It’s a trite question, but a deadly one.

It’s also a tender tale about the perils and promises of starting over that owes as much to Mexico’s trite telenovelas as it does to its big-hearted melodramas.

To say there even is such a thing reduces a wildly diverse group into a trite narrative that I’ve spent my career trying to debunk, when not ridiculing it altogether.

Not because it wasn’t true, but because it was so predictable and trite.

For decades, the powers that be have told a very specific narrative about us: triumphalist and trite, self-congratulatory and sappy, while staying far away from our difficult parts.