‘Lucha Libro’:
Writers wrestle to get published in debut event.
When it was his turn to enter the wrestling ring, Rio de Vergas made sure to put on a show. His Lucha Libre-style mask was pink. His lipstick matched, and so did the sequined cape that he’d pulled around his shoulders. His shoes lit up as he walked.
He ducked under the ring’s ropes, did a few rounds while pumping his fists in the air. And then he sat down at a computer.
He had planned to spend the next five minutes writing a story about, as he would put it later, “my hardworking immigrant mom.” Instead he wound up with a story about “Frida Kahlo, donuts and dicks.” (Long story short, Kahlo showed up at his house on Dia de los Muertos and told him she wanted to go see “some of those white women who can’t stop talking about me.”)
Rio de Vergas, whose name has a raunchy meaning in Spanish and who goes by Baruch Porras-Hernandez outside the ring, was one of the contestants Saturday in San Francisco’s first-ever Lucha Libro. The event at the Mission District’s Park Gym was a “literary wrestling match” staged by Radar Productions, in which five queer writers of color went head to head for a chance to have their chapbook published.
The rules were fairly simple. Each contestant would get one word they must incorporate into their stories; they had five minutes to type it out; and their writing had to have a narrative. Meanwhile, their every keystroke was projected onto the wall, so the audience could watch the story being created. Afterward, three judges would deliberate while the wrestlers’ identities remained hidden beneath their masks.
Making literature a spectacle is something that has always appealed to Juliana Delgado Lopera, the executive director of Radar. Readings,
Lucha Libro pits 5 queer writers of color in a competition against peers
she says, are not known for being particularly dynamic. But something like Lucha Libro has a broader reach, a better chance at pulling people in who might not normally find themselves in literary circles.
The idea came to Lopera by way of Peru. There books sell for a premium, and publishing contracts are generally reserved for the literary elite. “Like many other places, it is very much divided by race and class, specifically,” Lopera says.
In Peru, anybody could enter Lucha Libro, regardless of background. Thirty people would be chosen, their identities a secret, and eliminations would happen in a series of rounds until one writer was left standing. Only then would the winner’s name be revealed, and that writer would get a publishing contract. People from small, rural, towns travel considerable distances to compete, and the contests are often packed with spectators. “It’s huge,” Lopera says. “It’ll basically put you on the radar.”
This being the first in the Bay Area, the event was much smaller in scale. Still, the spirit was the same. Lopera made the decision to spotlight only queer and trans writers of color — “the people who are least likely to get a publishing contract.” Some 40 people sent in work hoping to land one of the five spots.
The stories written live at the Park Gym Saturday reflected that intent. There was a story about a park that suddenly had grass and a pool, where nobody the author remembered still hung out. (“Girl, mama, that’s gentrification all pretty and disgusting as hell.”) There was another about lost histories, handed down orally, generation to generation. (“Our history cannot be found in any book. Our history lives at the kitchen table. Our history haunts.”)
Generally, the participants have a story they’ve memorized, and they have to find a way to thread in their given word — “bones,” “sucking,” “desire,” whatever it might be — while not going over the five-minute mark. The judges were looking for people with voice, who were able to play with “queer” forms and images and language. Their overriding question, said Faith Adiele, one of the judges and a Bay Area author, was: “Who do you want to hear more from?”
In the end, the person they wanted most to hear more from was Vianney Casas. Her story wove together prose and poetry, discussed her ongoing battle with depression, and drew images from her culture; Casas is from Tijuana.
Casas says she woke up at 8 a.m. and wrote the winning piece then. Once she was done, she practiced it constantly, anywhere she could, even as she rode Muni.
When it was her turn, the audience watched as the cursor moved across the screen, leaving behind it a story about a woman who tries five times to kill herself. Each time she’s stopped by somebody (Frida Kahlo, Sylvia Plath, La Llorona) who whispers to her, “Not yet.” By the end of it, she pushes back against the depression, a defiant, symbolic act against the patriarchy.
“My pieces, in general, are really personal,” Casas said afterward. But this one was particularly so in the way it drew so much from home, from Tijuana where her family still lives. “When I talk to Mom, she’s going to be very proud.”
Each contestant would get one word they must incorporate into their stories; they had five minutes to type it out; and their writing had to have a narrative.