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• Libertad Dial Books (New York, NY), 2024

• Bessie Flores Zaldívar website - https://bessiefzaldivar.org/

  Bessie Flores Zaldívar (all pronouns) is a queer writer from Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Bessie teaches fiction and lives in the New Haven area. Libertad is their debut publication.

• Latinx in Publishing - https://latinxinpublishing.com/blog/author-qa-bessie-flores-zaldivar

  Roxanna Cardenas Colmenares
  Author Q&A: ‘Libertad’ by Bessie Flores Zaldívar
  October 16, 2024 Author Interviews

  Bessie Flores Zaldívar immediately places the readers in Libertad’s setting with the opening lines: “This fucking city,” and traps us in an overcrowded car along with the characters. The night is hot and loud, and Libertad and her friends have a party to go to. However, they are stopped by a cop and must bribe him if they don’t want to end up in jail. Libi, as her loved ones call her, is stuck under the pressure of her best friend Camila’s weight and vanilla smell as they wait for the driver to deal with the corrupted officer.

  They finally arrive at La Esquina, the bar where Libi and her friends usually go despite being underage, and the party begins. They dance and drink for hours, and suddenly Libertad and Camila can’t find the rest of the group in the crowd. When two older men try to dance with them, Camila pulls her friend inside the bathroom. Libertad’s mind is all over the place because she is drunk, but she comes back to the present when Camila’s lips touch hers. As the kiss intensifies, outside is Maynor, Libi’s older brother, looking for her desperately. The cops are in La Esquina looking for minors. When he gets to the bathroom door and interrupts the two best friends, will Libi be relieved that Maynor found them before the cops? Or will she wish he never knocked?

  In the prologue of their novel, Flores Zaldívar lets us know Libertad is about two things that are, as the author says, “inextricable from each other”: queerness and Honduras. They place us right next to Libi and we follow along as she discovers key things about herself and her country. The readers accompany Libertad through a year of growth where she must face hardships no 17-year-old should, but many do—especially queer Latin-American youth.

  Libertad inevitably becomes important to the reader and everything she experiences—Honduras’s hot summers, siblings love, mother-daughter arguments, grief, injustice—feels tangible. Each chapter is a page-turner, and readers eagerly follow Libi’s both painful and healing journey.

  Flores Zaldívar spoke with Latinx in Publishing about the process of writing Libertad.

  This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

  Roxanna Cardenas Colmenares (RCC): Congratulations on your debut novel Libertad, Bessie! With your book being about growth and overcoming adversity, can you tell me about yourself in your early twenties writing this story? Did younger Bessie ever imagine this moment you are experiencing now?

  Bessie Flores Zaldívar (BFZ): I started writing this novel in my second year of college when I was 20. I wrote a lot of it but only used the first three chapters to apply to the MFA, and this was my thesis at the end of it. When I finished the first full draft, I was 24 years old. Toni Morrison said that she wrote her first novel because she wanted to read a book like that and couldn’t find it anywhere. I think that is very much so why I wrote Libertad because I wanted to read a queer YA novel about a Honduran person, and I wanted it to engage with the political context. I also really wanted to see a family like mine depicted, and the family in this book is almost exactly like mine. So, this was the book I needed to write before anything else. In some ways that made it very easy, but in others, that made it very hard. Still, the book came to me very gracefully, like a gift.

  RCC: As an older sister, one of my favorite things about this book was the relationship between Libertad and her brothers. The bond between her and Maynor is key to this story, and you write it from the perspective of a younger sibling despite you being the oldest one in your family. Why did you choose to write from the point of view of a middle child and how did your own experience as an oldest sibling help you write this dynamic between Libi, Maynor, and Alberto?

  BFZ: Great question! The plot reason Libertad is a middle child is that I needed Maynor to be a student activist, and for that to be true, he needed to be of college age, which means he had to be older than Libi. Beyond that, queer young adults felt to me like a good place to grieve. I was telling my siblings that, as a queer person, when I came out in high school, I was the only person who was out, so a lot of it was that I wanted to reimagine what my youth could’ve been like if I had an older sibling, how that could’ve changed things for me.

  I love being an older sibling. I feel truly so lucky and blessed, but I also have always wondered what that could have been like for me, having someone who I really trusted and looked up to tell me it would be okay. How braver would I have been? I think that was key to my decision. Also, a lot of the grief depicted in the book comes from the things Maynor knows that Libertad doesn’t get to know and that we get to see from the chapters that I wrote from his perspective.

  Writing the dynamic was probably the easiest part. I would say it is a direct replica of the one I have with my siblings.

  RCC: Honduras is another character in this story. The book can’t exist without Honduras in the background. Tell me how it was to recall the quirks and corners of your home country while writing Libertad, especially from outside of it.

  BFZ: It was like being haunted. Especially because I was writing a Honduras I remembered living in but that wasn’t there anymore, and when I got to go home, things were different. La Esquina, the bar in the first three chapters, is the same one I would go to when I was in high school, and now it’s a Puerto Rican restaurant. It felt like I was trying to remember something that had become a ghost because my country is changing and there is nothing I can do about that since I’m the one who left. I’m the one who remembers it differently. In some ways, it was really pleasurable to process that grief of Honduras never being mine in the same way that it was before I left… I love Honduras, and what “Honduras” means to me is the people who live in that land.

  RCC: Your book also depicts the experience of closeted queers and, more specifically, the consequences of being outed. At the same time, the story takes place in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, an environment that was especially dangerous to queer youth at the time. How was it for you to write those painful moments Libertad had to face regarding her sexuality? What did you wish to tell young queer people with them, to both those who live in settings like Libi does and those who don’t?

  BFZ: I’ve been thinking about that a little bit because I knew I was queer pretty much as soon as I knew who I was, as soon as I understood myself, and I never really felt shame about it, even though I did grow up in such a homophobic country and society…When people come out, moms tend to say things like: “Your life is going to be hard,” which is what my mom said to me, along with “I don’t want your life to be harder than it needs to be. We already live in this country, you’re already a woman in this country. Why does it have to be any harder?” I never had a good answer for that until maybe two weeks ago. I realized that what I wanted to say in response was that my life would be harder, but I was raised by two very strong women. I saw my mom survive the same stuff Libertad’s mom did, so how could I not be strong enough to face what was coming? And I have been.

  A friend told me that when we ask God–or whatever we believe in–She doesn’t give us a little bottle of “Liquid Bravery;” you are just put in a situation where you can choose to be brave. That is what I wanted to put across to young readers, that being brave is just deciding to be so. I know there are issues to consider, such as safety, and the United States is not immune to this, but I now feel like the novel helped me find an answer to that moment in my life. Yes, my life will be harder, and I’ll have to be strong because it is more important to live my life authentically than to make it easier by shrinking myself. I’m so queer, so out, so happy… It was worth it. How could it not be?

  “
  I saw my mom survive the same stuff Libertad’s mom did, so how could I not be strong enough to face what was coming?
  RCC: You made interesting choices in your novel like having little sections with a change of the narrator’s point of view that added more details to the story beyond Libertad’s awareness, yet the most notorious one for me was the use of Spanish throughout the novel, more specifically when it comes to Libertad’s poems. Why did you choose to keep her poetry in Spanish and add the translations to the back of the book?

  BFZ: You are going to love this. It almost sounds made up, but all the poems in the book were written in Spanish by me and my brother. They were written before the book was. Those are old poems that we wrote when I was 19, which means that [my brother] was 17. We wrote them together as those specific moments in time [mentioned in LIBERTAD] were happening, and I just copied and pasted them into the book–I might have edited them a little bit. Therefore, I made that choice because the poems were written before the book, and it didn’t feel good to translate them… Ultimately, I think I just kept them in Spanish and the way they are because I wanted Emo, my brother, to get to read his work in my book. A lot of it is his and not mine, more rhymes are his than mine, and in many ways this book is a love letter to my brother and sister.

  RCC: In the same topic of choices, you could have chosen to tell a story focusing either on queerness or Honduran politics, but instead, you connected the two. Why was the depiction of this correlation so important?

  BFZ: The best answer for that is that I didn’t get to choose what affected me. I had to be affected by Honduran politics and be queer at the same time. They are also inextricable from each other. When the coup happened in 2009, I was twelve, and power got cut and there was all this military presence in the country, and we couldn’t go to school. I didn’t understand what was going on. Years later, when I was investigating it, I found out that a lot of people were killed that night, especially queer people, and what was found on the scene were military bullets that civilians don’t have access to… It wasn’t reported on the news. We’re talking about queer sex workers who got killed that night. I already knew the state wasn’t interested in protecting my livelihood as a person, but [this discovery] made me feel aware of how my queerness made me especially vulnerable to that truth.

  RCC: One more choice you made that I’m very curious about is your author’s letter at the end of the book. Why did you decide to write it?

  BFZ: I love that you’re asking me about this!... I didn’t want a book that gave a very simplistic answer about Honduran politics, and I don’t think the book does. But in my author’s note, I wanted to acknowledge that my reality is very different from Libertad’s now. I got to grow up, move somewhere else, and I know what being openly queer feels like, which she doesn’t. Also, there has been a change in power in Honduras since the end of that book… We had this historic election with the most participation ever, we elected the first woman president, and she’s from the left, but the next day, people still lived in the same conditions. One year later, people are still living in the same conditions. I really wanted to tell the reader that history did move past this, and it has meant something, but it also has meant nothing in other ways. The things that are true at the end of the book are still true today.

  Born in 1997 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Bessie Flores Zaldívar is a writer and professor of fiction. They’re currently based in the New Haven area. Libertad is Bessie’s debut novel.

• JMWW - https://jmwwblog.wordpress.com/2023/02/27/rain-revolutions-an-interview-with-bessie-flores-zaldivar-by-bethany-reinsch/

  Rain Revolutions: An Interview with Bessie Flores Zaldívar by Bethany Reinsch
  February 27, 2023 · by jmwwblog · in Interviews. ·
  Bessie Flores Zaldívar
  Bessie Flores Zaldívar

  Bessie Flores Zaldívar is a writer and poet from Tegucigalpa, Honduras. She earned an MFA in fiction from Virginia Tech. Her story “Lluvia Sin Aqua,” published On The Seawall, received a Best of the Net Prize. Her work has also appeared in work in Shenandoah, Foglifter, HAD, [PANK], CRAFT, The Arkansas International, and Bodega. Her fiction chapbook, Rain Revolutions, is available from Long Day Press.

  Bethany Reinsch: We’re always interested in a book’s journey, especially for debut authors. Can you tell us about its path to publication?

  Bessie Flores Zaldívar: I wrote Rain Revolutions without meaning to, really. The first story I wrote was the last (“United We Can”), in my last year of college. It is the story inspired by my great-grandparent’s life. A few months later, I wrote “Lluvia Sin Agua.” It was 2019 and the story is directly about what was going on in Tegucigalpa at the time. Months later, I looked at both stories and noticed how similar they were. Water. Revolution. Honduras. Unrest. And I saw the opportunity to write a third story that completed the trilogy. So I wrote “By This Time Tomorrow.” It was easy to pick the time and place because I’d always been interested in the events of 1988.

  And then I had the book—three short stories that took place in different times of Honduran revolution and history. I began looking for presses that took fiction chapbooks and submitted to a few contests. Rain Revolutions was short-listed in all contests it was submitted to: Gold Line Press, Black Lawrence, Split/Lip. Finally, I found Long Day Press through some googling. I ordered one of their chapbooks and read it and decided I really liked what they were up to. I submitted and received an acceptance from the editors a couple months later. We proceeded to work closely on revisions and the layout. They worked with a high school friend of mine, Andrea Aranda, on the cover. It was important to me to have a Honduran person do the art. I couldn’t be more pleased with how everything turned out. Long Day Press is amazing.

  BR: Throughout Rain Revolutions, the inclusion of Spanish seems significant to me. Could you say more about this?

  BFZ: Spanish is my first language and the main language spoken in Honduras. It is not in the book to add a sense of reality and truth. It is not in these stories as a tool of craft. It is there because it belongs there. Because these stories all happen in Spanish.

  BR: Throughout “By This Time Tomorrow,” there are hints of a deeper relationship between Rosa and Diana. Why did you keep the readers wondering until the final paragraphs?

  BFZ: I was moved by two engines in the decision to keep the relationship only alluded to till the end. The first, is recognizing the ways in which queerness is hidden and dangerous in Honduras. It is still now, and it was much worse 40 years ago, when this story takes place. The idea that these two characters could’ve been romantically involved openly, is unimaginable. Of course—even if the women in the story didn’t have a public relationship, the reader could’ve still been let in about the secret from the start. But here’s where the second engine of the decision comes in for me—which is acknowledging confusing homoerotic friendships and the way they mark so many young queer people. I don’t think the main character of the story is sure of how her lover feels at all. At times they are more than friends, and at times they’re just friends. That gray area, that in-betweeness that the protagonist is experiencing—it was important to me that the reader felt it, too.

  BR: In “By This Time Tomorrow,” you reference Roger Samuel Gonzalez, a student activist who disappeared in 1988. Are other characters in your chapbook based on real people, or are they fictional?

  BFZ: There are several other real-world people mentioned throughout Rain Revolutions. In “By This Time Tomorrow,” we have Roger Gonzalez, yes, and Juan Mata Ballesteros, the drug-lord who had been illegally extradited to the U.S. Of course, Juan Orlando Hernandez in “Lluvia Sin Agua” was Honduras’ president in 2019. In “United We Can,” the main characters, Isaias Barahona and Eva are named after my great-grandparents. My great-grandfather worked in the banana plantations and was the leader of the protests in his sector. My great-grandmother was pregnant with my grandmother at the time. Musical artists mentioned throughout are also all real people. I’m sure I’m missing a few—but the heart of this chapbook is nonfiction.

  BR: The imagery in “United We Can”—“like a Coca-Cola glass bottle shard fracturing skin”—is vivid and shocking. Could you discuss the connection between Coca-Cola and the event taking place?

  BFZ: To me, Coca-Cola is an American symbol. Like a McDonalds arch. Like Mickey Mouse ears. Like the United Fruit Company. Like an embassy. And, of course, American symbols are engines of colonization. That piece of glass that fracture’s the skin of Isaias is a symbol for the American forces in the story. America is present throughout the whole book. It is a reminder, in the end, that the lives of the people in these stories are all being affected by the forces of the colonial relationship between the United States and Honduras.

  BR: Rain and water recur in your chapbook. What deeper meanings do you want them to evoke?

  BFZ: Honduras has a very particular relationship to water. The name “Honduras” itself was (erroneously) thought once to come from Christopher Columbus exclaiming “Porfin hemos salido de esas Honduras,” meaning, “we have finally escaped these deep waters,” upon reaching the shore of Gracias a Dios. But that’s been since proven wrong. Our country touches both the Atlantic and the Pacific. In places like Tegus, we spend part of the year praying for rain and part of the year fearing hurricane season and what it means for us.

  BR: What are you working on now?

  BFZ: Right now, I’m working on a YA novel. Earlier this year, I signed with Penguin Random House for a two-book deal. My debut YA, Libertad, which all takes place in Tegucigalpa, will be out in summer of 2024. I’m working on my second YA which should be out in summer of 2025.

• College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, Virginia Tech website - https://liberalarts.vt.edu/news/articles/2022/12/bessie-flores-zaldivar-spotlight.html

  Answering the unanswerable
  A spotlight on Bessie Flores Zaldívar, M.F.A. alumna and instructor

  December 15, 2022

  Portrait of Bessie in front of a marbleized background.
  Bessie Flores Zaldívar is an author and instructor. Photo courtesy of Bessie Flores Zaldívar.
  For Bessie Flores Zaldívar, writing fiction is an attempt to answer unanswerable questions.

  As Zaldívar writes, she explores her relationship to where she grew up — Tegucigalpa, Honduras — and the state, her family, immigration, and her own queerness.

  Motivated by these, Zaldívar, a 2022 graduate of Virginia Tech's Master of Fine Arts program and now an instructor, seeks to learn more about herself through her writing. These themes recur in much of her fiction.

  Her first publication, “Rain Revolutions,” is a chapbook of three short stories that take place in Zaldívar’s home country from 1954-2019. Each story is motivated by environmental and political violence, and the cyclical course of history as it repeats itself.

  In a year, Zaldívar’s forthcoming young adult novel, “Libertad,” will explore similar themes as she tells a coming-of-age story about what it means to be queer in a time of political unrest. Also set in Honduras, it takes place in 2017, a time of political turmoil and dictatorship. Through the lens of queerness during these frightening times, she creates a story that involves finding a love for a geography and a people, and how queerness can help reimagine a relationship with that same geography and people.

  According to Zaldívar, she delves into different forms of writing and is most excited by the ways in which she can break genres. She writes nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and prose — cycling through them as her interests fluctuate. In doing so, she not only improves her writing, but is able to push the boundaries of a set genre.

  “With writing, you get to decide where the camera lingers,” Zaldívar said, “And for me, it lingers on the people that I love.”

  Her goal with fiction might be to answer unanswerable questions, but her subjects are the people and places that she loves. And sometimes, those involve mundane situations.

  Zaldívar once wrote a poem about a graduate student’s parking tickets because he had accumulated many and refused to pay them.

  “I think that’s so stupid and so funny and so fantastical,” she said. “For me, everything in writing feels so fantastical if you say it right.”

  Something as dull as parking tickets can serve as inspiration.

  Her time as a Virginia Tech graduate student allowed her to investigate genres and interests while being supported by her peers and professors. The intimacy and vulnerability of sharing work with her cohort is never lost on Zaldívar, nor was the work needed to build a level of trust between her and the other students. She said this level of vulnerability and willingness to help is at the core of the M.F.A program.

  And it was those relationships that led Zaldívar to remain in Blacksburg to teach first year writers in the University Writing Program at Virginia Tech.

  “Teaching first year writers is so rewarding,” Zaldívar said. “You see how exciting it is for a freshman to be told that their own obsessions and interests are worthy of pursuing.”

  After finishing her degree, she has been able to invest more time into her students.

  This semester, Zaldívar taught four sections of the course, themed around American horror in small towns. She and her students explored backwoods story tropes and how different aspects of horror reflect American cultural fears.

  “The reason I did this is because the book I am writing now is a social thriller,” Zaldívar said.

  Through the course, she is exploring the ways in which zombies are about race and vampires are about queerness. Then there is invasion horror, which became very popular after 9/11. She finds this exploration into the genre, alongside her student’s perspectives, exciting.

  As they examine American small-town horror, Zaldívar encourages students to explore their own special interests. Their research papers reflect the freedom she gives them, as their topics range from how small towns can ethically profit from ghost tours to Blacksburg’s own horror stories that only locals would know.

  Through the lens of American horror, she suggested her students dig into small town America and cultivate a sense of respect and honor for those places and the people who live in them.

  “I do think it’s important for my students to get to know the landscape of Blacksburg and honor it respectfully. Virginia Tech has such a complicated history. So much has happened here,” Zaldívar said.

  Much of her teaching philosophy centers around honor. She hopes her students move with respect for the campus and the land while they are at Virginia Tech, while also honoring themselves and their interests. She wants them to investigate a world where their interests and who they are not at odds with one another but coexist.

  She has a reverence for the knowledge the students bring into her classroom. And they have also taught her to be playful. When her students relax and express themselves, she said they perform better. Learning by their example, Zaldívar has begun to approach writing with a playful mindset, allowing herself room to make mistakes, be full of curiosity, and not know the answer to everything.

  She carries these attitudes that she has learned from her students with her, and she implores writers to be kind to themselves in the drafting process.

  “Approach writing with so much radical forgiveness for yourself,” she said. “That has been the game changer for my practice; to accept that writing is not just sitting in front of a page putting words down.”

  Instead, writing happens throughout the day. Zaldívar writes when she is walking her dog, Fig; playing soccer; eating. And then, when she does sit down in front of the page, she said it is so much easier to put the words on the paper because she has done so much of the work in her mind.

  During the semester, Zaldívar prioritizes her students and her teaching. She spends time prepping for her classes, having a lot of intentionality around meals, attending M.F.A. readings or workshops, and going on walks.

  While classes are not in session, “I’m giving myself a very well-deserved break and I feel zero guilt about it,” she said. “I am thinking about my next book, but I’m not writing it yet.”

  Written by Hannah Ballowe, a graduate student in the masters of arts program.

• Maudlin House - https://maudlinhouse.net/writer-of-the-week-bessie-flores-zaldivar/

  Writer of the Week: Bessie Flores Zaldívar
  Maudlin HouseJuly 22, 2021
  Columns0 Comments
  Bessie Flores Zaldívar is a queer writer from Tegucigalpa, Honduras. She moved to the United States five years ago, after turning 19. Right now, she’s in her last year of the MFA program at Virginia Tech. Bessie is an eldest daughter, an immigrant, a queer-YA author, a poet, Honduran, oldest-sibling, Central American, an american-sponsored coup survivor, y amante del Reggaeton. Bessie is a Tin House 2021 YA alumni, Pride Poet 2021 fellow, Best of the Net 2020 winner, and a Best New Poets nominee.

  Mostly, Bessie is Maria’s and Manuel’s daughter, that’s why her middle name is Maria and her loves will sometimes call her Bessie Maria. Mostly, Bessie is Edgardo’s, Fernanda’s, and Santiago’s oldest sister, that’s why she listens to Bad Bunny religiously.

  Bessie is currently working on finishing her YA-novel, which follows a queer Honduran girl, Libertad Morazán, living in Tegucigalpa in 2018, meaning, in the post-electoral crisis. In the midst of civil unrest, Libertad learns of the power and heartbreak in queerness, family, and activism.

  Bessie’s fiction chapbook, Rain Revolutions, will be out this October with Long Day Press. It is a collection of three short stories that center periods of uprise in Honduran history. One story takes place in 1954 after the protests against the United Fruit Company on the northern coast and a terrible flood lead to familial tragedy. Another story is set in 1988 after the American embassy is burnt in protest for the illegal extradition of a local drug lord. And the last story is set in 2019, following a long drought and growing sexual tension between a mango-seller and a taxi driver (this last story was selected by Matthew Salesses for Best of the Net, it is linked below).

  This is all to say, Bessie writes about Honduras and queerness, family, protest, Reggaeton, and the lemandarin tree that’s been in her grandparent’s backyard for as long as she can remember.

  This summer, Bessie’s been teaching YA-plot structures to teenagers via Zoom and listening to every new song Bad Bunny and Rauw Alejandro have dropped. She goes home, to Tegucigalpa, every summer and likes to stay up late with her younger siblings ranking songs and, sometimes, their mom joins them to dance bachata in the kitchen. She’s also recently gotten back into boxing, which she practiced for several years, and is sort of the whole point of her forthcoming story in the newest issue of Half Mystic.

  Bessie’s all-time favorite writer is Ocean Vuong. She really loves walking while listening to long podcast interviews of Ocean talking about language, being raised by women, queerness, Americannes, and everything, really. Since Ocean’s newest poem, “Reasons for Staying” came out in Harper’s Magazine in early June, she’s read it almost daily. In Young Adult Fiction, Bessie’s been really into the books of Adam Silvera, Angie Thomas, Mark Oshiro, and Kacen Callender. Bessie’s other favorite poets are Honora Ankong and Shaina Phenix, who you should absolutely be reading and following.

  Selected Writing:
  “Lluvia sin Agua” in Best of the Net 2020 Anthology
  “Brazos en Alto” in wildness
  “Lemandarin” in Palette Poetry
  “PASAPORTE F076717” in CRAFT Magazine
  Social Media:
  Twitter: @bessieflores
  Instagram: @bfzaldivar
  Website: bessiefzaldivar.org

• Publishers Weekly - https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/95794-q-a-with-bessie-flores-zald-var.html

  Q & A with Bessie Flores Zaldívar
  By Amanda Ramirez | Aug 22, 2024
  Comments Click Here

  Set in 2017 Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Bessie Flores Zaldívar’s debut YA novel Libertad follows 18-year-old gay poet Libi and her mother, grandmother, and brothers Maynor and Alberto as they navigate the months before a highly anticipated—and historically controversial—presidential election. As Libi struggles to understand her queer identity and how it could affect her relationships with her friends and politically divided yet loving family living in a conservative culture, she also wrestles with her fears over Maynor’s dangerous political activism. In a conversation with PW, Zaldívar reflected on immigrating to the U.S., the relationship between poetry and prose, and the way in which cycles of violence and oppression appear across time, cultures, and continents.

  Much of Libertad is based on your own experiences growing up in Honduras. Why did you decide to write a young adult fiction novel as opposed to a memoir?

  Part of it is because some of the big points of the book are fiction. But I think more than that, I didn’t want to write a book that would be used to answer the question of, “What was it like growing up queer in Honduras?” because that is such a complex and varied experience. My experience of growing up queer in Honduras is so different from other people and I didn’t want to create something that would then just be used as an anthropologic device. I’m a writer. I love writing fiction. I love the craft of it and the work that comes with imagining stuff and making a story work. And while so much of it is heavily based on my life, it’s a novel and I wanted it to be treated as a novel. Sure, it’s making commentary about real-life events and conditions, but it’s still a story that uses the sort of craft and imagination that other fiction writers use to write their own works, too.

  What, if anything, did you draw from the current political landscape to tell this story?

  As I was working on Libertad, I kept thinking, “How am I gonna write this?” The 2017 Honduran election was such a big deal. The reality of the book has shifted in ways that I don’t think the characters could ever imagine being possible.

  I grew up in Tegus, and when I was 12 years old, Juan Orlando Hernández and his right-wing government took control. As a queer person, that was a really big demarcation in my life. That’s when the place I knew completely changed. Now it’s election year here in the U.S.; Hernández was convicted of drug trafficking in June and there was just an attempted assassination on a U.S. presidential candidate. When I left Honduras in 2017, I was trying to leave all the political violence behind and now I’m here in the United States seeing it happen in a different way.

  How did your experience emigrating from Honduras to the U.S. inform your approach to Libi’s own internal conflict about whether to remain in Tegucigalpa?

  “
  People who have not dealt with immigration sometimes treat the question of immigrating as if it’s a simple thing. And it isn’t.
  ”
  Two or three months after I graduated from high school in 2016, I came to the U.S. as a university student. It was an election year, and the Pulse shooting happened right before I immigrated. It was something I was thinking about a lot when I was writing Libertad because I moved at a really weird time as a queer Latin person.

  People who have not dealt with immigration sometimes treat the question of immigrating as if it’s a simple thing. And it isn’t. It’s so deeply personal. When I first started drafting, I often thought that I was writing Libertad from the perspective of, “If I could go back in time and know what I know now, would I make the same choices? Would I immigrate again?” And that is an unanswerable question; the answer changes every day. Sometimes I feel pretty confident about the choices I made, and sometimes I wonder if I made a mistake.

  I like to ask people who have read Libertad if they think Libi emigrated or not, because it is never explicitly stated in the book. When I first submitted the story to my agent, Beth Phelan, she said, “I’m really glad she makes the choice to stay.” And when my editor, Rosie Ahmed, read it, she said, “I’m really glad she makes the choice to leave.” I change my mind all the time about what that decision is. The reader gets to make that choice with her.

  In addition to Libi’s first-person-present POV, you also include third-person chapters from other characters during different time periods. What did you want to convey by adding these perspectives?

  I wanted the reader to get to experience the grief and sadness that comes with what our main character doesn’t get to know. As an 18-year-old, it feels like you know so much, it feels like you know almost everything. But then we have these complex characters like Libi’s grandmother. I think it’s hard to understand where elders are coming from when their politics differ from ours, and so I really wanted that character to get to tell a little bit of her own story. And there are things that Maynor knows that Libi doesn’t ever get to find out. But I wanted the reader to get a sense of the things in between, the stuff that we can’t possibly know, because I think a lot of things, like forgiveness, only come when we approach them in a way where we remind ourselves, “I only know what I know.”

  What is your relationship to prose and poetry and how do these two mediums intersect in Libertad?

  Poetry often feels like a window into a moment in time. We can make beautiful connections and comparisons in that little window, but it’s ultimately still a poem. Almost as soon as you start reading it, it’s over. In the book, Libi’s poetry is doing exactly what she wants it to do because she’s speaking to an audience that already knows the things she’s talking about, people who are in the context of the events. But a foreign audience would need more specifics; Libi’s art would need to reframe everything that’s going on.

  A novel feels like a really good place to answer questions, especially questions you don’t have the answers for going in. And sometimes you don’t come out with an answer, but maybe you come out with a little bit more understanding. I think that’s good enough. One of the questions I approached in Libertad was regarding my relationship with my grandmother. Like Libi’s grandmother, mine is also a seamstress. I had a lot of questions about what would have happened if my grandmother had learned about my sexuality when I was a teenager versus now that I’m an adult. She only very recently learned about it, and it turned out fine, but when I was writing the book, she didn’t know. I felt really scared. I think that in some ways, I was trying to play out this little simulation of what would happen if she learned, because then I got to decide how she reacted. But I still tried to stay true to what felt authentic to the character.

  How has your debut experience been so far?

  I wrote Libertad over a period of three years in my early 20s, so my relationship with the book itself has changed tremendously. I had to sit with it for so long before anyone else got to see it, so I’m tired of it—I’m tired of reading it and I feel very different from the person who wrote it. But early copies have been reaching people who seem to be appreciating it and noticing the things that I wanted to be noticed, so I’m very proud and satisfied with what came of it. I had so many fears that I’ve become a little better about in the last few weeks. As we’re getting closer to publication, I’m feeling a deep sense of calm.

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  You have a second book contracted with PRH. What can you tell us about it?

  It’s going to be very different from Libertad. I’m really close to finishing it. It’s a magical realism story that takes place in the U.S. and Honduras that’s about legacy, specifically the legacy of being a Latin American person: what does it mean that you come from the incredibly violent meeting of several cultures? What does it mean to come from a lineage, a continent, a culture that was created from the process of colonization?

  Libertad by Bessie Flores Zaldívar. Dial, $19.99 Aug. 27, ISBN 978-0-59369-612-5

Zaldívar, Bessie Flores LIBERTAD Dial Books (Teen None) $19.99 8, 27 ISBN: 9780593696125

A queer coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the 2017 Honduran presidential election.

Named Libertad because she was born on September 15, Honduran Independence Day, high school senior Libi Morazán loves her country. But the right-wing party has ruled since the 2009 U.S.-backed coup, and as a girl who likes girls, she knows she can never fully be herself here. Now, Juan Orlando Hernández is standing for reelection despite the constitutional law prohibiting it, causing protests to erupt in the capital city of Tegucigalpa, where Libi and her family live. When the military police shoot and kill students on her brother Maynor's university campus, everything changes for both siblings. Libi creates a secret Instagram account, @InsurreccionPoeticaHN, to share her political poems, and Maynor joins the student front. Tensions are running high as election day draws closer, and Libi juggles her excitement over a new romance and finding her voice through poetry with her fears about an unfair election and her brother's safety. Zaldívar seamlessly weaves Honduran history and politics into the narrative. The characters are beautifully complex, and the multiple perspectives provide key moments of reflection and deep insight. Spanish appears throughout the text, but even those who don't know the language will easily understand the story, and Libi's poems are translated into English. The existential question of whether to stay or leave will resonate with readers from all backgrounds.

An emotionally charged must-read. (content warning, author's note) (Fiction. 14-18)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Zaldivar, Bessie Flores: LIBERTAD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799332883/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=55313343. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.

ZALDÍVAR, Bessie Flores. Libertad. 432p. Dial. Aug. 2024. Tr $19.99. ISBN 9780593696125.

Gr 9 Up—In 2017, Libertad, a high school senior living in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, is considering her future and evolving relationships in an atmosphere of political turbulence. After sharing a kiss with her best friend Camila, Libertad worries about being accepted amid the homophobic culture and conservative gender norms in Honduras. As a contentious presidential election nears, protests form across Tegus (as the capital is nicknamed) to denounce the incumbent right-wing government. The tension exacerbates already challenging living conditions, marked by power outages, corruption, and limited career options for people like Libertad's older brother. Libertad finds solace by writing poetry, which she shares from a secret social media account, gaining followers who connect with her powerful words. Surrounding Libertad is a strong cast of family and friends of varying and complex political and social perspectives, which the author depicts with authenticity and empathy. Zaldívar, who based the novel on real events, provides historical context via flashbacks and dialogue, and concludes with an update on the political state in Honduras.

VERDICT: An empowering and multifaceted debut novel of queer love and identity, devotion to family, political activism, and personal freedom. Highly recommended.—Jessica Agudelo

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
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MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Agudelo, Jessica. "Libertad." WebOnlyReviewsSLJ, vol. 70, no. 9, 27 Sept. 2024, p. 1. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A812243677/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d90ef6a0. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.