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Magical/Realism

Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders

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On sale May 14, 2024 | 12 Hours and 25 Minutes | 9780593787090
Longlisted for the National Book Award

A brilliant, singular collection of essays that looks to music, fantasy, and pop culture—from Beyoncé to Game of Thrones—to excavate and reimagine what has been disappeared by migration and colonialism.

Upon becoming a new mother, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was called to Mexico to reconnect with her ancestors and recover her grandmother’s story, only to return to the sudden loss of her marriage, home, and reality.

In Magical/Realism, Villarreal crosses into the erasure of memory and self, fragmented by migration, borders, and colonial and intimate violence, reconstructing her story with pieces of American pop culture, and the music, video games, and fantasy that have helped her make sense of it all.

The border between the real and imagined is a speculative space where we can remember, or re-world, what has been lost—and each chapter engages in this essential project of world-building. In one essay, Villarreal examines her own gender performativity through Nirvana and Selena; in another, she offers a radical but crucial racial reading of Jon Snow in Game of Thrones; and throughout the collection, she explores how fantasy can help us interpret and heal when grief feels insurmountable. She reflects on the moments of her life that are too painful to remember—her difficult adolescence, her role as the eldest daughter of Mexican immigrants, her divorce—and finds a way to archive her history and map her future(s) with the hope and joy of fantasy and magical thinking.

Magical/Realism is a wise, tender, and essential collection that carves a path toward a new way of remembering and telling our stories—broadening our understanding of what memoir and cultural criticism can be.
THAT NEVER HAPPENED. 12345678X
 
1. In the end, this is the phrase I remember most from my marriage: a phrase that echoes through time, tying my marriage to my fore­mothers’ marriages, my story to their stories, their stories a missing record in history, a history I can never reclaim. What is memory but a battleground, a bordered terrain between two versions of the truth?

2. Self-Erasure: And before that, there was the word Papi said to me at fourteen: compónete. Compónete ya, por favor. Fix yourself now, please, said in defeat. It was no longer the pórtate bien from my childhood. Puros pinches problemas, he would say, wishing for a more obedient, feminine, respectable daughter. Fast-forward to me at thirty-seven, standing in someone else’s dream: on the rim of the Pacific Ocean with a baby in my arms, married to a stranger who despised me, about to start a doctoral program. All surreal out­comes for the troubled teen with a past; at last I had fixed myself, me compuse. I’d become una mujer recta, casada, a mother, a college grad­uate, living the so-called American Dream.
 
It was a life I created in apology to my parents, the dream that I would live a decent life and never know struggle, a trap I rebelled against. Para que nunca tengas que batallar. I’d only ever repaid their sacrifices with sabotage, so to make it up to them, I erased the prob­lems, the color, the wildness, and created the buen hija they could be proud of, living out the grand narratives of what a “better life” meant to them: assimilation to whiteness, cis-heteronormativity, bootstraps individualism, mestizaje, Manifest Destiny, and the ear­liest one little girls are taught to believe, Happily Ever After. These too are fantasies, the grand narratives that execute inside us without much thought until at midlife, something inevitably begins to fail.
 
3. MEMORY LOSS: When we moved to Los Angeles in 2016, the final year of my marriage, I was a new mother in the first year of my PhD program, and writing my first book. But my mind was in pieces, and time slipped through some enormous, yawning wound I could not close. One of the more concerning symptoms I reported before receiving a PTSD and ADHD diagnosis was the feeling that, since having the baby, I was living in a state of unreality, or chirality—as if my home, my body, and my life only existed on the other side of the mirror. Derealization and depersonalization, the nurse called it. It was the same unreality of my adolescence, but now I was the mother, facing much higher stakes. My brain had erected a barrier between me and the profound loneliness of my marriage, a reality that was always shifting on unstable, unknowable ground.
 
4. When I visualize my memory, I imagine the defrag screen in Win­dows 95—rows of little blue squares punctured with missing data, the corrupted files speckled throughout in pink and yellow. I loved to defrag my Compaq computer and watch the teal squares turn blue and rearrange themselves. The pink and yellow files were errors, places the file structure was broken, or duplicated, overwritten, de­leted. Odd little squares that recorded nothing, invited speculation.
 
5. My father has cut off all contact with his family, for good reason; on my mother’s side, borders and elders with old grudges have made us all strangers. El árbol empieza aquí, or, the tree starts here, Papi says. As far as he’s concerned, our line begins in 1980, the year he and my mother were married in Reynosa. The family who came before would become unknown and unremembered, and over time, cease to exist.

Another word for starting over is shame, and when shame is combined with the immigrant dream of a “better life,” it’s easy to see how mestizes erase themselves by “starting over,” how entire lineages are lost, disowned, renamed, hidden, disappeared. If I am expected to be the repository of cultural and ancestral memory, the recipe librarian, the secret keeper, what lineage will my child in­herit? Not family, not language, not stories, not traditions, nor any sense of a homeland—just absence. Whiteness. To heal the present, I must recover the past. I try to piece our narrative back together from photos, docu­ments, stories, songs—portals into my childhood, my parents’ childhoods, our dead, to the land and their migrations, a line I trace back that ends at a cotton hacienda. Then, No records found. The same result I get from the Demand for Production and Discovery in my divorce proceedings: February through May are missing. Therefore, that never happened. As the ancestral memory I was trying to recover disappeared, my memory was also being erased in the present. I was stranded in time, a field of cotton, a whiteness that covers the land.
 
6. Perhaps memory loss is the intended result of America. I am a mestiza, a race defined by erasure and negation—not Indigenous, not white, but a national construct of mixedness, one that, according to the casta system, is the halfway point on the way to whiteness. The
hacienda is where our indigeneity ends and “Mexican” begins—an identity born in the field between nations, a ghost in the marrow, trying to remember its name. I grieve this loss. Memory itself is a terra nullius, a land emptied by language and law, laid bare for a man to plant his flag.
 
7. OVERWRITE: Theory, not therapy, is what helped me begin to make sense of it all. As I studied for exams and raised my child while em­broiled in divorce litigation and the world under Trump burned, I encountered the concepts of hauntology, post-humanism, critical fabulation, queer phenomenology, disidentification, the rhizome, ra­cial cartographies, the subaltern, the production of space—language and frameworks that allowed me to remap and reworld my broken reality. But it was the loss of the real, Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacra that shape our reality, that finally separated the layers—the grand narrative, and my real life. He begins Simulacra and Simu­lation by citing “On the Exactitude of Science,” a short Jorge Luis Borges story about cartographers who draw a map so detailed, the map itself is the size of the empire, an exact replica reproducing the territory point for point, until the map itself covers the land, then becomes the land. “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory . . .”
 
Baudrillard used the fabulation and allegory of magical realism to clarify the fiction and violence of borders, the simulation of dif­ferent nations on either side as a panting black bear paces its length; how the land does not produce borders, but borders themselves produce the land; how empire draws the map until its signifiers replace the land itself. Borders are sites of race-making, nation-building, temporal dislocation—the loss of the real, derealization, and depersonalization. In other words, trauma as I understood it: the moment you lose your reality to someone else’s story.
 
8. A dark thread pulls behind my navel; the nerve-ghost of my um­bilical cord connected to a black, starry pool in my center, the neb­ula I was connected to before I was born. It is a knowing beyond language. I light candles for my dead, listen for their voices. I write from this starry center; I write what they say until it’s true.
 
9. Once, a friend invited me over for dinner and put on a vinyl record as background music. In the first nanosecond, the breath the audience takes before the cheers and applause begin, I asked, “Is this Unplugged?” They teased me mercilessly about it—how could I recognize the album from silence, when the song hadn’t even started yet? It was because as a kid, I played those first few seconds over and over to hear Kurt’s voice introduce “About a Girl”: “Good evening. This is off our first record, most people don’t own it.” It stuck with me; something about it radiated truth.
 
10. Magic and trauma are inextricable; both begin in the language of disbelief; This can’t be real. I can’t believe it. I look out at the wall that 8 extends an imaginary border beyond the land and into the sea, as if it could split the ocean in half. How do you make sense of an incomprehensible world? Baudrillard turned to magical realism to expose the absurdity of empire through fabulist allegory. If trauma is a state of unreality, and grief is a site of magical thinking, then magical realism is both its narrative and interpretive mode.
Longlisted for the National Book Award

A Best Book of 2024 (so far) by Book Riot

Most Anticipated by Book Riot, Hip Latina, Electric Lit, Screen Rant, and Write or Die


"A revelation… to be studied, savored, re-read and discussed”
Melissa Castillo Planas, Latinx Pop Magazine

“This collection of essays is a modern exploration of topics such as loss, colonialism, migration and gender through the lens of pop culture. It provides a reflective narrative that prompts readers to reconsider their perspectives on these subjects.”
Los Angeles Times, Des Los Reads

“This nonfiction read is one of my favorite books of the year and it is my mission to make more people read it… I slapped my desk in emphasis while thinking about this book again just now. It’s that good.”
—Vanessa Diaz, Book Riot

"Magical/Realism is the perfect non-fiction work for fiction lovers. Vanessa Angélica Villarreal's essays explore her journey of reconnection with her heritage and ancestors in Mexico while using current popular media, like Game of Thrones, to explore cultural erasure and the damages of migration and colonialism."
Screen Rant

“Searing, deeply affecting, and profoundly moving . . . The future-dreaming and re-worlding that Villarreal enacts across her genre-bending chapters, quite frankly, opens new worlds of healing both for herself and for readers.”
—Southern Review of Books

“The fresh perspective and distinctive voice of poet Villarreal drive this smart collection… the meditations on fantasy narratives incisively probe how fictional worlds reflect and intersect with the real one. Readers will be spellbound.”
Publishers Weekly (starred)

“With brilliant insight and masterful writing, Villarreal examines fantasy at close range…the magic of this collection is the elasticity and brilliance with which Villarreal is able to take critical analysis and connect it to her own experiences. A wondrous book that will change the way you think about fantasy and magic.”
—Kirkus (starred)

"Not only is this intimate essay collection a healing listen, but it repositions cultural criticism on the map as a meaningful and resonant form of catharsis."
Audible

Magical/Realism is staggeringly good; it’s been ages since I’ve been this moved, challenged, and devastated by an essay collection. An energetic, paradigm-shifting book.”
Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

"A stunning, provocative, and essential book that lights up the mind. Villarreal’s ferocious imagination is matched only by a roving intellect and so much heart that these essays will stay with you for a long time after reading. One of my favorite nonfiction collections of the past decade."
Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author

“Villarreal possesses endless talent. As she connects the dots between the various extraordinary and mundane realisms that haunt our daily lives, she displays a poet’s command of form, making this work sing with resonance. A banger.”
—Camonghne Felix, author of Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation

“Vanessa Angelica Villarreal’s Magical/Realism is the impossible book that does so much so well and still retains a distinct and propulsive voice. Villarreal’s formal variousness illuminates and usefully complicates her subjects, but the bedrock upon which she engages her intellectual might is a big beating heart—there are lines here that made me, a non-crier, actually well-up. About her father who taught himself to play guitar while his migrant laborer parents worked, Villarreal writes: ‘He was not a rare mind dreaming in a place that suppresses dreams with debt and labor. What is rare is that he almost made it.’ Often, for Villarreal, tenderness presents itself as a kind of rage, a rage that emerges from an ability to perceive the interiority of the harmed. Our loss, how rare this rage—without any accompanying smug back-patting—feels in the contemporary critical discourse. Our luck, to find in such abundance here.”
—Kaveh Akbar, New York Times bestselling author of Martyr!
© Vanessa Angelica Villarreal
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the author of Beast Meridian, which received a Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and the Texas Institute of Letters John A. Robertson Award. She was a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles with her son. View titles by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

About

Longlisted for the National Book Award

A brilliant, singular collection of essays that looks to music, fantasy, and pop culture—from Beyoncé to Game of Thrones—to excavate and reimagine what has been disappeared by migration and colonialism.

Upon becoming a new mother, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was called to Mexico to reconnect with her ancestors and recover her grandmother’s story, only to return to the sudden loss of her marriage, home, and reality.

In Magical/Realism, Villarreal crosses into the erasure of memory and self, fragmented by migration, borders, and colonial and intimate violence, reconstructing her story with pieces of American pop culture, and the music, video games, and fantasy that have helped her make sense of it all.

The border between the real and imagined is a speculative space where we can remember, or re-world, what has been lost—and each chapter engages in this essential project of world-building. In one essay, Villarreal examines her own gender performativity through Nirvana and Selena; in another, she offers a radical but crucial racial reading of Jon Snow in Game of Thrones; and throughout the collection, she explores how fantasy can help us interpret and heal when grief feels insurmountable. She reflects on the moments of her life that are too painful to remember—her difficult adolescence, her role as the eldest daughter of Mexican immigrants, her divorce—and finds a way to archive her history and map her future(s) with the hope and joy of fantasy and magical thinking.

Magical/Realism is a wise, tender, and essential collection that carves a path toward a new way of remembering and telling our stories—broadening our understanding of what memoir and cultural criticism can be.

Excerpt

THAT NEVER HAPPENED. 12345678X
 
1. In the end, this is the phrase I remember most from my marriage: a phrase that echoes through time, tying my marriage to my fore­mothers’ marriages, my story to their stories, their stories a missing record in history, a history I can never reclaim. What is memory but a battleground, a bordered terrain between two versions of the truth?

2. Self-Erasure: And before that, there was the word Papi said to me at fourteen: compónete. Compónete ya, por favor. Fix yourself now, please, said in defeat. It was no longer the pórtate bien from my childhood. Puros pinches problemas, he would say, wishing for a more obedient, feminine, respectable daughter. Fast-forward to me at thirty-seven, standing in someone else’s dream: on the rim of the Pacific Ocean with a baby in my arms, married to a stranger who despised me, about to start a doctoral program. All surreal out­comes for the troubled teen with a past; at last I had fixed myself, me compuse. I’d become una mujer recta, casada, a mother, a college grad­uate, living the so-called American Dream.
 
It was a life I created in apology to my parents, the dream that I would live a decent life and never know struggle, a trap I rebelled against. Para que nunca tengas que batallar. I’d only ever repaid their sacrifices with sabotage, so to make it up to them, I erased the prob­lems, the color, the wildness, and created the buen hija they could be proud of, living out the grand narratives of what a “better life” meant to them: assimilation to whiteness, cis-heteronormativity, bootstraps individualism, mestizaje, Manifest Destiny, and the ear­liest one little girls are taught to believe, Happily Ever After. These too are fantasies, the grand narratives that execute inside us without much thought until at midlife, something inevitably begins to fail.
 
3. MEMORY LOSS: When we moved to Los Angeles in 2016, the final year of my marriage, I was a new mother in the first year of my PhD program, and writing my first book. But my mind was in pieces, and time slipped through some enormous, yawning wound I could not close. One of the more concerning symptoms I reported before receiving a PTSD and ADHD diagnosis was the feeling that, since having the baby, I was living in a state of unreality, or chirality—as if my home, my body, and my life only existed on the other side of the mirror. Derealization and depersonalization, the nurse called it. It was the same unreality of my adolescence, but now I was the mother, facing much higher stakes. My brain had erected a barrier between me and the profound loneliness of my marriage, a reality that was always shifting on unstable, unknowable ground.
 
4. When I visualize my memory, I imagine the defrag screen in Win­dows 95—rows of little blue squares punctured with missing data, the corrupted files speckled throughout in pink and yellow. I loved to defrag my Compaq computer and watch the teal squares turn blue and rearrange themselves. The pink and yellow files were errors, places the file structure was broken, or duplicated, overwritten, de­leted. Odd little squares that recorded nothing, invited speculation.
 
5. My father has cut off all contact with his family, for good reason; on my mother’s side, borders and elders with old grudges have made us all strangers. El árbol empieza aquí, or, the tree starts here, Papi says. As far as he’s concerned, our line begins in 1980, the year he and my mother were married in Reynosa. The family who came before would become unknown and unremembered, and over time, cease to exist.

Another word for starting over is shame, and when shame is combined with the immigrant dream of a “better life,” it’s easy to see how mestizes erase themselves by “starting over,” how entire lineages are lost, disowned, renamed, hidden, disappeared. If I am expected to be the repository of cultural and ancestral memory, the recipe librarian, the secret keeper, what lineage will my child in­herit? Not family, not language, not stories, not traditions, nor any sense of a homeland—just absence. Whiteness. To heal the present, I must recover the past. I try to piece our narrative back together from photos, docu­ments, stories, songs—portals into my childhood, my parents’ childhoods, our dead, to the land and their migrations, a line I trace back that ends at a cotton hacienda. Then, No records found. The same result I get from the Demand for Production and Discovery in my divorce proceedings: February through May are missing. Therefore, that never happened. As the ancestral memory I was trying to recover disappeared, my memory was also being erased in the present. I was stranded in time, a field of cotton, a whiteness that covers the land.
 
6. Perhaps memory loss is the intended result of America. I am a mestiza, a race defined by erasure and negation—not Indigenous, not white, but a national construct of mixedness, one that, according to the casta system, is the halfway point on the way to whiteness. The
hacienda is where our indigeneity ends and “Mexican” begins—an identity born in the field between nations, a ghost in the marrow, trying to remember its name. I grieve this loss. Memory itself is a terra nullius, a land emptied by language and law, laid bare for a man to plant his flag.
 
7. OVERWRITE: Theory, not therapy, is what helped me begin to make sense of it all. As I studied for exams and raised my child while em­broiled in divorce litigation and the world under Trump burned, I encountered the concepts of hauntology, post-humanism, critical fabulation, queer phenomenology, disidentification, the rhizome, ra­cial cartographies, the subaltern, the production of space—language and frameworks that allowed me to remap and reworld my broken reality. But it was the loss of the real, Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacra that shape our reality, that finally separated the layers—the grand narrative, and my real life. He begins Simulacra and Simu­lation by citing “On the Exactitude of Science,” a short Jorge Luis Borges story about cartographers who draw a map so detailed, the map itself is the size of the empire, an exact replica reproducing the territory point for point, until the map itself covers the land, then becomes the land. “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory . . .”
 
Baudrillard used the fabulation and allegory of magical realism to clarify the fiction and violence of borders, the simulation of dif­ferent nations on either side as a panting black bear paces its length; how the land does not produce borders, but borders themselves produce the land; how empire draws the map until its signifiers replace the land itself. Borders are sites of race-making, nation-building, temporal dislocation—the loss of the real, derealization, and depersonalization. In other words, trauma as I understood it: the moment you lose your reality to someone else’s story.
 
8. A dark thread pulls behind my navel; the nerve-ghost of my um­bilical cord connected to a black, starry pool in my center, the neb­ula I was connected to before I was born. It is a knowing beyond language. I light candles for my dead, listen for their voices. I write from this starry center; I write what they say until it’s true.
 
9. Once, a friend invited me over for dinner and put on a vinyl record as background music. In the first nanosecond, the breath the audience takes before the cheers and applause begin, I asked, “Is this Unplugged?” They teased me mercilessly about it—how could I recognize the album from silence, when the song hadn’t even started yet? It was because as a kid, I played those first few seconds over and over to hear Kurt’s voice introduce “About a Girl”: “Good evening. This is off our first record, most people don’t own it.” It stuck with me; something about it radiated truth.
 
10. Magic and trauma are inextricable; both begin in the language of disbelief; This can’t be real. I can’t believe it. I look out at the wall that 8 extends an imaginary border beyond the land and into the sea, as if it could split the ocean in half. How do you make sense of an incomprehensible world? Baudrillard turned to magical realism to expose the absurdity of empire through fabulist allegory. If trauma is a state of unreality, and grief is a site of magical thinking, then magical realism is both its narrative and interpretive mode.

Reviews

Longlisted for the National Book Award

A Best Book of 2024 (so far) by Book Riot

Most Anticipated by Book Riot, Hip Latina, Electric Lit, Screen Rant, and Write or Die


"A revelation… to be studied, savored, re-read and discussed”
Melissa Castillo Planas, Latinx Pop Magazine

“This collection of essays is a modern exploration of topics such as loss, colonialism, migration and gender through the lens of pop culture. It provides a reflective narrative that prompts readers to reconsider their perspectives on these subjects.”
Los Angeles Times, Des Los Reads

“This nonfiction read is one of my favorite books of the year and it is my mission to make more people read it… I slapped my desk in emphasis while thinking about this book again just now. It’s that good.”
—Vanessa Diaz, Book Riot

"Magical/Realism is the perfect non-fiction work for fiction lovers. Vanessa Angélica Villarreal's essays explore her journey of reconnection with her heritage and ancestors in Mexico while using current popular media, like Game of Thrones, to explore cultural erasure and the damages of migration and colonialism."
Screen Rant

“Searing, deeply affecting, and profoundly moving . . . The future-dreaming and re-worlding that Villarreal enacts across her genre-bending chapters, quite frankly, opens new worlds of healing both for herself and for readers.”
—Southern Review of Books

“The fresh perspective and distinctive voice of poet Villarreal drive this smart collection… the meditations on fantasy narratives incisively probe how fictional worlds reflect and intersect with the real one. Readers will be spellbound.”
Publishers Weekly (starred)

“With brilliant insight and masterful writing, Villarreal examines fantasy at close range…the magic of this collection is the elasticity and brilliance with which Villarreal is able to take critical analysis and connect it to her own experiences. A wondrous book that will change the way you think about fantasy and magic.”
—Kirkus (starred)

"Not only is this intimate essay collection a healing listen, but it repositions cultural criticism on the map as a meaningful and resonant form of catharsis."
Audible

Magical/Realism is staggeringly good; it’s been ages since I’ve been this moved, challenged, and devastated by an essay collection. An energetic, paradigm-shifting book.”
Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

"A stunning, provocative, and essential book that lights up the mind. Villarreal’s ferocious imagination is matched only by a roving intellect and so much heart that these essays will stay with you for a long time after reading. One of my favorite nonfiction collections of the past decade."
Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author

“Villarreal possesses endless talent. As she connects the dots between the various extraordinary and mundane realisms that haunt our daily lives, she displays a poet’s command of form, making this work sing with resonance. A banger.”
—Camonghne Felix, author of Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation

“Vanessa Angelica Villarreal’s Magical/Realism is the impossible book that does so much so well and still retains a distinct and propulsive voice. Villarreal’s formal variousness illuminates and usefully complicates her subjects, but the bedrock upon which she engages her intellectual might is a big beating heart—there are lines here that made me, a non-crier, actually well-up. About her father who taught himself to play guitar while his migrant laborer parents worked, Villarreal writes: ‘He was not a rare mind dreaming in a place that suppresses dreams with debt and labor. What is rare is that he almost made it.’ Often, for Villarreal, tenderness presents itself as a kind of rage, a rage that emerges from an ability to perceive the interiority of the harmed. Our loss, how rare this rage—without any accompanying smug back-patting—feels in the contemporary critical discourse. Our luck, to find in such abundance here.”
—Kaveh Akbar, New York Times bestselling author of Martyr!

Author

© Vanessa Angelica Villarreal
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the author of Beast Meridian, which received a Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and the Texas Institute of Letters John A. Robertson Award. She was a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles with her son. View titles by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal