In a Los Angeles hospice, an old fighter draws his final breaths. Ernesto Vega was a star of the Mexican wrestling circuit under the name El Rey Coyote, a técnico (good guy) known for his trickster moves and fur-trimmed cape. Now, this great luchador lies weakened and brittle, fading in and out as nurses tend to his body. “When one is so close to departing, no grand thoughts fill the mind,” he reflects in Alex Espinoza’s third novel, The Sons of El Rey. “Instead, it’s the madness of insignificant things you focus on. Like the nurse’s freckled arms, the scent of coffee on her breath, the sound of a child whining out in the hallway.”
Also haunting his faltering consciousness: the ghost of his late wife, Elena, and a festering secret he may take to the grave.
Ernesto is the magnetic sun around which his family orbits in The Sons of El Rey. The novel straddles the border, following him from a rural town in Michoacán to Mexico City, where he determinedly launches a wrestling career between shifts at a construction site. From there, he continues to Los Angeles, where, past his physical and reputational peak, he reinvents himself as the proprietor of a popular Boyle Heights gym.
The novel also straddles narrators, shifting between Ernesto’s hallucinatory, near-death point of view and the voices of various relatives: his son, Freddy, who dutifully follows him into wrestling; his grandson, Julian, who wants nothing to do with the sport and goes to college; and the dead Elena, who, even in the afterlife, bristles at her husband’s obfuscations and betrayals. As she ruefully declares, “fuck anyone who thinks a mujer like me isn’t tough, isn’t capable of exacting revenge in life and beyond that.”
Also weighing in is El Rey Coyote, Ernesto’s alter ego, a persona so powerful that he practically functions like an autonomous member of the family. “I’m not like her, the wife. She’s a ghost,” El Rey explains. “I’m something more, something ancient, powerful. Both the old man and not.”
Much as Espinoza’s earlier novels do, The Sons of El Rey weaves different geographies, people, and voices into a narrative that explores the bonds of love and the ways those bonds can be put to the test. In his debut, Still Water Saints (2007), a shifting chorus of characters recounts the life of an Inland Empire curandera and the afflicted souls she serves. The Five Acts of Diego León (2013) follows the title character on an epic journey, hopscotching from a tiny Indigenous town during the Mexican Revolution to the comfortable home of arriviste criollos in Morelia before concluding in the film studios of Hollywood’s golden age.
The Sons of El Rey uses similar techniques to explore the complicated relationships between fathers and sons—in this case made more tangled by a patriarch who buries his true self in his coyote character, a move that comes at the expense of his happiness, as well as his family’s. In an early chapter, Freddy describes a photograph of his father as a young man, leaping off the back of a truck in his tights and white boots. “To my father’s right there’s a shadow stretching over the concrete sidewalk,” the younger man recalls. “It’s small, and anyone else would miss it because it looks like nothing more than a smudge, a flaw in the film. But it’s my mother’s frame. She’s pregnant with me.” In that image, “my mother and I are incomplete, but my father’s not. He’s whole.”
Though the novel includes Elena and El Rey Coyote as narrators, the crux of it revolves around Ernesto, Freddy, and Julian. All three grapple with Ernesto’s impending death, not to mention the messes—professional and emotional—that the old man will leave behind. The Boyle Heights gym, once a popular outpost among weight lifters and wannabe wrestlers, is barely hanging on in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Freddy sleepwalks through the crisis, aloof from everybody else’s needs. Julian, who is struggling to make ends meet as an adjunct professor, distracts himself with quick hookups via an app called Papi, fulfilling the desires of white men with a fetish for Latinos.
Intriguing parallels emerge. Julian’s performance as a Latino boy toy echoes the performances of his grandfather in the ring—men wearing masks, both literal and figurative. Moreover, the universe of lucha libre provides Espinoza with fertile ground for tackling issues of masculinity and repressed queerness: the sport is relentlessly macho but also features Liberace levels of flamboyance.
The result is a propulsive story that covers more than half a century and two nations. In the juggling of so many voices, though, some feel less than fully formed. Elena reveals little of herself outside the context of her marriage, and her reasons for sticking with this troubled union feel broadly sketched. Ernesto’s journey to become El Rey Coyote likewise could have used more definition. His first major bout is rendered in largely technical terms. Underexplored is what the persona of El Rey Coyote allowed him to express that he was unable to do as plain old Ernesto Vega, immigrant, bricklayer, gym owner.
Still, many poignant moments emerge. Espinoza captures the curious transmission of love and knowledge between one generation of men and another. In a particularly pointed scene, Freddy recalls his early training to become a luchador: a vigorous regimen of sit-ups, raw eggs, and hours spent tumbling on mats. “Whenever I pulled a muscle or sprained my wrist or was accidentally punched by one of the other guys, my father was always there to remind me that I would be fine,” he remembers. “The hurt is what shapes us, but we need to move past it.”
The Vega men may be wounded, but they do not break.•
