The Other Among Us

Addie Tsai interviews Daniel Olivas about his new book “Chicano Frankenstein.”

By Addie TsaiDecember 16, 2024

• Fiction

• Cultural Studies

I BEGAN TO WRITE Unwieldy Creatures (2022), my queer nonbinary Asian retelling of Frankenstein, in 2019, informed by the growing tensions in the United States surrounding both reproductive rights and technologies, as we headed catastrophically toward the overturning of Roe v. Wade. I also began Unwieldy Creatures at a time when queer and minority-written and -centered retellings of classics were gaining popularity, and in my desire to read one of my favorite classical works, I decided to write my own. When I heard about Daniel Olivas’s Chicano Frankenstein (2024), I was delighted to recognize a kindred spirit, to discover another version of Frankenstein written from the perspective of a marginalized protagonist, using Shelley’s 1818 story of reanimation to engage more deeply with anti-immigrant rhetoric and the commodification of labor.

Daniel Olivas is a fiction writer, poet, playwright, book critic, and attorney. He is the author of 12 books, editor of two anthologies, and a co-editor of the series The New Oeste from University of Nevada Press. Chicano Frankenstein addresses issues of belonging and assimilation in a near-future world that feels dangerously close to our present. An unnamed paralegal, brought back to life through a controversial resurrection process, maneuvers through a society that both needs and resents him. As the US president spouts anti-reanimation rhetoric and giant pharmaceutical companies rake in the profits, the man falls in love with lawyer Faustina Godínez. His world expands as he meets her network of family and friends, setting him on a course to discover what happened to him prior to his reanimation. With elements of science fiction, horror, political satire, and romance, Chicano Frankenstein confronts our nation’s bigotries and the question of what it truly means to be human.

I spoke with Olivas about the inspiration behind his latest book, its contemporary political relevance, and how otherness can be represented.

¤

ADDIE TSAI: When I read that your first introduction to the Frankenstein universe was the original Frankenstein film, I was surprised! Did you end up reading the novel after that first encounter? When did you first consider the idea of writing a Frankenstein retelling?

DANIEL OLIVAS: Since I was born in 1959, all we had were three networks in the Los Angeles of my youth—CBS, NBC, and ABC—and the local stations that filled their schedules with reruns of long-canceled television series and old movies. That’s how I was introduced to the Universal Pictures monster films including the 1931 James Whale black-and-white classic, Frankenstein, with Boris Karloff as the creature. I was about five or so when that wonderfully frightening film entered my life. It wasn’t until high school that I finally read Mary Shelley’s novel and learned that the film was dramatically different from the book. Jump forward to 2022 as our country was struggling through another ugly election cycle, this time the midterms, where MAGA anti-immigrant rhetoric once again took over the airwaves. I had addressed such bigotry before in short stories and even a play, but this time I wanted to go bigger in the form of the novel. And then it came to me: I would use the creature of Frankenstein as a metaphor for how our country hates, hounds, and demonizes the Other among us.

As someone who has written and published a POC-centered Frankenstein retelling, I understand deeply how the Frankenstein adaptation is particularly primed to speak to our current cultural moment, even as it shifts and changes. Tell me a bit about why you decided to use Frankenstein to address the ways in which the labor of Latinx immigrants is used and treated in this country.

The United States needs immigrants as much as it hates them. That’s the plain truth. Our country is aging and there aren’t enough people to fill the jobs that need to be done—at all levels. So, for my novel, I imagined a near-future world where the reanimation of the recently deceased is used to fill this labor shortage. In my United States, there are 12 million reanimated people working throughout society in all kinds of jobs that would otherwise go unfilled. However, reanimation is not a new lease on your old life. Rather, if you agree to be reanimated, you will have your face changed, fingerprints removed, and memory wiped except for your job skills. I used this framing as a metaphor for what immigrants go through when they are forced to leave their homelands and start anew. While my main character is clearly of Mexican heritage—he is only known as “the man” and remains unnamed to the reader—it really could apply to any immigrant. The Chicano Frankenstein of the title is not this unnamed man but the Chicano reanimation doctor who ends up coming back into my protagonist’s life. In the background is the right-wing president Mary Beth Cadwallader who uses anti-reanimation rhetoric to juice her midterm election numbers because she wants to increase her hold on the House and Senate. Her slogan is “Make America Safe Again” (or MASA).

What did you find most exciting about retelling a novel like Frankenstein, which has been retold and adapted in so many ways?

I was on a mission to express my anger but with humor and in an entertaining way—a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, right? Once I started, the novel just poured out of me. I wrote morning and night, and on weekends and holidays, because I have a day job as an attorney. I finished it in 50 days!

How does it feel to have written this novel prior to this election cycle? How do you see Chicano Frankenstein’s relevance in this regard?

It is disconcerting, to say the least. I assumed that our society would evolve each year. But the last gasp of the old order (i.e., white, cisgender, male, Christian dominance of government) is lasting much longer than I had expected. I truly believed that MAGA would have been somewhat subdued by its losses during the midterm elections in 2022, but it roared back this past year. One of the shocking things I saw during the 2024 Republican National Convention was the use of “Make America Safe Again” as the slogan for one of the convention’s days. Of course, in 2022, when I wrote the book and made up the MASA mantra, I was going for political satire. Sadly, satire became reality. Sometimes reality is weirder than our imaginations.

How did you begin to imagine the universe of your book? 

I mapped out the basic premise during my many pandemic lunchtime walks. I landed on my own personal interpretation of Frankenstein very early in the thinking process and just built it from there. The one “visual” aspect that was in my mind from the very beginning was of a body that had been stitched together. So, I decided early on that my reanimated protagonist would be a brown man but with mismatched limbs: a left arm and leg that are white-skinned and larger than his other limbs. In this way, the world knows that he is a “stitcher,” the cruel epithet used against the reanimated—and he always feels out of place as he goes to work as a paralegal, goes running, does errands. His patchwork body can also serve as a metaphor for assimilation along with the wiping of his memory during the reanimation process: no matter how much we—immigrants of first, second, third generation and so on—try to fit in with society, our otherness is always pointed out and on display. We are neither here nor there.

What do you hope readers gain from the book? 

First and foremost, I want to tell an entertaining story. If I don’t meet that basic goal as a writer, then I’ve failed. If readers get something beyond that, that’s pure gravy as far as I’m concerned. I will note that several reviewers and readers have expressed how much they liked my protagonist and felt his pain as he tries to maneuver through a world that resents his very presence. So, my desire to humanize the Other has apparently succeeded, at least for some readers. Will I change any hearts? Who knows. But a writer can dream.