"Anita de Monte Laughs Last" is a 2024 novel by Xochitl Gonzalez (author of Olga Dies Dreaming). The titular character is loosely based off the late Cuban-American artist, Ana Mendieta.
The novel alternates between the perspectives of Anita de Monte, an "earth-body" Cuban-American sculptor, and Raquel Toro, a Puerto Rican third-year Art History student. In The '80s, Anita slowly ups her way in the art world with her unique style. When her growing fame threatens to overshadow that of her white husband, Minimalist sculptor Jack Martin, he throws her out the window of their apartment to her death, after which he has her art put under lock and key, out of the public eye.
Fast forward to 1998. Raquel is set to do her thesis on Jack Martin's work, but in the process she learns about Anita and her work. Meanwhile, Raquel meets and falls in love with Nick, a rich white Brown graduate who provides her with plenty of connection into the art world, and starts out to be a loving boyfriend.
Tropes present:
- Alpha Bitch: Margot is the unofficial leader of the Art History Girls, and is as bitchy as they can get. At one point, when Raquel reveals that she's seeing Nick, she holds the latter hostage unless she admits that she is a talentless, poor brown Latina girl who only got into Brown because of affirmative action and is using the wealthy, white Nick as her meal ticket.
- Amoral Attorney: Ron Rosen, Jack's defense lawyer, learns about Anita's interest in Santeria and decides to exploit that angle to make her look unhinged and create reasonable doubt as to her murder.
- Animal Motif: Bats. In pre-Hispanic cultures such as the Taino bats are representatives of the dead and perceived as mediators between the living and the deceased. They dwell in caves, which were seen as portals to the underworld. After Anita dies, she meets a spirit who takes the form of a bat to visit his lover and bring him mice as a gift. This gives her the idea of haunting Jack in the form of a bat.
- Antagonist in Mourning: Jack occasionally tears up for Anita's death, mainly for how lonely he feels without her. He still does not regret how he treated her in life, though. Nor does it make him turn himself in for her murder.
- Asshole Victim: In-universe. Linda, Nick's mother, minimizes Jack Martin's alleged murder of Anita by saying that she was a "horrid woman. Loud, pushy Cuban thing and not a lot of talent," and "It’s not like he threw Frida Kahlo out a window."
- Bilingual Bonus: Anita's thoughts about Ingrid, Jack's mistress: ¿Qué clase de puta aparece en el funeral de la esposa? (What kind of a whore shows up at the wife's funeral?)
- Brief Accent Imitation: At a retrospective for Jack Martin's work, Anita gets fed up with him acting like she's not a serious artist like him and like he personally rescued her from a life of poverty in Cuba. So she stands up on her chair and gives a speech in broken English (she's completely fluent) with an exaggerated Cuban accent:"Jooo all know Yack is a briyiant arteest, but no many peeple know Yack es un oomanitarian muy grande."
- Country Matters: Jack Martin calls his deceased wife's sister "that mousy cunt" for having little to say in front of him yet having a lot to say in depositions about his verbal abuse, bad temper, and getting frightened calls from Anita in the middle of the night.
- Fatal Flaw:
- For Anita, it's her tendency to put on a show. Even as she's falling out of the 24-story window, her final thoughts are how she could've just quietly divorced Jack and sent him a letter instead of taunting him to his face.
- For Jack, it is jealousy. He claims that nobody would have known who she was if she had not married him, even though she had won plenty of prestigious prizes. After her death, she comes back as a ghost and even messes with one of his installations, creating shapes suggestive of female anatomy. He is infuriated when the pieces she messed with get "better reviews than [he'd] gotten in ten years."
- Freudian Excuse: Claire and her friend's overall bitchiness is due to them being secretly in love with each other, adding to the fact that Margot's parents are homophobic.
- Internalized Categorism: Aside from Raquel, Mavette is the only other person of color in the Art History Girls (she's Arabic). Coming from a wealthy family, she considers fine European art to be superior, and barely does a thing to stand up for Raquel when she gets bullied by Margot and Claire. Unsurprisingly, Mavette is not thought of too highly precisely because she is a person of colour, but the white girls only keep her around as the token POC who will validate their racist beliefs.
- It Amused Me: The deceased Anita's justification for tormenting her husband and his mistress by taking the form of a bat and attacking them: "What can I say? Can a girl not have a little fun?"
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Anita feels like an afterthought at a showing of her own artwork. When nobody else seems to care that a discussion about feminist art practices involves two white men (in fact, she is chastised for pointing it out) all the prints of her work start crashing off the wall, one after the other. The organizer claims it had to do something with the heat in the building but Anita attributes it to the energy brought into the room correcting its course.
- Our Ghosts Are Different: Anita spends years haunting and tormenting Jack by appearing to him in the form of a bat and biting him, or by altering his installations so that they reflect her art, not only for murdering her, but for doing everything in his power to bury any recognition of her artwork.
- Poltergeist: What ghost!Anita likes to do to haunt Jack: she moves pieces in his minimalist installations to drive him crazy, and in one instance so that they reflect her artistic POV more than his.
- Spicy Latina: The white Art History Girls believe Raquel to be this, accusing her of sleeping with her advisor to secure the coveted internship with Belinda Kim, and using her white boyfriend as a ladder.
- Take That!: Plenty.
- Performative diversity in academia is picked apart by many characters, particularly Raquel, who calls out the university for promoting physical diversity by admitting students of color, but does nothing to accommodate them. There is also the radical promotion of Eurocentric curricula that effectively alienates them.
- White feminism is discussed in-length by ghost Anita. She rips apart the many white women (like Tilly and Ingrid), who are charmed (or romanced) enough by Jack to bury her work while elevating his (ignoring his sexist views on women). She also points out the hypocrisy in the white feminists whose radical movements repeatedly exclude women of color, and how their racial privilege is used by white men to help oppress people of color.
- Traumatic Haircut: Raquel treasures her long, curly hair as it had been carefully cared for by her and her mother. So when Nick deliberately cuts it all off (when she had only asked him to trim it), she has a nervous breakdown. This is one of her reasons for breaking up with him.
- Very Loosely Based on a True Story: Anita de Monte and Jack Martin are based on artists Ana Mendieta
and Carl Andre, who was acquitted on murder charges after her death. Per The Other Wiki, exhibits of his work have been met with protests from Mendieta's supporters. - Weight Woe: Raquel starts controlling her food intake during her year as a psychology major. After switching her major, she enjoys food again as her confidence increases. Then she meets rich white senior Nick, who starts influencing what she wears and eats under the façade of "helping her". He buys her a beautiful designer dress—and extra-firm control top pantyhose to go with it.
- White Man's Burden: Jack parades Anita as his little brown wife whom he personally saved from poverty in Cuba (despite the fact that she grew up in a wealthy family). He revels on her 'inherent' vulnerability as a Latina in a racist white world (one that he is more than happy to uphold), as this would keep her entirely dependent on him. When her art proves to be a revolutionary hit with the other artists, with Anita publicly mocking her husband's racist views on her, he begins to see her as a threat to his fame, and throws her out of a window.
