Spic vs spec - 2. Chicanos/latinos & sci-fi lit

by Rudy Ch. Garcia

continued from last week's post. . .

As with mainstream literary works, U.S. gringo-corporate publishers shy away from SciFi featuring latino characters, cultural settings and Spanish dialogue/prose. We all know why. And yes, it has changed, somewhat.

But despite the mushrooming, latino demographics, the unspoken corollary persists--Chicanos, Latinos don't read, i.e. buy, sci-fi lit. So why publish or write it? I asked such questions on the new LinkedIn discussion group, "Latino and Latina writers group" last week and got one response. Getting so few wasn't surprising. It reflects the sci-fi that's out there.

[To focus and develop this topic according to genre terms and history, I relegate fantasy lit to the next part of this series. There are several reasons for this, which I'll get to.]

A search at Amazon for "Chicano science fiction" produced 3 books, only one of which was sci-fi, Ernest Hogan's classic, Cortez on Jupiter. Next came: "Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization, and the Academy," a nonfiction book that intends to "give special attention to multicultural and feminist concerns," but in the 100 books it cites, there's not one novel by a (recognizable) latino. I can't speak to the overall content of the book.

Third came, Dogs Descend on Chiapas: Proof of Tzoquito by Dominic Ambrose, who looks like a latino, though I couldn't verify his latinismo. Nevertheless, Tzoquito appears to be a fantasy novel, rather than sci-fi.

Even a search on Wikipedia--not the final word on veracity--for Chicano sci-fi turned up 0, cero, zero.

In contrast to this paucity of material, the first La Bloga post generated several comments. Below are my takes [tagged RG] on those comments, to encourage wider discussion than just my posting.

Fellow sci-fi/fantasy author and Thursday's Bloguero Ernest Hogan wrote:
"A lot of food for thought here. We need to make contact with the Spanish-speaking, sci-fi world -- there are several blogs en español that I'm following . . . As for this side of the Border, it's an interesting story -- my dad read science fiction magazines in East L.A. back in the Forties -- in the Seventies, some Chicano activists thought that sci-fi and technology were tools of the Anglo oppressors. Of course, today Chicano hackers are part of Aztlán landscape. I guess I have some work to do . . . I almost forgot! Spic Spec Fic! I can see it on a book cover!"
RG: Sophia Flores, a bilingual boriqua at scifilatino.com, has been carrying her own torch for sci-fi on her website for years, and other than mondoernesto.com--your website--no hay mucho. Connecting to the español sci-fi world would seem appropriate.

Ah, those Chicano activists--sometimes we didn't know caca. Hogan's father and mine also read sci-fi, leading to our reading it. Is there un patron here? About the title SpicSpecFic--I think the culturally-correct gente might boycott it.

Manuel Ramos commented:
"The current issue of The New Yorker has a "sci-fi" (somebody doesn't like that term, really?) theme and, sabes qué, there's a story by the one and only Junot Diaz (and also stories/articles by Jonathem Lethem, Anthony Burgess, Ray Bradbury (QEPD), Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, etc. Le Guin's article talks about the gender ghetto of science fiction. I think her point is to write good stuff and it will be read."

RG: Well, at least one latino made it into the issue. I guess one fulfills their Spanish-speaking quota, but don't they have an ethnicity quota, too? Or did that get replaced by a "looks latino" quota?
Seriously, Junot's Oscar Wao is more than just a good read. Where most Spanish-speaking writers might exclude sci-fi thematic elements in a mainstream work, Juno utilized his novel's many sci-fi references and footnotes to underscore the absurd elements of Dominican-dictatorship history.
Oscar Wao is also unique in that a latino mainstream writer has his Dominican character Oscar de Leon obsessed with sci-fi [yes, and fantasy]. In one footnote he writes: "Where this outsized love of genre jumped off from no one quite seems to know. It might have been a consequence of being Antillean (who's more sci-fi than us?)"
As sci-fi anciano Ernest Hogan would not doubt agree, also, who's more sci-fi than us Chicanos? We whose gov't builds high-tech electronic fences to keep us agabachado, where on this side of the border our genetic make-up has been altered by radioactive fallout from nuclear testing? And on the other side, our gente live lives more gruesome than anything portrayed on the planet Lagarto in the dark sci-fi series KOP? Hunger Games is not sci-fi to us, it's just latinos' last couple hundred years surviving in or under the U.S.
Ramos's final point doesn't guarantee that our "good stuff" will get published. But take it as a call that without a lot of latinos writing this in genre, there will not be much "good stuff" created to make it to the top or ever be read.

BellaVida Letty said...
"I'm Boricua, I read sci-fi and am writing a sci-fi screenplay."
RG: Okay, Letty, first question--did your parent(s) read sci-fi? Secondly, here's our open invitation to pitch your script on La Bloga, after you've registered/copywrited it. Now, where's the Chicana sci-fi scripts?

David Garcia, Jr. wrote:
"I used to not like science fiction literature, thinking that writers didn't have to go to outer space to find characters, settings and conflicts worth writing about, when we have all of the above aplenty here on earth. Childhood's End changed all that. I realized that I liked science fiction films and that I had a limited view of science fiction lit (bug-eyed monsters). I'm now aware of the breadth of the lit genre, from hardwired to gutterpunk and have a lot of respect for its writers. How's this for a character arc: I'm the author of "Destiny's Quest: Transformation" a YA novel manuscript about a teenager who discovers that she has powers and has to rescue her brother from some hybrid monsters."
RG: La Bloga is about promoting literacy, literature and writers, so we're all for David G. Jr. plugging his MS. Actually, some of us wish more readers would use us that way. I'm going to risk saying that his MS sounds like a fantasy, not sci-fi, but that's just to clarify the sequence of this series. Fantasy will come next.

Jose Antonio Romero commented:
"I watched the movie Prometheus and my girlfriend mentioned there were no Brown gente in the film. I didn't expect there to be any. This led me think about the topic you bring up about the lack of Sci-Fi literature coming from the Latino community. I remember hearing the term afro-futurism from a compañera, and I thought about what that might encompass and thought it would be great idea to incorporate that genre into the Brown community and develop the concept. I thought about a world in which various barrios began to create a community based on healthy lifestyles that would promote quantum leaps into autonomous education. This education would give the access to leaps and bounds into a world that would be a truly advanced civilization. My imagination went wild when I thought of the ancient indigenous cultures that had existed and the barrios coming into full contact with these lost knowledge systems. What would happen if they re-examined these ancient knowledge systems and incorporated them into their daily lives and synthesized something completely unique and free from conventional advanced technology. This is a topic I feel worth touching on because it's not a popular idea that I feel gets easily overlooked because of the social stigmas conceived of the brown communities. That is why the potential of a truly rich sci-fi story coming from the barrios could and will blow away wigs."
RG: Jose Antonio raises relevant points. Sci-fi movies constitute 5 of the 10 [12 of the top 20] top-grossing US films, if your interest is dinero. And every film came from a WRITTEN script. Maybe Jose Antonio should take his interest to the composing level with his ideas, because he's got visions longing to fill blank pages.

ggwritespoetry [who lists Fahrenheit 451 as a favorite book] wrote:
"I was just talking about this with Rene Saldana [RG: the YA author?] and David Bowles at TLA last month. I am Latina, Mexicana actually. My second novel, Summer of the Mariposas from TU Books is fantasy/ magical realism, and I have another SF novel in the works. But I agree with you; we definitely, absolutely, positively need more Hispanics writing SF."
RG: Okay, gg [Pura Belpre award winner Guadalupe Garcia McCall} crossed the line between sci-fi and fantasy, but her discussion with the others is evidence of interest in the topic. Her YA book in the fantasy genre is what we need more of coming from a sci-fi Chicano/latino community of writers. We wish her well with her SF novel.

Next week I'll get more into why gg's last sentence means more than we commonly think. Keep the comments coming and please pass links to this discussion on to others.

Es todo, hoy,
RudyG