Not Your Papi’s Utopia: Latinx Visions of Radical Hope
Matthew David Goodwin, Alex Hernandez, Sara Rivera, eds.
Paperback
ISBN: 9781957840352
Mouthfeel Press, December 2024, 306 pgs

You need to read this book.

Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself. But if you remember one thing from this review, I want it to be that single line: You need to read this book.

As I’ve done from time to time, I’m getting to this book a bit late. In my defense, I initially wrote down an incorrect publication date when I started reading; also, I only found out about it quite late. All the same, I see Not Your Papi’s Utopia as an important book, and I doubt that many people reading this column have heard of the press or seen the title. I believe reviewing a title dating all the way back to last December is not only forgivable, but also essential.

Mouthfeel “is a Latinx, woman-owned press,” founded in El Paso, Texas, in 2009, “with the goal of publishing new and established poets from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, writing in English and Spanish.” As happens, the remit has expanded a bit, and according to their site, they’ve published over sixty books of poetry. They’ve also published a few fiction titles, but it looks like they haven’t published a book quite like Not Your Papi’s Utopia before. I really hope they do more in this vein, and I’d be eager to read them.

Not Your Papi’s Utopia brings together a wonderful assortment of original stories and poetry, plus a handful of illustrations by Luis Valderas. There are a few names here that folks who love speculative fiction may recognize, such as Night Beast author, Ruth Joffre, and Sordidez author, E.G. Condé; folks like Gabriela Santiago and Rodrigo Culagovski, whose work has popped up in various SFF magazines; and more. There are also a number of authors whose names many SFF readers probably won’t recognize, which I see as a strength of high-quality anthologies, something I’ve mentioned in a few other reviews: Bringing different authors to different readerships benefits everyone. All told, the publisher’s page lists twenty-five authors.

The book is separated into three sections: The Utopian Question, The Utopian Odyssey, and The Utopian Enclave. I’ll discuss a handful of entries and leave the rest for your discovery. I think that for this subject, more than for some, it’s important to know that as a reviewer, I am less interested in certain questions that some reviewers and critics would find paramount, especially when it comes to the topic of “Utopia.” Many reviewers would consider what they see as “classical” science fiction stories and compare the overall book to those works, as well as render judgment on how well the individual stories speak to the titles of the sections they are in. My reviews are more for people who want to know, simply, “Are these kick-ass stories? Will I enjoy reading them?” And, for the many readers out there who feel that those classical texts don’t represent them at all, “Will I see myself in any of these stories? Will they speak to my concerns?” For those readers: Yes, you will indeed find kick-ass stories. And yes, even if you are not Latinx (I’m not), you will find that these stories speak to you in ways that many of the “classical” science fiction texts did not; and in this, seriously, you will find joy. At least, I know the joy I feel when I read awesome stories that also speak to the things that concern me as a person, and this is part of why books like this one are so important.

The anthology starts strong with “Somewhere in Pico Rivera Heaven” by Lesley Téllez. This piece, which is beautifully imagined, is both clever in the ways it points to social issues and touching without being saccharine. Tere is in a place that is woman-centered yet familiar. It’s also community-centered, and the women with her in this place inhabit humor and joy. Tere, tellingly, seems to have a hard time simply asking for, or even accepting, things she wants. Simultaneously, despite the many comforts offered, she can’t stop thinking about the brother she left behind, a brother she left with some serious unresolved issues between them. Tere decides she wants to see him, that she needs to talk to him more than anything. Altogether, the story is brilliantly constructed. The author does fantastic work building Tere’s character, as well as utilizing the character to highlight so many things women deal with in real life, while also delivering a story that feels healing. Along with all this, the story is immersive and laced with wonder. I loved this one.

“Diocese Moon” by Roxane Llanque features an unsure Catholic bishop on her way to give a sermon on the moon. The opening effectively sets up an internal conflict between duty and doubt, while also using description to beautifully bring home the emotions of the moment, making them more resonant and rounded. As the awkward Bishop Rivera meets the crew stationed on the moon, she is met with hostility and judgment, which (for story purposes) makes her very likable and relatable while still playing in the spaces of plausibility and perhaps even probability. In short, we feel for Rivera because this is some solid writing. We also find out that the hostile chief scientist may have complicated feelings toward her own mother, which adds a lovely layer of drama and complexity. All these elements come together to build a compelling narrative. It is interesting and surprising where Roxane Llanque takes the story while, perhaps realistically, offering no easy resolutions. “Diocese Moon” is a thoughtful story and a good one, which is more interested in sketching the nuances of life and perhaps raising questions than anything else.

Joy Castro’s “Blessed” is the only entry on the copyright page with a separate copyright note, which usually indicates that an entry is a reprint; however, I believe in this case it simply indicates something more complicated than usual regarding the legal rights of the story. In other words, I believe it is still previously unpublished and original to this book. In any case, “Blessed” is a study of the way that one person’s utopia is another’s dystopia. It may ostensibly be a near future of some kind, but in nearly every regard, it could be “now”–and is certainly “now” for some people. An unnamed protagonist, “I”, has arrived at a spa. Castro uses brief details to subtly develop tension so that while “I” should feel ready for relaxation, and while the spa sounds great, the reader feels the stress and dissonance that “I” feels, the deliberately buried discomforts bleeding through from a daily life which is meant to be perceived as lovely. And, certainly, that life is lovely for some. It’s a brief yet effective story, with a subtlety that calls for attentive and empathetic reading. At heart, for me, it’s a story of survival.

Amanda Torres gifts readers three poetic entries, each of them evocative, startling, and moving. The first could be read as a prose story leaning heavily—wonderfully—into imagery, metaphor, and simile, while the last is more easily recognizable to folks who don’t read much poetry as a literary form. Each speaks to loss, resistance, and survival, but in different ways, and each is worth rereading, allowing the imagery to fill your mind and absorb the moods into your heart.

For readers more interested in examining the idea of “Utopia” as it relates to the “classic” science fiction lens, the introduction is an erudite and targeted entrance to the book, and I think it will be a crucial starting point. The introduction contextualizes the stories in ways that will be helpful for those readers, laying out the questions and thoughts guiding the sections as well as placing the overall work within the history of the science fiction discussions of “Utopia.”

Pick up this book immediately. Throw some money at the publishers, send a strong message that we need more stories like these, and that these books are important to the larger landscape of literary culture. I’m so glad I found this one, and I think many of you out there will love it as much as I did.