Latinx Talk Editorial Board member Belinda Linn Rincon, along with student Angelicke Sierra, interview Paola Mendoza. Mendoza is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and activist who joins us to discuss her latest novel, Solis (2024), co-written with Abby Sher. Solis is a young adult dystopian novel that is the sequel to Sanctuary (2020) which was selected as the Best Book of the Year for 2020 by Kirkus Reviews and the School Library Journal. Both novels demonstrate the prescience and value of Latinx sci-fi and how it calls on us to fight the violence of xenophobia with stories of resistance, community, and love. We also discuss Mendoza’s indie film Entre Nos (2009), co-directed with Gloria La Morte, and its powerful depiction of the sacrifices that immigrant mothers make to provide for their families.
Description of Solis from the publisher website: From the authors of national bestseller Sanctuary comes a haunting near-future companion tale about undocumented immigrants subjected to deadly experiments in a government labor camp and the four courageous rebels who set into place a daring plan to liberate them.
The year is 2033, and in this near-future America where undocumented people are forced into labor camps, life is bleak. Especially so for seventeen-year-old Rania, a Lebanese teenager from Chicago. When she and her mother were rounded up by the Deportation Force, they were given the brutal job of digging in the labor camp’s mine searching for the destructive and toxic, but potentially world-changing chemical, aqualinium. With this chemical the corrupt and xenophobic government of the New American Republic could actually control the weather—ending devastating droughts sweeping the planet due to climate change. If the government succeeds, other countries would be at their mercy. Solidifying this power comes at the expense of the undocumented immigrants forced to endure horrendous conditions to mine the chemical or used in cruel experiments to test it, leaving their bodies wracked in extreme pain to the point of death. As the experiments ramp up, things only get worse. Rania and her fellow prisoners decide to start a revolution; if they don’t, they know they will die.
Told by four narrators—Rania, Jess (a former teenage Deportation Force officer), Vali, and Vali’s mother Liliana—Solis is about the courage and sacrifice it takes to stand and fight for freedom.