{"id":67139,"date":"2016-10-17T11:41:27","date_gmt":"2016-10-17T18:41:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mayagonzalez.com\/blog\/?p=67139"},"modified":"2018-05-07T16:14:51","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T23:14:51","slug":"calling-indie-queer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mayagonzalez.com\/blog\/2016\/10\/calling-indie-queer\/","title":{"rendered":"Calling OUT Indie-QUEER!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two Books that Honor Mexican Heritage AND LGBTQ Experience
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Death In the Family<\/span><\/em> and When We Love Someone We Sing to Them<\/span><\/em> will be published in 2017 by Reflection Press.<\/p>\n

Written and illustrated by me, Death In the Family<\/span><\/em>\u00a0is not a Dia de los Muertos book with cultural references and sugar skulls. I love many of those and get to learn about a holiday I was not formally raised with. But I was<\/em> raised with Death.<\/p>\n

In fact, Death has been a profound and amazing teacher for me and talking about her is an important part of who I am as well as how I was raised. When I first learned about Dia I already knew the shape of the holiday. My father taught me a Mexican sensibility in how he related to death and how death featured in our life.<\/p>\n

In Death in the Family<\/span><\/em> I talk about different experiences of death in a family setting. This is a book to open up conversations about death in your own family and bring the ones back into powerful memory who have dropped the body and become one with everything.<\/p>\n

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Another book,\u00a0 mentored by me and written by Ernesto Martinez, changes reality as it reframes a\u00a0 cultural tradition to include LGBTQ experience. In When We Love Someone We Sing to Them<\/span><\/em> we learn about the Mexican tradition of singing to family and loved ones through one small boy who naturally assumes the tradition includes him and his experience.<\/p>\n

Watch a tradition expand as limitations are lifted to include everyone, all the way to remembering Xochipilli, the Mesoamerican diety of flowers, dance and song, a traditionally gay protector of ancient Mexico.<\/p>\n

A perfect book to bring tradition and inclusion into the conversation and support our LGBTQ young ones in knowing that they belong and always have, while providing pride in both our Mexican heritage and our LGBTQ culture and history as families.<\/p>\n

I am honored and excited to illustrate this project. But being able to publish it through my indie-press feels truly revolutionary! Thank you so much Ernesto for your courage and BEing. You’re the first, I hope, in a long line of folks in my new Mentorship with Intent to Publish<\/span> program. Queer eternal darling!<\/p>\n

YOU ARE THE REVOLUTION-may our children and families hear your words and know that they are beautiful and belong as Latinx and LGBTQ!<\/p>\n