THROUGH FENCES, graphic novel in the Latinographix series via Mad Creek Books

THROUGH FENCES (Latinographix series)
FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMA (illus. Oscar Garza)
Mad Creek Books
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Through Fences follows the ups and downs of Latino kids and young adults in the US–Mexico borderlands:

San Ysidro, Calexico, McAllen, and back and forth across the border. A young girl’s journey north goes wrong, and now she is in a forbidding new place, away from her parents and brother, where she doesn’t understand what the adults in green are saying even as she tries to obey their rules.

Rocky, one of the few white kids in town, stands by and watches as Miguel is jumped by two of his friends. Maggie and her parents are separated at the border in a tragic accident.

Alberto’s son doesn’t understand his Mexican father’s hatred for “illegals” or his work as a border patrol agent. Alicia is a TikTok influencer who doesn’t want to grow up to be a hospital cleaning lady like her mother, but COVID complicates things. Whatever their challenges, the kids, teens, tweens, and adults in these pages are just trying to survive their everyday lives.

Vibrantly illustrated by Oscar Garza, each of these short stories brings a different perspective on the perils of living on the border while brown.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The stories told here are tough. They're honest, they're emotionally charged, and they do not pander to or play out for the gaze of oh-so-sensitive/delicate fleur wypipo who whine every time anyone tells them the unvarnished truth about what the system their privilege enables them to ignore actually does in their collective name and to their collective benefit.

I don't recommend this for under-fifteens. I do think it's a good idea to give the book to your comic-loving teen nibling/grand boy.

These are indicative of the visual idiom of the entire book. It's intense and kinetic art, it's intense storytelling, and it can't be lightly glossed over or cynically dismissed easily. Young white men in particular could use a dose of this reality. Apart from urging you to get the work in front of all the teenaged white lads you can find, I'm out of polite words to say.

THE SONS OF EL REY, intergenerational fathers, sons, and expectations with added gayness

THE SONS OF EL REY
ALEX ESPINOZA
Simon & Schuster
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the American Book Award–winning author comes a multi-generational epic spanning 1960s Mexico City to contemporary Los Angeles, following a family of Luchadores as they contend with forbidden love and family secrets.

Ernesto and Elena Vega arrive in Mexico City where Ernesto works on a construction site until he is discovered by a local lucha libre trainer. At a time when luchadores—Mexican wrestlers donning flamboyant masks and capes—were treated as daredevils or rockstars, Ernesto finds fame as El Rey Coyote, rapidly gaining name recognition across Mexico.

Years later, in East Los Angeles Freddy Vega is struggling to save his father’s gym while Freddy’s own son Julian is searching for professional and romantic fulfillment as a Mexican American gay man refusing to be defined by stereotypes. The once larger-than-life Ernesto Vega is now dying, leading Freddy and Julian to find their own passions and discover what really happened back in Mexico.

Told from alternating perspectives, Ernesto takes you from the ranches of Michoacán to the makeshift colonias and crowded sports arenas of Mexico City. Freddy describes life in the suburban streets of 1980s Los Angeles and the community their family built as Julian descends deep into the culture of hook-up apps, lucha burlesque shows, and the dark underbelly of West Hollywood, The Sons of El Rey is an intimate portrait of a family wading against time and legacy, yet always choosing the fight.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The very idea of luchadores is Exotic to me, in the settler-colonial sense. I am as far from a wrestling fan that it is possible for someone to be. So, well, what's the appeal of this story to someone like me?

The very idea of the immigrant journey.

Immigrants are the lifeblood of the US on economic and cultural levels. The country wouldn't exist without us. (The Native Americans would doubtless see this as a plus.) The present cultural conversation around immigrants and their role across the world demands that we see the actual, real humans in these roles not abstractions of Otherness. The best way I know to do that is to learn the stories that immigrants tell us. Author Espinoza, infant immigrant to the US, knows the life he's writing about as a grown queer man.

What he does in this novel is to open the world of men whose lives are lived in the weighty spotlight of expectations. The ones they have, the ones their families—born, chosen, made—have, the ones US culture imposes. Exploring that interplay is fertile ground for stories, for secrets, for endless surprises...mostly the surprise, evergreen, of how very much of a miracle it is that there are any adult survivors of childhood. Fathers aren't usually much good at parenting because, well, where would most men learn it? Immigrant fathers don't even have the acquisition of culture to pass down, so these luchadores are actually very lucky in that they have this familial tie to their fathers. Of course, the links in that chain are all shaped very differently. A gay son isn't going to follow his father into the family trade when it's so explicitly homophobic, is he. And, to be honoest, that surprises me: Lucha libre is vivid, male-centered, and as close to drag as it's possible to be without falsies and heels being involved. (Plenty of wigs, though.) It veers at the last second into that other drag-adjacent cosplay genre, the superhero/supervillain dichotomy.

The women in the story are peripheral, and that is (I believe) by design. If it's going to bother you not to read yet another take on immigrant mother pluckily overcomes cultural and patriarchal barriers story, there's shelves of books that will stroke your needy story parts. The existential stakes aren't, for once, set by the women but by and for men. The women aren't consulted or considered. How very unexaminedly patriarchal. You've been warned.

For #PrideMonth, it's a dads-and-lads custom-made celebration of the bond we either fail to form or miss feeling; it's a clear-eyed look at the gay-son-defies-tradition tale so popular in our group; and a call to acceptance of nonwhite men in our wider community. It's also, in Author Espinoza's award-winning tradition, a delight to read on the language level. Don't expect a deep dive into the world, and language, of the luchadores...our focus is definitely on the people, the family they form and change. They live in the intense, hyperreal fakeness of lucha libre, but they spend little time examining it. As you do. That means as a consequence that the reader doesn't examine it, either. Go in to the read knowing what's on offer and avoid disappointment, says me.

The Mexican backstory is, in my view, scanty. It's not meant to be a knock...it's not the story solely of El Rey Coyote...but it does seem to me that another chapter in Michoacán would've been very welcome. The ending is rushed, and contains a plot thread that's...obscure...for the vast majority of the book. That missing half-star is down to my sense that it was pretty much just sprung on me, though I hasten to say that it did not feel as though it was parachuted in from above. It just wasn't given any oxygen until the ending. Again, best to know now, not come up suddenly upon the end and think, "...wait...".

Not my perfect read, but one I enjoyed very much indeed. A terrific #PrideMonth read.

PEDRO & DANIEL, when home is not The Safe Place it should be

PEDRO & DANIEL
FEDERICO EREBIA (illus. Julie Kwon)
Levine Querido
$19.99 hardcover, available 20 June 2023

Rating: 4* of five, doubtless the full five or even more for its target audience

The Publisher Says: Pedro and Daniel are Mexican American brothers growing up in 1970s Ohio. Their mother resents that Pedro is a spitting image of their darker-skinned father; that Daniel likes dolls; that neither boy plays sports. Both are gay and neurodivergent. They are alike, but they are dissimilar in their struggles, their dreams, their approach to life.

Pedro & Daniel is a sweeping and deeply personal novel that spans from childhood, through their teen years, and into adulthood. Theirs is a bond that won’t be broken. Together they endure an abusive home life, coming out, first loves, first jobs, and the AIDS pandemic, in a coming-of-age story unlike any other.

Despite everything, there is much joy in the stories in the book. Their resilience and special bond help the boys face one evil after another. While Pedro suffers more at home, Daniel is particularly susceptible to the malevolence of the outside world.

They are similar: gay, neurodivergent Latinos in love with all things Mexico.

Son tal para cual.
They are cut from the same cloth.

They are different: Pedro is darker-skinned, oppressed, repressed, introverted, and agnostic. Daniel is precocious, carefree, mischievous, religious, and unguarded.


Mismo perro, distinto collar.
Same dog, different collar.

CW: References to domestic violence, child abuse, homophobia, colorism, racism, clergy abuse, suicidality, sex, and death.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The survivor always writes the history. Pedro, the in-book pseudonym for Dr. Federico Erebia, a retired physician, who is also an artist, a woodworker, an author, and an illustrator, here tells the story of the horrifying, abusive family life led by himself and his late brother Daniel. Their boyhood having roughly coincided with my own, and their immigrant parents being much like the immigrant parents I knew in South Texas, the dichos and the interspersed poetry with prose, the cultural touchstones were all bone-deep familiar. What added to my sense of coming home was the young men's comings-out, internal and public, between themselves quietly and subtly; being gay in a deeply religious and brutally homophobic culture, during the peak terror of the AIDS crisis, only added to my anxious sense of identification with them.

What makes this story ideal for its youthful intended market is the absolute honesty and clarity of Author Erebia's prose; he couldn't tell a lie in these words, or even invent too much, because the ring of truth is absent when he does. He also never softens any blow, or pretends what hurt wasn't that bad, or helped grow him up, as other authos have in pursuing similar themes. He never takes the tack that it will all turn out okay; his belovèd brother dies of AIDS.

Love does not conquer all. What Love does is help one bear all that misery hateful bigots heap on you from before you know why they hate you. This is honest and it is helpful to young people to be told the truth. Things can hurt so bad in the moment that no one is surprised that you would consider ending your life. No one who's experienced hatred and rejection, however it's presented, is at all ever going to judge you for that. I do enjoy a story that tells young gay boys and girls all that, as well as implicitly supports the knowledge of no you aren't imagining it; yes, they do mean it; but crucially importantly you can and are wanted by others you haven't met to survive all of it. This story says loud and clear the truth: IT DOES GET BETTER.

Why I only rated it 4 stars of five is I found myself almost chanting the metrical dichos and poetic snippets, in that read-aloud to infants cadence. I don't enjoy that sensation. It's not aimed at me, so I present this as a reason, not an excuse. Others have other ideas about this facet of storytelling, and it works in the rap/hiphop/modern spoken word generation a treat. For me and those of my tastes, exercise caution in your consumption.