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.
Roxanna Cardenas Colmenares is a Venezuelan writer living in New York City who loves to consume, study, and create art. She explores multiple genres in her writing, with a special interest in horror and sci-fi, while working on her B.A. in English with a Creative Writing concentration.
Her work has made her a two-time recipient of the James Tolan Student Writing Award for her critical essays analyzing movies. She has also won The Henry Roth Award in Fiction, The Esther Unger Poetry Prize, and The Allan Danzig Memorial Award in Victorian Literature.
In her free time, she likes to watch movies, dance, and draw doodles that she hopes to be brave enough to share one day.
