by Ernest Hogan
It’s like I don’t as much create characters as meet them. It was that way with Paco Cohen.
I was working as a janitor, sweeping out classrooms and cleaning toilets at an elementary school. I wore a baseball cap and a bandana. Just another Chicano janitor.
I was still a sci-fi writer at heart, thinking about Mars, because Phoenix seems so much like a Mars colony to me. I started getting these flashes of a guy like me on Mars . . .
They weren’t very clear at first. I needed to experience some things before I could write this story. While doing the job, I soaked up the way I was treated and people reacted to me.
I learned a lot from my Chicano—actually, most of them were Chicanas—coworkers, learning about their lives and the important part Mexican music played. They grew up, worked, and fell in love to this soundtrack.
Eventually, Paco came into focus, and began talking to me.
It wasn’t easy, like picking up a signal from a distant world. I had to tap into feelings about my down-but-not out writing career. Paco’s life was similar.
Soon I was telling people, “He’s gonna say stuff like, My mama would say, ‘Mijo, don’t be a yutz!”
And people would say,”You’ve got to write that!”
The result was the novelette “The Rise and Fall of Paco Cohen and the Mariachis of Mars.” The story of a man who was crucified on a vampire cactus by an interplanetary development corporation, then patched himself back together. The corporate take-over of Mars from a point of view of a guy who has to wipe the red dust off everything. Chicano stuff. I was amazed when it sold to Analog, the magazine that first serialized Dune.
I wasn’t thinking of sequels or franchises, but Paco wasn’t done with me. What would this Mars, and Paco’s life be like with the corporation versus the Chicano-style rasquache lifestyle of the workers, and the awakening of ancient Martian lifeforms. The result was "Death and Dancing in New Las Vegas” (the bilingual glitch on purpose, a nod to “the Los Angeles Times” and other artifacts of my SoCal upbringing) that also sold to Analog.
Would I be able to find success by pretending to be a venerable “hard science” writer?
It didn’t happen. By the time I wrote “Flying Under the Texas Radar with Paco and Los Freetails,” I had been told that what I have been sending Analog was “too surrealistic and cartoony” (my writing described in a nutshell). I couldn’t help it–that’s the way Paco’s life–and mine–went. This one was about how and why he got from Texas to Mars, and his youth as a rocking young rebel, with maybe some parallels to my life. It ended up seeing print in Latin@ Rising, that became Latinx Rising in the next edition.
And Paco still wouldn’t leave me alone. His world, his life, kept growing in the back of my brain, turning into stories . . .
Ben Bova, who published Cortez on Jupiter, and High Aztech liked these stories, and encouraged me to keep writing them and make them into a novel, like Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. I had thought about it, and was glad he liked the idea.
Then Covid killed him. Now I have to write the book, so I can dedicate it to him.
In the next couple of months, if this year doesn’t get too apocalyptic, another Paco story, “A Wild and Wooly Road Trip on Mars,” will appear in Xicanxfuturism: Gritos for Tomorrow / Codex II. I’ll be making a lot of noise about it.
I also have a file with all the stories, notes, some additional bridging material, and part of another story. It’s about time I focused on finishing the novel I plan to call Paco Cohen is Alive and Well and Living on Mars. A good chunk of it is already written, and I am getting old.
I just hope that no thugs are watching me, waiting to impale me on the fang/spines of vampire cactus.
Ernest Hogan is alive and well and going stark, raving Xicanxfuturist no matter what pendejos running the world do.
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