ICYMI: I wrote about Latino/a Speculative fiction at Tor.com (#SFWAPro)

Putting the I in Speculative: Looking at U.S. Latino/a Writers and Stories

Spanish designates the letter Y as “i-griega”—literally, the Greek i—to mark its difference from the letter I, which Spanish-speakers understand to be from the Latin even when we don’t say “i-latina” as we recite the alphabet. In choosing the title for this blog post, I reveled a bit—as only a bilingual language nerd can—in the hidden layer of significance I could give that not-so-simple I.


Until the end of July 2014, if you looked at the Wikipedia entry for “speculative fiction by writers of color” and scrolled down past the lists of African and African-American writers, Asian and Asian-American writers, etc., to the category for “Latino writers” you saw no list, just one line: “see Magical Realism.”


To add insult to injury, if you happened to click on that “see Magic Realism” link, you were taken to a list of Latin American writers of the speculative, with not a single U.S. Latino/a representative among them.


The Wikipedia entry no longer looks like it did in July, because Matthew Goodwin, a comparative literature professor and editor of the upcoming speculative fiction anthology Latino/a Rising (Restless Books, 2016), added an entry for U.S. Latino speculative fiction writers. But the omission he corrected is emblematic. The U.S. Latino/a speculative fiction writer is largely invisible to the speculative mainstream editor, publisher, reviewer and anthologist....


The thing is, to experience the tradition and sheer range of U.S. Latin@ speculative writing, you have to venture out of the usual neighborhoods and cross into the liminal borderland between genres; into the barrios of small press and website; and onto momentarily unfamiliar streets....


Let me introduce you to a few Latino/a authors whose stories you may not have read, and show you around some of the (perhaps unfamiliar) markets that have published their work.


Read the rest of the post

Five days left to fund this kickstarter for an anthology of Latin@ speculative fiction

Hey folks, there are five days left on the Latino/a Rising kickstarter and they're just over half way there. Please, if you haven't yet, support this anthology which is the first of its kind and which is really needed to change the perception that Latinos don't write (or read) science fiction and fantasy.


Junot Diaz and Ana Castillo will be included in the anthology, as will be Nesto Hogan and Daína Chaviano, among many others (including me!) and they are still open to submissions.


At a $50 donation level, you'll get a cool Latino/a Rising postcard and equally cool print by Javier Hernandez, a Latino/a Rising Tee-shirt, and the book in two ways: ebook and the print copy signed by the editor and one of the authors.


If it would be an incentive for you to go support it at the $50 level, I'll offer any of you who do (and come back here and tell me in the comments that you have pledged $50 between now and Oct. 31) any one of the following:


1) I'll tuckerize you (name a character after you) in an upcoming story.


2) I'll send you a link to a soon-to-be-written storymap or gigapixel piece of fiction with visuals, links and maybe even audio or video.


3) I'll write a piece of flash fiction (1,000 words max) to your prompt.


Yeah, it means that much to me.


I love that the anthology We See a Different Frontier had three fabulous stories by Latin@ writers in it (Fábio Fernandes, Ernest Hogan and Silvia Moreno-Garcia), but it was the exception — most anthologies have one, if any. The Latino/a anthology will be an eye-opener about the scope and range of Latin@ speculative fiction. Please help make it happen.

Nuestras Voces, Our Voices: Emerging Latina writers talk about their work - Julia Rios

Editor's note: this is the seventh in monthly series of guest blog posts in which emerging Latina writers talk about their work, their process and what inspires them.

Julia Rios is a writer, editor, podcaster, and narrator. She hosts the

Outer Alliance Podcast (celebrating QUILTBAG speculative fiction), and

is one of the three fiction editors at Strange Horizons. Her fiction,

articles, interviews, and poetry have appeared in Daily Science

Fiction, Apex Magazine, Stone Telling, Jabberwocky, and several other

places. Her website is www.juliarios.com, and she's @omgjulia on Twitter.

Embracing diversity

My father came to the United States from Yucatán, Mexico when he was a teenager. My earliest memories are filled with his melodious voice, deep and still bearing an accent that marked him as different from my mother's WASP family. Though he spoke English fluently, and even got a PhD in Psychology from the University of Southern California, his English speech patterns remained slightly off. He never taught me Spanish, but I managed to absorb some of his foreign markers all the same. To this day, I sometimes use the wrong prepositions, or not quite usual English constructions when I'm tired. "Put it in the table," I'll say. "Close the lamp."

Most of the time when that happens, it amuses me, but sometimes it makes me angry, or profoundly sad. My father wanted me to be proud of my heritage. More than once in mid-September, he took me to Mexican Independence Day celebrations on Olvera Street in Los Angeles, he made sure I knew Cinco de Mayo was not "Mexican 4th of July" like many advertisers claimed, and he shared stories and food from his home with me in between our infrequent visits to his family. But for all that, the reason my father didn't teach me Spanish was because in Southern California, Latin@s abound, and unfortunately, so does racism. My father wanted me to pass for white, to assimilate, and to have the privilege accorded to people who didn't speak Spanish at home.

As an adult, this push and pull of pride vs. shame is still confusing, and I spend a lot of time thinking about who I am, which communities I belong to, and why. I realized a few years ago that as a child I loved the show I Love Lucy, because it presented a comforting family structure. There was a white mom and a Latino dad who had an accent, yelled a lot, and also liked to sing. It was very similar to my own home. When I asked my sister if she liked it, too, she was surprised and said yes, and that it was weird we'd both liked it because it wasn't a particularly new or popular show during our childhood. It should be obvious though that there's nothing weird about us wanting to see ourselves reflected in our media.

Because of that, I have been paying more attention to what I put into my fiction lately. I started out writing with default straight white viewpoint characters, because that was what I'd understood was "normal" in commercial narratives. Now not everything I write includes Latin@ content, but I've issued an open invitation for those aspects of my background to come out and play. I think about all the other people out there who long to see representations of themselves, and I take that as challenge to embrace my own diversity.

I'm not just a Latina. I'm Mexican. I'm American. I'm bisexual. I'm a feminist. I'm left-handed. I love cats. All of these things are part of me, and none of them alone make me who I am. My story "Oracle Gretel" recently appeared in PodCastle and is forthcoming in Heiresses of Russ 2013 edited by Steve Berman and Tenea D. Johnson. It features a bi protagonist and a talking cat. My story "Love and the Giant Squid" will appear in July in Pen-Ultimate: A Speculative Fiction Anthology edited by Lisa J. Cohen and Talib Hussain. It features a character who has a lot in common with my own father, though he's very much a fictional person. I don't know what the future will bring for my writing, but I do know that all of it will be in some way Latina, because it all will come from me. If I want to encourage my Latin@ peers to stretch out and embrace their full identities, whatever they may be, I guess first I must start with myself.

Nuestras Voces, Our Voices: Long Hidden

Editor’s note: Elianne Ramos is the scheduled “Nuestras Voces, Our Voices” writer spotlight for March, but as she has been swamped and hasn’t been able to send her guest blog post yet, I wanted to introduce you, in the interim, to an anthology very much in the spirit of “Nuestras Voces, Our Voices.”

"¡Alumbra, lumbre de alumbre, Luzbel de piedralumbre! Como zumbido de oídos persistía el rumor de las campanas ...."

I read this in Guatemala more than three decades ago.

And while some of my memories of the country I called home during my earliest years have faded (or healed or diminished or become distant and pale as old photographs) the opening of Miguel Ángel Asturias’ seminal magical realist novel, El Señor Presidente, never has.

Because books shape us.

I read it as a form of resistance. It was, after all, about Manuel Estrada Cabrera, an early 20th century Guatemalan dictator heading a regime very much like the ones that would follow his. The ones that would put the country through thirty-plus years of armed internal conflict and genocide. The ones I was living under when I read the book.

I read it as an incantation against forgetting. I was young when I read it, but even my juvenile, half-formed conscience knew what this book did: it called out the present by looking at the past. It saw the dispossessed, the marginalized, the invisible. And if it could do that, couldn’t we all?

I read it as magic. Because words are the beginning of magic, and with them, we learn to make and unmake. To spell. To create speculation about what could be, or might be — if only we conjure it true.

Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History is an anthology that sets out to conjure  history true. Writer Daniel José Older, editor Rose Fox and publisher Crossed Genres describe the book (slated for release in early 2014) this way:

“Most written chronicles of history, and most speculative stories, put rulers, conquerors, and invaders front and center. People with less power, money, or status—enslaved people, indigenous people, people of color, queer people, laborers, women, people with disabilities, the very young and very old, and religious minorities, among others—are relegated to the margins. Today, mainstream history continues to perpetuate one-sided versions of the past while mistelling or erasing the stories of the rest of the world.

There is a long and honorable legacy of literary resistance to erasure. This anthology partakes of that legacy. It will feature stories from the margins of speculative history, each taking place between 1400 and the early 1900s and putting a speculative twist—an element of science fiction, fantasy, horror, or the unclassifiably strange—on real past events.”

They have enough funds to include approximately 20 stories in the anthology, and have asked a number of very accomplished speculative fiction writers to submit work to be considered for it. But they are also planning to have an open submission period, and would like to be able to gather enough supplemental funding to include 10 additional stories.

If you are a reader of this “Nuestras Voces, Our Voices” series, you already know that there are many fine, undiscovered writers that deserve to be heard. In fact, some of you are those writers. If fully funded, Long Hidden will be a book of stories of resistance, of incantation, of magic. Please help make it a reality by clicking here and pledging your support.