In 2013, after finishing my dissertation on Mexican, Puerto Rican, and U.S. Latinx science fiction, I began to think about how I could support the growth of the field, especially in the U.S. I didn't know much about publishing, but I figured that an anthology might be helpful. And so, with some inspiration from anthologies such as Walking the Clouds, So Long Been Dreaming, and Cosmos Latinos, we embarked on a new endeavor and put together Latinx Rising. The Kickstarter was a marvelous experience and a particularly powerful event as it helped to connect the growing readership of U.S. Latinx speculative fiction.
One night in 2017, while working at the University of Puerto Rico, I had a dream about my dear brother, who by any standard is successful and has a stable job. I, on the other hand, had been moving around from academic job to academic job with my family, and feeling kind of disconnected. Luckily my dream self had some helpful advice: "We have the archive." I wasn't sure at first what it meant exactly, except that it was meant to give me assurance about my life. Then I realized that it was about Latinx Rising, and that we could continue to publish anthologies. The Latinx Archive is grounded in the communities that I live in, but it is also mobile and digital. Maybe, I thought, we could even make a trilogy. And so it goes...
Hurricane Maria came that year and messed things up for a long while. It also gave us another perspective as we made Speculative Fiction for Dreamers which came out in 2021, as well as an awareness of the overarching disaster capitalism at work in our world. With environmental disaster surrounding us, and Maga fascism on the rise, we realized that it was time for a themed anthology to help us exercise our progressive utopian muscle so that we could begin to imagine something better, and so in 2025 Not Your Papi's Utopia was born.
Throughout this time period I was also working on my academic writing, mostly essays, but also The Latinx Files which came out in 2021. This was a really important book for me because it could not have been written before 2017. There were simply not enough works of U.S. Latinx science fiction with space aliens at that time, but with our anthologies my academic work could move forward. The field itself continued to move forward, and in 2023 we held the Latinx Visions conference which was a great catalyst that connected the scholars and artists interested in this field. I feel like the Latinx speculative world is thriving and that we are now ready for what's next!
So, what's the big picture? There are lots of ways to describe it but of course Octavia Butler does it best.
“When I began to do a little public speaking, one of the questions I heard most often was, ‘What good is science fiction to Black people?’... At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what ‘everyone’ is saying, doing, thinking–whoever ‘everyone’ happens to be this year.(134-135).
From her essay “Positive Obsession” in Bloodchild and Other Stories (2005)
