Going Home: A Guest Post by Santiago Jose Sanchez
A story about living between two continents, two cultures and two different identities. Hombrecito soars off the page and introduces us to an author we can’t wait to hear more from. Taking us from Colombia to Miami to New York, explore life and love in Santiago Jose Sanchez’s debut novel. Read on to discover the real-life events that led to this book and the inspiration behind the story in their exclusive B&N Reads essay — here is Santiago, in their own words.
Hardcover $29.00
Hombrecito: A Novel
Hombrecito: A Novel
In Stock Online
Hardcover $29.00
We’re not the only fans of this story about the search for home, family, belonging and identity — Brandon Taylor (The Late Americans) and Xochitl Gonzalez (Anita de Monte Laughs Last) are too.
We’re not the only fans of this story about the search for home, family, belonging and identity — Brandon Taylor (The Late Americans) and Xochitl Gonzalez (Anita de Monte Laughs Last) are too.
As the child of a microbiologist and civil engineer, I was destined from a young age to become a scientist. But everything changed in my junior year of college when, after several attempts, I finally got into a fiction workshop. Half-way through a chemistry degree, with only one other English class under my belt, I was as excited as I was lost.
For my first piece, I started with a simple image: a young boy waiting for his mother after school, a line echoing in his head as she fails to appear: “Today she forgot she is a mother.” He doesn’t know exactly why she’s been so unreliable lately, only that it involves his father and the badlands of Colombia. The rest of the story, filled with everything the boy doesn’t know, haunts him as he waits. I poured myself into writing, obsessing over each line, trying to capture the boy’s longing and confusion, while I absorbed the work of Anne Carson, Richard Siken, and Clarice Lispector. In the end, I spent more time working on this story than I did on any of the problem sets for my organic chemistry class that semester.
While I don’t remember my mother ever forgetting me at school, I did grow up hearing the story of the time she disappeared for a weekend to search for my father. He had drained their bank account and gone into hiding with his mistress in the badlands, so she enlisted her sister-in-law and together they set off to find him. This wild, shocking tale was first told to me by my mother, then later by my father and aunts when I returned to Colombia in my early teens. What astonished me most was how much everyone loved telling this story.
My mother had moved us from Colombia to Miami when I was seven, after the events of this story. I should’ve remembered more from those years, but my mind held onto as little as it could from this period, and what I did recall often came from my mother and brother—half-memories, half-stories that blurred into each other. The greatest mystery to my life, it seemed, was in my mother’s decision to leave my father and homeland, a choice that forever altered our lives.
With this first workshop story, which would later become the opening chapter of Hombrecito, I set out to write my own story, the one no one else could tell me: Where was I that weekend my mother went looking for my father? Where was I when she banged on his motel room door and, rather than letting her in, he yelled back that he needed to shower? Where was I when he finally opened the door and she saw the pair of feet squirming underneath the mattress?
For the next decade, I followed the boy from the classroom to Miami and beyond, inventing the life around half-remembered or forgotten moments from my own life. I wrote past the stories I’d inherited to what lay on the other side, excavating experiences I had long buried out of shame or fear.
Like the scientist my parents hoped I would be, I experimented with voice, point-of-view, and time, searching for the precise conditions to resurrect my younger self at the most intense junctures of his little life. The project grew into a nonlinear network of stories that mapped a fictional life that was and wasn’t mine. With each iteration, the Santiago of my novel became an entity separate and distinct from me. Returning to him day after day brought me closer to finding acceptance and grace for the complexities of my own life; through him, through writing, I came to a deeper love for myself.
Writing Hombrecito was a labor of love, an act of bearing witness and making space for my whole self on the page. Blending fact and fiction, I crafted a new narrative for the parts of my past I had lost in the move, and pieced together the fragments into a story that you and I could step into together. It was, in a sense, going home.
