As you might have seen, I’ve been offline for the last month dealing with some heavy life events, so I haven’t been able to celebrate some major accomplishments that happened. One of them was The Library of Broken Worlds winning a British Science Fiction Award for best fiction for younger readers! I am delighted that Freida’s story has been recognized by the British Science Fiction Association and members of Eastercon, and I hope that she finds even more readers on that side of the Atlantic.
Another big milestone was the publication of a new short story, A Brief Oral History of the El Zopilote Dock, in Clarkesworld Magazine this March.
This is my fourth Mexico story—the first was “The Subjunctive” in Feral Youth, then “A Hundred Thousand Threads” in Three Sides of A Heart, and the third was “The Mirages” in my collection Reconstruction, and also published in Asimov’s. The first was magical realism and the second two were near future SF set in Mexico City. I’m continuing my streak of near future Mexican SF, but this is the first set in the area of Oaxaca where I live now.
I waited several years after moving to Mexico before trying to write a story set in my new home. That combination of insider-outsider status requires a lot of negotiation. There’s the simple (or simplistic?) question, “What right do you have to write this?” Then some difficult ones, “What is your position as a storyteller here? How deeply can you observe without imposing your own framework?”
The answer to that last question is probably, “Not as much as I would like.” The longer I live here, the more I experience those delightful jolts of suddenly understanding something I hadn’t even realized I didn’t know. The more my ignorance lessens, the better I can guess the dimensions of its vastness. I will never be an adequate observer by many measures, but I have realized that I can construct my stories so that they trace the bounds of my ignorance. I can allow space for everything I don’t know.
A Brief Oral History of the El Zopilote dock is a near future SF exploration of the relationship between the US and Mexico, but in a different direction than we mostly see discussed (and which I explored in “The Mirages”). It’s about the long history of the US’s dispossessed and criminalized finding refuge south of the border. From classic USian songs about “going down to Mexico” (I love this list! Perfectly captures the vibe) to Burroughs fleeing here from drug charges in the US (and then fleeing back to the US after accidentally murdering his wife), to the thousands of Texan slaves who found freedom by crossing the Rio Grande, my chosen home has always represented a kind of freedom for those trapped on the wrong side of the border. I take this history and merge it with the very real phenomenon of modern-day slavery, which is now the norm of the US prison system. Overwhelmingly Black, brown and Indigenous prisoners are now forced to work cotton fields, build furniture, serve white senators in state legislatures and fight fires—all for penny wages which are withheld from them in any case. In the for-profit carceral system that has taken over the country, they have to pay exorbitant prices for the smallest of amenities: soap, reading their mail, and calls home. Their families go into debt trying to make sure they have the basics needed to survive, while their forced labor serves white communities. This is the real reason why the US has more people incarcerated than any other nation1. The profit motive has taken over the system. And the 13th amendment allows slavery for incarcerated people. How easy, and how convenient, that we have criminalized the same groups of people that we once enslaved!
I need to be honest here and say that few aspects of US life fill me with more rage than the injustices perpetrated by our deeply unjust “justice system.” My rage makes me want to do something, but I find it hard to write out of anger. So I think that this story really came out of a long process of me trying to find a way to encapsulate the grief-rage I feel at the ongoing slavery in my country of birth, while also trying to find something hopeful and beautiful in my people’s resistance to it—both my Black people and the people of my adopted home.
Trying to envision the possibilities of a better future, it occurred to me that in the face of the mass incarceration of slavery in the past, enslaved people engineered their own escape. And that is what I imagine for the prisoners in the near future, post-civil war United States of this story. They create a new underground railroad called the River Underground, and they help ferry prisoners over the border through Mexico. The story is narrated by the granddaughter of one of the first escaped prisoners, who has grown up in an isolated maroon community in the mountains of Oaxaca. Like a lot of my work, it touches on themes of intergenerational trauma and identity. It asks some of the questions I have to ask myself every time I write a story about my adopted home: Who gets to tell stories? Is there a difference between objectivity and truth? How do you allow for the existence of multiple stories while still prioritizing your own?
“Zopilote” means vulture in Mexican Spanish (derived from the Nahuatl “zopilotl”). The vultures where I live have always fascinated me with the silent beauty of their flight in the evening, as the sun goes down. They’re not looking for food. They’re simply flying, moving together along the wind roads for—as far as I can tell—the pure joy of movement. The image of them felt right as a story anchor: a loaded story object that encompasses what I know and also goes beyond it, into the spaces that I can only feel.
I hope you enjoy the story. And if the injustices of prison slavery in the US make you as angry as they make me, please consider donating to Prison Legal News, which advocates for the human rights of all incarcerated people.
In terms of incarceration rates as a function of population, the US is sixth in the world. China isn’t even in the top 30.