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Latinx in Horror: Interview with Nathan Castellanos

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I was born and raised in Highland Park, CA. My mother came to California in the 80s after my Abuelo had worked the fields here in LA county, saving money to bring his family from Guadalajara. She married my father, who came from an Anglo/Jewish background. Cultural differences instigated their divorce when I was fairly young, which led to me developing a very independent (and sometimes rebellious) nature early on. This sparked my interest in things such as punk rock music, existentialist philosophy, Buddhism, comic books, sci and horror novels, and alternative subcultures of various sorts.

Essentially, having a mother who was busy working, and a father whom I hardly saw, I actively sought my own answers to life, a habit that grew into my tendency to always question everything, to always look for the most abstract (and sometimes subversive) answers to things.

In my early twenties, I developed a semi-severe spinal issue. This led to my desire to study kinesiology and dietetics, along with yoga, Taoist alchemy, Tarot, Zen meditation, Kabbalah, Curandisimo, and all manner of subjects related to alternative healing.

It was around 2010 that I began to develop a keen awareness of the growth of gentrification in Los Angeles. Rents began to rise, and new businesses came to Highland Park that many long-time locals could not afford. My initial reaction was panic; I was not living in a rent-controlled apartment; money was tight, and between my health issue, going to night school, and work, the idea of an impending growth in the cost of living scared me to death.

The day eventually came when the landlord raised the rent and I had to leave, take on extra work and give up school. I was devasted, frustrated and at a loss for how to let these feelings out. I was severely broke, and I had a birthday coming up in a few weeks, so I made an executive decision to do something to ease the emotional pain I was going through. I’d heard from a friend that it wasn’t hard to self-publish these days, so I spent the next few weeks tirelessly writing and editing the first installment of Salted Plastic: Tales of Gentrification. I just barely finished and uploaded it to the publisher about an hour or two before midnight on my birthday; the feeling of elation and catharsis was beautiful; I broke down crying, popped open a beer, and gave myself a hug. And that essentially was the advent of my desire to write.

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What inspired you to start writing?

I began writing Salted Plastic as a positive outlet for the pain and upset I felt in the face of gentrification in Los Angeles. I had lost my affordable apartment, and due to the rising cost of living I also had to put aside college and work several jobs to survive. That said, I wanted to find a more constructive way to let my feelings out; I could have very well taken the political route via protest, getting involved legally, or worse yet, ending up in a verbal debate with every and any advocate of gentrification everywhere I went, but I knew that this would just end in trouble. In a very real way the stories in Salted Plastic are a kind of catharsis for the sadness and anger I felt in the face of seeing my friends, family and myself being displaced/priced out of our neighborhoods.

What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it?

To be honest I had no intention of writing a horror story, it just sort of evolved that way; I had originally intended my story to be more along the lines of a social critique in the vain of Cintra Wilson or Chuck Palahniuk, both of whom I highly admire. That said, something in my unconscious just sort of led me to this realization that my feelings on gentrification would translate better if I personified them as a sort of inhuman force with tortuously demonic power. This lead to my creation of Salted Plastic’s Barons, a sort of spin on the vampire mythos, a group of undead pseudo humans who orchestrate human culture, using it as a sort of psychic food source while they buy up as much real estate as possible in Los Angeles.

Do you make a conscious effort to include LatinX characters and themes in your writing and if so, what do you want to portray?

Yes, I have several LatinX characters and themes, most notably the protagonist, Miguel Lyons, and a scene where one of the demon Barons hypnotizes a young LatinX girl to steal her family recipe for pozole. That said, I feel that the first character to exemplify how I wanted to portray a LatinX character would be Tlaloca, a nineteen year old girl who essentially is presented as someone with severe cultural identity crisis. Having been raised by wealthy Anglo foster parents in an upscale neighborhood, she finds herself constantly affecting a so called “hood” mentality to live up to the expectations of her punk rock inner city peers. She keeps this up until she has a traumatizing experience that essentially jumpstarts her true self, leading to her becoming an avatar of the Aztec god Tlaloc. At the time I was studying a lot of psychology, specifically the concept of anamnesis, which roughly means finding your true self and identity through a sort of ego drop instigated by self-exploration and/or extreme emotional trauma.

What has writing horror taught you about the world and yourself?

I’d say the best lesson I’ve taken from writing horror is that analogy is sometimes more powerful than the naked truth. I’m not ashamed to say that spending many many nights in tears, feeling broken and like I’m fighting a losing battle, is what lead to a lot of my writing. Much of this frustration came (and still comes) from the sadness I feel trying to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced gentrification what it feels like. My point is this; once I started explaining these feelings through the metaphor of monsters who displace lower class LatinX renters from our communities, often times capitalizing on our culture while they price us out; once I started to do this I noticed that the ideas I presented clicked better with my readers. This led to a lot of people approaching me and telling me that they get my pain, that they see what I’m trying to say. Even more priceless than this though, is that people who had also been effected by gentrification began to congratulate me on creating a language for their feelings, telling me over and over again that they had felt hurt, marginalized and disinherited by their experiences, but had no real way to express it in concrete terms that those unaffected by gentrification would understand or validate. That is the biggest reward and lesson of utilizing horror for my message, that it seems to do the job creating a communications paradigm for those hurt by displacement.

How have you seen the horror genre change over the years? And how do you think it will continue to evolve?

The biggest change I’ve noticed this generation would have to be the variety. When I was a teen we usually just had a handful of set sub-genres of horror, namely vampire, occult, zombie, werewolf, and ad hoc themes set on portraying an almost too predictable narrative. Nowadays I feel like personal twists (from the author’s own experience) are more welcome, leading to a larger variety of context to supplement the content of a story. I believe that this will continue to grow the more the diversity of author pools is allowed to expand, and to me, always desiring to read something new, this is highly encouraging.

How do you feel the LatinX community has been represented thus far in the genre and what hopes do you have for representation in the genre going forward?

I’d like to say (with all due respect) that it has been presented in a very “young movement” way. What I mean by this is that, whether we’re talking about novels, comic books, or movies, that a lot of the LatinX characters tend to be one dimensional, and based on a lot of stock variety concepts of what it means to be LatinX. I’m not saying that’s bad; it’s a great start and spark for the movement, but I feel that the diversity needs to be as exponentially variant as the people. Myself for instance; I’m half Jewish/Anglo, and half Mexican, raised mainly by my Mexican mother; this is not a character background you see often in a typical horror narrative, which is why I decided to create my protagonist, Miguel Lyons, who happens to be a LatinX character of mixed background. I’m sure I’m not the only one doing this out there, but I would like to see it become more commonplace in the future.

Who are some of your favorite LatinX characters in horror?

I read and watch so much horror that that’s a hard one, but to list a few I’d have to say Jackie Estacado from “Darkness”, La Diosa in “From Dusk Till Dawn”, and Malintzinita from “Vampire the Masquerade.” I tend to be very eclectic in where I get my dose of story writing from no matter what the medium is; novels, comic books, video games, anime, manga, movies; I love them all.

Who are some LatinX horror authors you recommend our audience check out?

Off the top of my head I would say check out Sofía Guadarrama Collado, Silvia Moreno Garcia, and Gabriel García Márquez. Ultimately though, I encourage readers to constantly dig and research for more content; the majority of the writers I’ve found came from hours and hours of late-night phone searches, going down rabbit holes that led to little-known writers with some real and fresh talent.

What is one piece of advice you would give horror authors today?

I know this may sound cliché, but listen to yourself! Along the road of writing, you will get a lot of criticism veiled as advice in regards to your style and subject matter. If it feels right in your heart, and your message is uniquely a part of who you are, then you’ve got an authentic voice. I believe firmly that novels are art, and should be treated as such, as vehicles for self-expression, for painting the world as you experience it as a way of opening up communal understanding between people of all walks of life.

And to the LatinX writers out there who are just getting started, what advice would you give them?

I would say again, put a little piece of you in all your writing; make your writing a mirror of your unique experience as a member of the LatinX community. Whether this means your family life, your feelings on the neighborhood you grew up in, or how you feel you are perceived and understood by others, let it shine in your narratives! Put simply, bring the model that you wish to represent your culture to the fore so the world can see that being LatinX means something rich, diverse, and specific from person to person.

 

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