I Refuse to Let You Have My Joy

Iris Kim talks to Jaquira Díaz about her new novel, “This Is the Only Kingdom.”

By Iris KimNovember 23, 2025

• Fiction

SOME STORIES, when you hear them, can haunt you for a lifetime. A family member offers a casual anecdote that provides a glimpse into the past, without realizing that it might upend a child’s world. That’s what happened to Jaquira Díaz 30 years ago when she heard the story of Rey, her father’s childhood friend, through a popular salsa song called “Rey el Chino.” She spent the next 30 years piecing Rey’s life together.

Díaz is a self-proclaimed research nerd. “If I could get paid to do research all day, I would,” she laughs as we begin our conversation. She embarked on a project about Rey thinking that she would write a nonfiction book, then quickly realized that a narrative close to the truth would require another 15 years of research. Instead, she decided to fictionalize the story of Rey el Chino, allowing for characterization and imagination to flesh out what remained elusive to her.

Her new novel, This Is the Only Kingdom, takes place in a fictionalized version of Díaz’s childhood neighborhood in Puerto Rico called el Caserío Padre Rivera. She turns the myth of Rey el Chino into a man, writing about how the brutal murder of a flawed but beloved human reverberates across generations. She is unflinching in portraying the daily violence that crushes the bodies and souls of a colonized people, yet she also allows precious moments of celebration in the characters’ lives. Salsa is a political force in the novel, illuminating and heightening joy amid colonial oppression.

Díaz’s first memoir about her girlhood in Puerto Rico and Miami, Ordinary Girls (2019), won the Whiting Award and was featured in O Magazine, in Time, and on NBC News. I spoke to Díaz about This Is the Only Kingdom, her fiction debut, shortly before the book’s release in October.

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IRIS (YI YOUN) KIM:  When was the first time that you heard Rey’s story? Do you have a memory of that moment?

JAQUIRA DÍAZ: I have a very vivid memory of the first time I heard it. I was six or seven years old. My dad and I were on a road trip, and the song was on the radio. My dad asked, “Do you know the story behind this song?” He started telling me the story of Rey el Chino, how he had grown up with him, and how he had been very close friends with him. I remember thinking, There’s no way that this could be real. How come I haven’t heard about this? I was part of a family that was always telling stories—my dad, my mom, my grandmother, all of my aunts—but this was the first time I had heard about Rey.

After he told me the story, I became obsessed with it. My instinct was immediately to become a reporter and get all the different versions. I asked my mom, I asked my grandmother, I asked everybody around el Caserío, “What do you know about Rey?” I was fascinated with the idea that somebody could be both beloved by so many people and also deeply despised by the police.

Then, through the years, I kept returning to the story. When I went to grad school, I decided to sit down with my grandmother and turn on a tape recorder. She told me about how people in the community tried to protect him. He was not a lost cause. He was somebody who had deep love for his community but could not stop getting in trouble. She told me stories about how she fed him and how he would come around and always bring her gifts.

When in the research process did you decide to write a novel about Rey?

In the beginning, I intended to write a nonfiction book, and then I realized, no, I actually need a lot more time—time with his family in order to write something completely real, something that does him justice. So I decided I would write a fictional version that was inspired by his story, but not quite the story of Rey el Chino.

But I’m still holding on to all of that research. Someday it might become a nonfiction book.

Rey is so vivid on the page and as a character. How did you integrate the interviews with what you wanted to create on the page?

Something that kept coming up as I interviewed people was that the real Rey was mysterious. Nobody actually fully knew him. Nobody knew what was going through his head. So, in the novel, I tried really hard not to make him a mystery but to make him plausible as a real human, a person who is capable of being good and compassionate but also capable of betrayal.

I wanted most of the characters in the book to feel that way, as people who have the capacity to be really compassionate or really terrible people, but that they just make choices, and we understand: this is why they make the choices they make.

There’s a little mention of you on page 100 during Rey’s funeral.

That is me!

 Do you remember the funeral at all?

 No, I don’t remember it. There are details straight from real life that I kept in the book: the Cano character is supposed to be my dad. Rey did get my dad money so that he could get baby formula and diapers, and my grandmother did leave food out for him whenever he was on the run from the police.

Then there are a lot of things that are fictional. In real life, instead of a funeral procession for Rey, people went out into the streets like a parade. People marched and carried him toward the cemetery. There was a musician who was playing congas and there were people singing all the way there. In real life, people fought for the chance to carry the casket. The pallbearers were pushed aside and neighbors and people who loved him wanted to carry the casket to the cemetery.

Part of putting that scene together was asking my dad to tell me about the funeral over and over again.

Sometimes you zoom out from these scenes in the neighborhood to give us historical context of los caseríos as a colonial project: the bulldozing of entire neighborhoods to build beachfront hotels, or the environmental destruction that American corporations have wrought upon the neighborhood. How did you decide where and when to zoom out like that?

I knew very early on that historical context would be part of the book in some way. I didn’t want to present just a place but also the history of the place. In particular, I knew very early on that I wanted to talk about environmental destruction and environmental racism. They put all these factories in our backyard—the backyard of the poorest community, which had the most Black and Brown people.

Including the context happened in later drafts, when I was able to add the details about the American factories. I went into drafts three and four asking, “Where do I actually include some of these details of place so they don’t feel heavy-handed? So they actually feel like they’re happening organically and that the reader is getting these details when they feel relevant?” I also wanted to give the history of el Caserío. Even though it’s a place I love that we made into a community, it started off as this fairy tale that was sold to people in order to get them to leave their homes. Others were forced to leave their homes, ending up in el Caserío. I wanted to include this in the book because it’s also the history of this place.

 I listened to “Rey el Chino,” the song, to trace the arc of Rey’s story. Did the song speak to you as you were writing the novel?

 I didn’t want the book to be about the real person in the song. I wanted to focus on Rey’s character as this legend that lives on long after his death. I also wanted to show how salsa was very political and story-driven. Salsa music as a whole plays a role throughout the course of the book. There’s something very cultural about salsa music being a genre that we turn to as a kind of resistance that is anti-colonial and anti-oppression.

I noticed that the salsa music is present alongside the moments of oppression in the book: the characters are all dancing together, and then the police come and wreak havoc. How did you think about when to use salsa in the book?

That was very deliberate. I realized deep into the writing that the book was really dark, and that there was so much death and grief. I asked myself, How do I counteract that? How do I emphasize that there’s more than just pain in the lives of these people? I wanted to center the moments of joy and celebration in el Caserío—not just the fictional version but also the real place that I grew up in. That even when there was a death, there was a celebration of life; that even as overpoliced and surveilled as they were, they refused to stop throwing parties.

I wanted to show that joy was a part of their life, and that the decision to have a party was very political. The decision to actually have moments of joy was political. I wanted explicitly to have salsa music come in, to live in a book where people have decided, “We’re gonna be happy even though we live in this colonial project.” It’s a political decision both in the book and in real life. Right now, when we’re battling against an administration that wants to steal all of our joy, it’s important to actually decide, no, I refuse to let you have my joy.

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Born in Puerto Rico, Jaquira Díaz is the author of the award-winning Ordinary Girls (2019). Díaz has written for The Atlantic, The Guardian, Time, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Condé Nast Traveler, and The Fader, and her stories, poems, and essays have been anthologized in The Best American Essays, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext (2020), Best American Experimental Writing, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. In 2022, she held the Mina Hohenberg Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University’s MFA program and a Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University.