The Sons of El Rey

April 15, 2024
Espinoza (The Five Acts of Diego Leon, 2013) brings three generations of a Mexican American family to life, along with their life in la lucha, Mexico's popular wrestling sport featuring masked athletes. El Rey Coyote is the luchador alter ego of patriarch Ernesto Vega, who is on his death bed. El Rey Coyote was a t�cnico, the good guy in the Manichean logic of this sport-spectacle of carefully crafted, elaborate rivalries. This immigrant family's struggles to survive and thrive in their native country (in the luchador business) and in their adopted one (by opening a gym) is complicated by the secret drama of Ernesto's closeted homosexuality. Each family member, including Elena, Ernesto's deceased wife, tells their part of the family story in short, punchy chapters. There's Julian, the baby of the family, named for Ernesto's best friend and partner (and perhaps something more); his father Freddy/Alfredo aka El Rey Coyote Jr.; angry and resentful Elena; and El Rey Coyote himself. From rural Mexico to Ajusco, the outskirts of Mexico City to Los Angeles, their stories unfold in surprising ways.

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Starred review from April 29, 2024
Espinoza (Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime) returns to fiction with the arresting story of an elderly wrestler’s last days. Ernesto Vega is visited while in hospice care by his son, Freddy; his gay grandson, Julian; the ghost of his wife, Elena; and a manifestation of his lucha libre persona, El Rey Coyote. Elena and El Rey Coyote press Ernesto to reexamine his life and his competing devotions to wrestling, his marriage, and his close childhood friend Julián Tamez. Meanwhile, Freddy, who once performed as El Rey Coyote Jr., agonizes over having to permanently shutter his father’s East Los Angeles gym, which never bounced back after the pandemic lockdowns, and Julian, an underpaid community college professor, chafes at being fetishized by other men for the color of his skin. The seamlessly interwoven story lines bring each character to vivid life, and Espinoza shines in the lucha libre scenes (“The crowd gasping, unmoving as they witnessed the flurry of leaps and jumps, the swirling colors and lights, these men doing such incredible things, things no mortal was ever expected to do”). This is a knockout. Agent: Eleanor Jackson, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.