Yesteryear: Reactionary Literature & Why Trad Wifeism doesn’t work for Latinas

by Cynthia Salinas Cappellano

Editor Note: Following the trilogy of ‘it’ books this year (Lost Lambs, Strangers, and now Yesteryear), I was hungry for reviews that tackled gendered topics like trad wives and divorce through a broader lens. What begins as a book review quickly (and thankfully for you reader) evolves into a personal reflection on how race, ethnicity, and class interact with gender performance through the writer’s exploration of the history of the women in their family.

Today, I sourced a book from scratch. Braving a Long Story Books’ pop-up at Stereo, full of stroller-pushing moms and women carrying weiner dogs in tote bags, only to find that the book sold out within minutes. I drank a lavender soda as a consolation, and then off to the Atlanta Beltline I went, until I found the last copy at their newly installed vending machine. By then, Taylor Sheridan’s sense of pioneer adventure was already within me for this read, because, divas, I was laboring.The book’s reading frenzy comes amid the announcement that Anne Hathaway bought the film rights to Caro Claire Burke’s novel and will be starring in the adaptation. Yesteryear follows a Trad Wife Influencer sent back in time to 1855 and forced to live out the lifestyle she promotes online without the help of producers, ranch hands, or nannies.

If you’re expecting a Trad Wife Influencer to be punished by being sent back to 1855, then this is not the book for you. Or at least that seems to be why so many readers set out to buy this book from the disappointed GoodReads review section. Reader reactions want Natalie Heller Mills to be humiliated by 19th-century domestic labor and put to the task by the Montana frontier. But Burke’s goal here isn’t to dole out punishment to a “bad woman.”

Burke’s novel reacts to a need in the book market to see Trad Wife Influencers fleshed out in text from their appearances on our algorithms or in The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. She’s pulling back the curtain on how gender performance is the real product that Trad Wives Influencers are selling to their followers. Followers who are largely women who have none of the financial literacy their faves do when it comes to $300 charcuterie boards. Burke examines why we, as an audience, are so enamored with the aesthetic.

For many white women, Trad Wifeism is nostalgic of a time period where women could recede from public life into the home, but for Latinas, it’s an inheritance of domestic labor.

For me, it’s a familial cycle I was ready to break out of since I saw my mom wake up at dawn to prepare my dad a freshly-squeezed glass of orange juice before both of their jobs at our family business. It was not tapping into “divine feminine energy,” it was an obstacle to her daily life. I saw her spend many evenings racing to get dinner cooked before my dad came home. The entire mood of the house depended on her getting these chores done to his satisfaction.

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Caro Claire Burke’s main character, Natalie Heller Mills, is clearly modeled after the Nara Smith or Hannah Neeleman archetype: a conventionally attractive woman who slings domestic labor and gender performance as aspirational content to millions of followers. The sourdough starter made in couture, perfectly dressed kids, golden hour lighting for b-roll of manicured hands.

But at the heart of the dream is the reality that receding into the home in today’s economy necessitates immense wealth to mask the burden of labor. The privilege to relinquish one’s self into homemaking without financial panic is what followers are responding to. It’s not doing laundry with natural detergents or raising children in isolation. It’s the freedom to opt out of capitalism: rent anxiety, student loan debt, corporate burnout.

As Natalie says in the book, “What I didn’t say to Shannon: disappearing is an expensive magic trick. Did these girls have the funds to pull it off? What I said instead was much simpler: “Go on.”” (Burke, 275).

Trad Wives like my mom labored: preparing each one of my dad’s meals, cutting his hair, deep cleaning the house alone, doing all secretarial tasks for his business. (Before childcare was involved, which included braiding my hair in elaborate styles). Trad Wife Influencers aestheticize that labor to capitalize on economic dread as the middle class narrows. The content is carefully packaged to look like a soft life with endless slow mornings.

The distinction between Trad Wife and Trad Wife Influencer is one we’re supposed to derive for ourselves here. Trad Wives work, but Trad Wife Influencers, well, they do nothing.

This is the driving force behind Rue’s famous Euphoria monologue, “Maddy knew who she was from a very early age… ”For Maddy, a former pageant girl, she was primed for a life of gendered performance, “because you didn’t have to be the prettiest or the tallest or the blondest or the whitest. You just had to have fucking confidence.”

Maddy, like us, isn’t interested in actually being a Trad Wife but in financial independence. “She realized how much she liked not doing anything…” When she studies the women who come into her mom’s salon, it’s not because they’re the best at making sourdough starter, it’s because “none of them actually did anything.”

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Who gets to be a Trad Wife?

As a culture, we’re so intrigued by the role of the Trad Wife, because it’s one that historically wealthy white women have always performed. In Angela Davis’ 1981 essay Women, Race and Class, she argues that the “housewife” was never a reality but simply a class symbol exploiting the labor of Black women, low-income women, and immigrant women of color working inside suburban homes. Trad Wife Influencers are just the latest response to the collapse of the middle class by repackaging that era as an escape. But nostalgia for the “good old days” ignores who made that dream possible.

Perhaps this is why we find Nara Smith’s success an interesting subversion of who we expect to be a Trad Wife Influencer. Nara Smith, as a Biracial Black woman, has aesthetically achieved what was previously denied to Black women. Again, the “privilege” to be a Trad Wife is what followers gravitate towards.

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Latina Trad Wives: Not Too Far in the Rearview Mirror

Latina Trad Wives also provide another lens to this. Their pink Hello Kitty kitchens and “cooking my man’s lonche at 5 am” captions do not communicate the same polished sterility as mainstream Trad Wives. Their aesthetic is less rooted in wealth, but in supporting their blue-collar husbands, recognizable to any of us who saw our mothers and grandmothers do the same each morning growing up.

Unlike affluent white trad-wife influencers choosing to abandon corporate ambition or forego Ivy League education, Latina trad-wife content documents routines many of us already inherited. For Latina women, this is not a subversive choice or a glamorous alternative; it is simply what we’ve watched generations of women do.

Influencers like Jennifer Mendoza film themselves waking before sunrise with their hair in chongos, warming tortillas on the comal, throwing jamón onto the stove, brewing coffee, and warming up their husband’s car before work.

What’s more interesting to me is how differently Latinas interpret this trad wifeism as a neotraditional aesthetic. Some Latina Trad Wife Influencers view it through a traditional lens as their “role” to stay home and cook and childrear. They’re “supporting their man,” but would a dual-income household support him further?

Other Latina Trad Wives view it as cultural participation in addition to working their 9-to-5. @alexamariesa on TikTok frequently captions her videos, “cook with me after my 9-5 as a Latina corporate girly and wife.” Alexa says in one video, “At the end of the day, it’s not about who cooks or cleans, it’s about a partnership, if you know what I mean.”

Ironically, both have content that looks virtually the same: cooking traditional meals, wooden kitchen tools, and tidying up montages. “Choice feminism” reframes this labor as empowerment and masks the burden, even if lovingly chosen.

The work we saw men do ended after eight or ten hours. The work we saw our mothers and abuelas do never ends: desayuno, lonche, cena, wiping mocos, preparing backpacks, folding laundry late into the night after returning from work themselves.

That is the artifice of patriarchy: to convince women that fulfillment is in endless domestic chores.

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Disinheriting Domestic Labor

For me, marriage and servitude to a man have felt like a generational trap. Cinderella, Ariel, and Belle could never convince me that marriage was inherently romantic. My abuela in her pueblo, Juchitán, gave birth to twelve of my abuelo’s children after “se la robaron.” When I ask her about her marriage story, all she says is, “No tenía un vestido blanco.”

Before marriage, she was a maid for a Spanish family, preparing meals for the family and caring for their children. There was never a life she didn’t know outside of survival or caregiving to others. Like many Juchitecas, she received no formal education. If she had a dream, she never told us, or could never visualize one for herself.

My mother would also go on to work for the same Spanish family before immigrating to Santa Barbara, California, in her twenties. She would go on to marry my father and spend years restructuring her life around his, but when she finally divorced after years of cohabitation, there was little infrastructure to support her.

She had to return to the job market, in one of the most vulnerable positions: an immigrant woman of color with limited job experience. She began her long uphill battle, working odd jobs before obtaining her GED, and eventually settling into office work in her 50s. Through the work of therapy, she unwove the narrative she grew up with: a woman must endure to build a happy home.

Generations of women before me have suffered in the position of wife and mother without autonomy. So when I see a perfectly lit shot of a loaf of bread on the windowsill, it feels more like The Yellow Wallpaper than a righteous return to gender roles.

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What’s not being filmed: the risk of being a Trad Wife.

I want to spend my 20s single in my own apartment, making mistakes, building a career, and having as much sex as possible. I want to feel my frontal lobe seal in place without children asking for fruit snacks, that’s empowering to me, therapeutic even.

Sure, corporate life can suck, but I can always get another job, another degree. An independent bank account will never put me in the same position as being at the whim of a husband who is the sole provider for the household.

Trad Wife content is frozen in time for the perfect scenario: a home-owning family with two elementary-aged kids in a stable economy where the husband goes to work, and the wife stays at home. And when the kids leave the home? Or the husband cheats? Is baking from scratch or prepping masa for tortillas enough? What happens to the Trad Wife in her fifties who’s never paid into social security income if her husband leaves her?

Disinheriting domestic labor as a life path feels much more subversive than bowing out of corporate life. After watching countless women invest their lives into the role of mother and housewife, I’m turning the energy to me and my ambitions, that’s a path I know I can never regret.

Cynthia Salinas Cappellano is a writer based in Atlanta. A 2024 graduate of Emory University, they hold a BA in Film & Media Studies and Creative Writing. Cynthia was the 2022 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize and a 2023 finalist in Agnes Scott College’s 52nd Annual Writers’ Festival. Their poetry has been published previously in Peachfuzz Journal and American Weirdo Magazine. When not writing, they document Atlanta’s nightlife through photography, write screenplays, and maintain a healthy Substack.