Alex Espinoza’s The Sons of El Rey captures the generational aspirations and labors of the Vega family, and its men, bringing forward into the light what is confined to the shadows—shadows of the soul and locked bedrooms. The conflict between the outer persona and the inner self is made manifest by the family’s career: luchadores (técnicos, the good guys!) in Mexico’s vibrant lucha libre scene of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. The novel weaves grandiose bouts of good versus evil with threads of human suffering, triumph, humiliation, and the search for acceptance.
Told through five distinct points-of-view, The Sons of El Rey forces the audience to interrogate each of its central characters through multiple layers of relationships, proving that the masks we wear, stunning as they may be, are only that: masks.
The novel opens, “A friend once told me the dead tell the best lies. I will try to be honest even though I never learned how.” Ernesto, the patriarch, is in grave health, and the story of his rise as El Rey Coyote, superstar luchador, frames the tragedy of forced masculinity that is passed to his son and his grandson after. These three Vega men provide three distinct renderings of the claustrophobia induced by North American masculine traditions and the lengths to which young and old men go to bury their shame.
In this way, the novel is a story of discovery. Freddy Vega, Ernesto’s son, is “determined to sort through it all…” His struggling gym, his marriage, his strained relationship with his own son Julian, and the lingering mysteries of his father.
Not only does Espinoza track the acted imposition of masculinity down the generations, but he also layers a tapestry of Chicano heritage and influence on the development and culture of the United States. The Sons of El Rey is truly a North American story; as black a line on the earth as la frontera is, this novel evidences a sprawling human story that transcends nation. Instead, it focuses on where we come from and how those origins are, indeed, inseparable from any discussion of nation.
Espinoza applies an expert hand in The Sons of El Rey to cast the male body as dually a source of power and center of fascination. The recurrent imagery of lucha libre keeps us in close-up with these superheroic men, the athletic competition a great emblem of heterosexuality. Yet, depictions of lucha libre are infused with queer notions of the body, dress-as-performance, and evaporation of gender through contact with the supernatural.
Espinoza writes of the luchadores, “they kicked some serious ass, the crowd gasping, unmoving as they witnessed the flurry of leaps and jumps, the swirling colors and lights, those men doing such incredible things, things no mortal was ever expected to do.”
At its core, The Sons of El Rey is a novel of combat: between characters, within oneself, against oppressive narratives of the dominant culture, against the creep of time. Ernesto, patriarch, superstar, luchador, states it so: “In the end, for us fighters, it’s not about the script or about the feuds or about who the victor is. It’s about the spectacle of it all. It’s about the struggle. Sólo la lucha.”
In The Sons of El Rey, the struggle and the spectacle walk hand-in-hand into the clouded waters of the soul. There, they might find a place where light can grow.
Alex Espinoza (he/him/his/they) is a queer writer born in Tijuana, Mexico––on Kumeyaay original lands–– to Purepécha parents from the state of Michoacán and raised in Southern California, on Gabrieliño-Tongva land. His debut novel, Still Water Saints, was published to wide critical acclaim. His second novel, The Five Acts of Diego León, was the winner of a 2014 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Other awards include fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts, and MacDowell. He is the author of the nonfiction book Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime and has written essays, reviews, and stories for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Times, LitHub, and NPR. His short story “Detainment” was selected for inclusion in the 2022 Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories. His newest novel, The Sons of El Rey, was published in June, 2024 from Simon and Schuster. It was longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was selected as one of the best books of 2024 by The New Yorker. Alex lives in Los Angeles on Gabrieliño-Tongva land with his husband Kyle and teaches at the University of California, Riverside––within Tongva, Cahuilla, Luiseño & Serrano original lands––where he serves as the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair and Professor of Creative Writing.
Griffin Hamstead is a writer from Appalachia. He is in the final year of his MFA at George Mason University, where he was awarded the Third-Year Thesis Fellowship. His fiction has appeared in The Write Launch and Stillpoint, with poetry appearing elsewhere. His novella To Be Born in the Time of Nations was selected as the runner-up for the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize. He is the incoming Fiction Editor at phoebe journal.