prose approaches the infernal.”
