Boom! Crash! ‘Lucía’ is a smash
‘Lucía the Luchadora’ author wants more Latino kids to see themselves in books
In “Lucía the Luchadora,” a little girl named Lucía beats boys in all areas.
On the playground, Lucía reports, “I go POW. I go BAM.” The boys go, “BOOM. They go CRASH.” The boys can jump off the monkey bars, but only Lucía can make a high-flying leap from the highest bar, spin, dive and nail her landing: “Every! Single! Time!”
“Girls can’t be superheroes!” one of the boys on the playground complains. Another boy chimes in: “Girls are just made of sugar and spice and everything nice!”
But with the help of her abeula, Lucía dresses as a luchadora — a fighter in Mexico’s Luche Libre wrestling, with a mask and cape. With her identity disguised, she becomes a superhero. “The crowd goes wild! The boys go BOOM. They try to CRASH into me. But I’m lightning fast, no one can catch me. No one can wow like I can.”
That’s the story behind “Lucía the Luchadora,” Cynthia Leonor Garza’s new picture book for kids. The book, which published in March, has received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews, a publishing standard.
Garza, a Rice graduate and a former Houston Chronicle reporter, lives in Nairobi now, where her husband, Eyder Peralta, is a correspondent for NPR. But she is in Houston this week to read her new kids’ book to little superheroes, both boys and girls. The story of a luchadora came naturally to Garza, who has two daughters, 4 and 7. When she was growing up in South Texas, Garza said, she and her family used to cross the border to Mexico often to shop, eat or hang out. “They used to sell those little Luche Libre rings and action figures,” she said. Her brothers would get a ring, but Garza always got something else — usually a doll — “because I was a girl.” “I wanted a wrestling ring,” she said. “I was fascinated by the fact that (Luche Libre wrestlers) wore masks. The idea of a mask was always interesting to me; it lets you become a different person.” And in Garza’s picture book, her heroine, Lucía, gets to strut around the playground in costume, while no one knows who she is. She might be a girl, but she can still prove herself: “A real luchadora must fight for what is right.” Garza said she wanted to write her first picture book for kids like her — and for kids like her daughters. “I was looking for something I wasn’t finding,” she said: picture books that featured kids who looked like her kids.
Just a few years ago, a study by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center study revealed that only about 3 percent of kids’ books are by or about Latinos. “Animals and trucks are more widely represented in children’s books than Latinos,” Garza said. So she wrote “Lucía the Luchadora,” hoping to make a small dent in that statistic.
Since she got to Texas, Garza has signed her book for a number of little girls named Lucía. Other kids have identified with the book’s heroine because they have accents in their name, just like Lucía does.
At a Houston storytime this week, one little boy showed up wearing a Luche Libre shirt. “He was super excited about it,” Garza said, and he told her his dad is from Mexico and is a Luche Libre fan. “He was so into the book,” she said. “I don’t think he noticed it was a ‘girl superhero’ book. Kids don’t have these biases that we have.”
With “Lucía,” she said, “little boys get the message that girls can be superheroes. That’s the big message they walk away with.”