BookBrowse Reviews There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes

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In Ruben Reyes Jr.'s debut short story collection, speculative forms conjure up the challenges of immigration and loss for Latinx characters.

While it is common for children of immigrants to reflect on their ancestors' struggles through literary or historical fiction, or family memoir, it is more unusual for writers to turn to speculative writing to probe the interplay between the past, the present, and imagined futures (see Beyond the Book). Second-generation Salvadoran American writer Ruben Reyes Jr.'s There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven employs science fiction and alternative history in its dozen varied stories about Latinx characters trying to connect with family and survive perilous situations.

Five stories are flash length and share the heading "An Alternative History of El Salvador or Perhaps the World." Ranging in subject matter from individual experiences to ripped-from-the-headlines satire, these flash pieces speculate, for example, on what might have happened had Christopher Columbus's ships sank, or, in one darkly funny and unexpected story, how Americans' daily lives would falter if all Central American immigrants were simultaneously hit by a bad stomach bug, leaving no one to work restaurant, cleaning, and lawn service jobs.

The longest story, "Variations on Your Migrant Life," is a second-person Choose Your Own Adventure. Mami goes to California to work as a cleaner and send money home. What will happen to "you," the nine-year-old boy left behind in Central America? Will Papi stay, or follow Mami? Will you live with your grandmother, or will your parents pay for a coyote to take you across several borders and into the USA? Will you be drawn into violent gang life? Will you make it to Mami's apartment, or perish in the desert? All options are possible, and the protagonist's fate is guided by the reader in this participatory reading experience.

There is an elegiac tone to much of the book, but Reyes' playful approaches, including his blurring of genre lines, mostly temper any somberness. In "My Abuela, the Puppet," for example, Reyes explores themes of loss and family bonds with magical realism, as the narrator's grandmother transforms into a puppet over the course of a decade and loses the ability to speak; it works as both a parable for dementia and as pure fantasy. In "Quiero Perrear! and Other Catastrophes," another lightly magical realist story, Reyes humorously references Kafka in the opening line: "As Manuel Cisneros awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in bed into a gigantic reggaeton star."

Several of Reyes' protagonists, including the reggaeton star Manuel Cisneros, are queer. In one of my favorite stories, "Try Again," a gay man pays a company called SyncALife to implant brain tissue from his dead father into a robot. Gradually, the robot regains the father's language and memory—including memories of his past as a guerrillero in El Salvador. To his son's dismay, though, another thing the robot remembers is his homophobia.

I did find that in a few of Reyes' stories, what started as a promising setup fizzled out by the end. In "Quiero Perrear!", for example, Reyes draws out the narrative for too long, so that the story loses power by the time it ends on a reversal of fortunes. One story, set in 2174, has a man named Victor visiting the National Archives for Ph.D. research into Central American migration, specifically looking for someone named Felipe. In this future, a celebrated Latino entrepreneur has created cyborg servants called "Self-Made Men"—but as Victor searches for Felipe, he realizes that, disturbingly, these cyborgs were created from young men that were abducted when they crossed into the USA. This is an interesting premise, but the distant future setting doesn't feel convincing, and connections between some characters remain unclear. Another sci-fi story is set in an age of interplanetary travel, necessary to leave behind an uninhabitable Earth, and follows an action hero escaping a detention center, but the hero's characterization is shallow and doesn't inspire curiosity about what will happen to him.

Although I had mixed feelings about some of these stories, when Reyes is good, he is very good. In one standout, a character regularly has crates of mangoes flown to Los Angeles from the tree on his uncle's property. He's convinced that things would go awry if he did not eat one of its perfect fruits for breakfast each morning, but in his obsession he ends up ruining multiple family members' lives. This story has the symbolic weight of an old-fashioned morality tale, like a Bible story or a Greek myth. What is fated and what can be changed? Reyes asks. Are family and national origins defining, or do all possibilities lie open? These are compelling thematic questions, and science fiction, alternative history, and magical realism are apt vehicles for their exploration.

This review first ran in the September 4, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.