Aura Xilonen wrote her debut novel The Gringo Champion (Campeón Gabacho) at age nineteen. The book tells the story of a young Mexican boy, Liborio, who crosses the border into the United States undocumented. Among anxiety-inducing episodes, violence, and an insane amount of swearing, the story follows Liborio as he scrambles to survive, gets a job at a bookstore and develops a love for literature — and boxing. The novel is funny, crude, experimental, and peppered with words that Liborio makes up as he discovers more and more language through reading.
Xilonen started working on The Gringo Champion at age sixteen, on the side of a job she still holds as a part-time cashier in her grandmother’s shop. She’s now finishing her film studies in Mexico. “Film is actually my first passion, and afterwards comes literature,” she told me. “Film is the love of my life and literature is discipline.”
Xilonen is generous, honest and oftentimes unmeasured. I first got in touch with her over email. She was casually affectionate from the beginning, in a way that feels immediately familiar, and which I rarely encounter in the English-speaking world. “Hi, cough, cough, cough. I was horribly ill with the flu last week. I spent all of yesterday in bed but I had to study for an exam at university. Cough,” she wrote in one of our first exchanges. In the exchanges that followed, she merged stories about life and family with more considered thoughts about the book and its reception at home and abroad.
The Gringo Champion, which won the prestigious Mauricio Achar award in Mexico in 2015, has been translated into eight languages. In English, the translation comes from Andrea Rosenberg, published by Europa Editions. The book has resonated in the Spanish speaking world in the last two years — Xilonen says she has received messages from readers telling her she made them laugh and cry in equal measure. In a recent review of the book appearing in The Los Angeles Times, Professor Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado wrote that “Americans of all stripes — including its intellectual elite — possess an astonishing level of ignorance regarding [Mexico].”
Let us hope that books like this one help breach that depressing divide.
Marta Bausells: You were a teenager when you wrote The Gringo Champion. Where did the idea for the novel come from?
Aura Xilonen: It came from feeling like I needed to preserve my memory. When I started writing it, my grandpa had just suffered a stroke, and I felt so much pain seeing him lie in a hospital bed, and later in a wheelchair. He used to be a giant, an oak. As far as I was concerned, he was made of the same matter stars are made of. Seeing him so diminished, slowly fading out, prompted me to write so I wouldn’t forget him. A lot of what Liborio goes through is based on stories he and my grandma told me about his life — he always would tell us of his adventures in Mexico and the US. It’s a shame he didn’t live to see my novel get published, though he would sometimes read parts of what I was writing about him and he would lift his hand and smile.
From a practical point of view, it came from the fact that when I was a kid, I lived in Germany for two years with my aunt, and she forced me to write 1,000 word-long letters that we religiously emailed to my family in Mexico. This was incredibly hard initially, but as years went by, I guess this weekly practice trained me, perhaps a bit like athletes train for the Olympics.
I also think my novel is an homage to my ancestors. My grandparents are the roots, my uncles and aunts and mother are the branches, my brother and cousins the fruits, and I am a tiny flower, shyly hiding between the leaves and the birds.
Bausells: The story revolves around the experience of an undocumented immigrant and the struggles he encounters, and a lot of it is set in the underground boxing world. What kind of research did you have to do to immerse yourself in that world?
Xilonen: It didn’t involve much research beyond some internet searches about boxing teams and brands. Like I said, most of it is based on the stories my grandfather, also named Liborio, told me, and some is based on my own experience living in Germany as an undocumented immigrant, the fear of being discovered in my aunt’s apartment, or the anxiety of going to school and not understanding anything, because my schoolmates were Turkish, Arab, Chinese or Japanese. We played and talked using sign language.
All my characters are a mix of myself and people I know, especially my family. For instance, the character of the Chef is based on my uncle who challenged me to the impossible mission of reading the entire dictionary, because “we’re language” and “our ideas are as long or as short as our vocabulary is,” he would say. I actually used a male character because he told me that if I wanted to grow with my stories I had to use a man, and see what I would come up with. It was like a literary exercise and I liked the idea of it.
Bausells: I found the contrasts in the book interesting: between violence (physical and in the language) and love (with often sickly-sweet, over-the-top, uncontainable language); or between the street and the sanctuary of sorts that is the bookshop. How and why did you decide to introduce these discordant elements?
Xilonen: Maybe because love is also a form of violence: the stolen, annihilated or resuscitated kisses; the hugs that asphyxiate; the caresses that feel like hammers … Maybe the best-tasting kisses are those after a fight.
I think most people aren’t romantic in their daily life, and that explains why we make books that taste like honey. I’ve always been shy and quiet, maybe because as a kid I moved schools and had to change friendships constantly. I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere and I hated lots of things, including dancing, avocado, and anything jelly-like. I still do. But I’ve discovered that, through writing, one can find a hidden romantic side that doesn’t usually come out.
Bausells: The novel is also a true love letter to bookshops.
Xilonen: Yes. At home we had a library of over a thousand books and it used to be my brother’s and my refuge when my mom told us off. It was the one place we could just be, away from the shouting. Also, my grandfather always read a lot. My memories are of him with an open book. His bed and study were always full of scattered books.
