América del Norte

A young man from an elite Mexican family travels back and forth between the United States and Mexico in a dizzyingly inventive bildungsroman.

For fans of Hernan Diaz and Teju Cole, this autofiction debut explores whiteness, power, immigration, and the history of Mexican literature, from the 17th century letters of a peevishly polymathic Spanish colonizer to the contemporary packaging of Mexican lit for a US audience.

Sebastián lived a childhood of privilege among the Mexican elite. Now in his twenties, he has a degree from Yale, an American girlfriend, and a slot in the University of Iowa’s MFA program.

But Sebastián’s well-curated bi-national life begins to fall apart, shaken by the Trump administration’s increasingly stringent restrictions on immigrants, his mother’s terminal cancer, the cracks in his relationships with his American girlfriend, and his father’s humiliation and forced resignation at the hands of Mexico’s new president. As he struggles through the Trump and López Obrador years, Sebastián must confront his father’s role in the Mexican drug war, his whiteness in Mexican contexts even as he is often perceived as a person of color in the US, his place in a Mexican elite that has ruled the country since 1521, and the contemporary literary cultures he is both scornful of and desperately want to be part of.

Debut novelist Medina Mora blends the Latin American literary traditions of Roberto Bolaño and Valeria Luiselli with the autofiction of US writers like Ben Lerner and Teju Cole to wrestle with identity, privilege, history, and the questions: Who is a Mexican writer writing for? How are we to live while knowing that history may interrupt and shatter our lives at any moment?