All Booked | Books from South of the Border

Hello fellow summer readers!

While the sun may still be hiding behind a thick marine layer, leaving us with an extended June Gloom, it’s still summertime, which means it’s time to grab that stack of books you’ve been meaning to read and break through the springtime reading slump. I’m Indy news reporter Ryan P. Cruz, and when I’m not running around the town covering our city’s daily and weekly happenings, I try to spend my free time reading and finding some new voices in contemporary literature that inspire me to grow in my own writing and reporting.

This week, I’m taking over the All Booked newsletter while our usual host, Emily Lee, is on maternity leave (congrats on your new baby boy, Emily and family!) and I’m very excited to share some of the books I recently read by authors who are pushing the boundaries of fiction by combining deeply entrenched Latin American legends, symbols, and myths alongside modern-world characters navigating the ever-changing world. These books, mostly written by Mexican-based authors, have really helped me understand my own heritage — my mother was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, before moving to Santa Barbara in her childhood — by exploring the experiences of Latin Americans both before colonization and afterward.

Below are four books from south of the border to get your summer reading fix. I encourage you all to try one out and to dive into the deep and fantastic worlds created by some of the best Latin American authors that are still working.

This might be the best book I have read in the past year, and I won’t stop recommending it to anybody who will listen. Yuri Herrera has emerged as one of the brightest political and literary minds to come out of Mexico recently, and though it wasn’t the first book he wrote, Signs Preceding the End of the World was his first work to be translated to English, and it landed him the 2016 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction.

In Herrera’s sparse and simple storytelling style, he tells the story of a young woman, Makina, traversing the modern-day U.S.–Mexico border to bring two messages to her brother on the other side. But why I love this book so much is that Makina’s journey is told through the structure of the Aztec legend of a soul crossing over into the afterlife: Each chapter, character, and situation parallels the symbols found in the ancient world.

At just more than 100 pages, Herrera is able to draw powerful parallels between modern and ancient beliefs, all while exploring the heavy topics of immigration and border policies between the U.S. and Mexico.

In a similar way, Guadalajara-born Juan Pablo Villalobos’s fifth novel, Invasion of the Spirit People, has the tone of a fable or old-world story, all while tackling the struggles of a modern-day immigrant.

In this book, we follow immigrant and vegetable seller Gastón in “an unnamed city, colonized by an unnamed world power,” as he navigates three main problems: putting his ailing dog, paradoxically named Kitten, to sleep humanely; finding a new space to save his friend’s failing restaurant; and coming to terms with the news that human life may well be the byproduct of an ancient alien attempt at colonization — and that those aliens might intend to make a return visit.

This book takes a much lighter tone, and I found myself laughing alongside the characters as they discover the absurd and nonsensical logic behind racist and xenophobic ideas.