The author will appear on the Southern California News Group webinar series Bookish with Mike Madrid on Friday, June 21 at 5 p.m.
Alex Espinoza, the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at UC Riverside, is the author of the new novel, “The Sons of El Rey.” , the Mexican professional wrestling style that became a phenomenon in the early 20th century. Children, in particular, have been enchanted with the sport, which features. The author, who was born in Tijuana and raised in Southern California, grew up watching luchador movies, in which the masked fighters took on a wide range of villains.
That was the origin for “The Sons of El Rey,” Espinoza’s third novel, and his first in 11 years. It follows Ernesto Vega, a dying luchador with a secret; his son, Freddy, who is trying in vain to save his father’s gym; and Freddy’s son, Julian, a professor who finds himself being racially fetishized by other gay men.
And of course, I got into the exóticos, the drag performances of lucha libre from the early days. The first drag luchador was an individual named Gardenia Davis, and he used to come out throwing gardenias to the audience, and he was kind of considered the first exótico back in the ‘40s and ‘50s. There was a fighter named Murciélago Velázquez, whose shtick was that he would release bats into the audience. He was one of the first rudos.
Q: Ernesto almost splits his personality into these two people, Ernesto and El Rey Coyote. What do you think he gets out of having this alter ego that he’s carefully constructed?
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