Carla (Mari) Trujillo is an American fiction writer, noted for her first novel What Night Brings, about the cultural contradictions of a Chicana lesbian growing up in a Catholic home.
[1] Trujillo would later use these early memories as inspiration for her works such as Faith and Fat Chances and Dogtown which both carry messages about class struggle and the impact of gentrification.
What Night Brings focuses on the Chicana lesbian character, Marci Cruz, and her upbringing in a conservative Catholic home in 1960s Northern California.
As she later explained, she "wanted to see more about the intricacies and specifics of lesbianism and our culture," for her this meant incorporating writings which discussed issues such as racism and familial rejection of identity.
The anthology interrogates the presence of coloniality in the academy as well as Chicanx culture at large, and explores meanings of identity construction in Chicana lives.