A Conversation with Ruben Reyes, Jr.

Institute for Latino Studies

Available on-demand

Listen in to a conversation with author Ruben Reyes, Jr.. interviewed by Notre Dame Ph.D. student Paulina Hernandez-Trejo, that resonates with the pulse of Salvadoran history, illuminating how memory transcends trauma through the architecture of speculative fiction. Be transported to a many-faceted border landscape where digital artifacts and ancestral legacies collide, offering a profound understanding of how imagination can refine our collective past into a resilient future.

For more information on Letras Latinas at the Institute for Latino Studies, please visit the Letras Latinas website.

Memory, Technology, and the Borderless Archive

Ruben Reyes, Jr. occupies a singular position in the contemporary literary landscape, reconciling the ontological demands of historical witness with the expansive architectures of speculative fiction. His dual identity as a high-level publishing editor for non-fiction—guiding the narrative truth of authors like Elliot Page and Julia Arce—and a speculative author allows him to perceive storytelling as a curated transmission of knowledge. This editorial rigor informs his “teachable” fiction, ensuring his work remains in dialogue with the scholarly traditions of Latinx studies while pushing toward a meta-textual future that utilizes letters, reports, and digital metadata to construct its reality.

The Academic and Artistic Genesis

Reyes’s trajectory, from his roots in Fontana, California, through his years as a Mellon Mays Fellow at Harvard to his refinement at the Iowa Writers Workshop, grounds his creative output in a rigorous academic foundation. His work functions as an active response to the sociological “silence” surrounding the Salvadoran Civil War, a concept he traces to Leisy Abrego’s foundational article, “On Silences.” For Reyes, this silence is not merely an absence but the starting point for emotional truth. He employs “rememory”—a Morrisonian reclamation of the past—and Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” to populate the gaps left by state denial and intergenerational trauma. In his debut novel, Archive of Unknown Universes, the multiverse becomes a canvas where the ghosts of the civil war are confronted through active, imaginative preservation.

The “Double Duty” of the Author-Editor

The interview reveals how Reyes’s professional engagement with non-fiction sustains the mental capacity required for his ambitious creative projects. Influenced by Toni Morrison’s editorial tenure at Random House, Reyes acknowledges the irony of his “double duty.” He guides empirical truth by day to fuel the speculative truths he crafts by night. This synthesis is evident in his use of “metadata” within fiction, where the practical transmission of facts provides the basis for stories that “blow up” real-world emotional seeds into speculative realms, reaching truths that empirical data alone might fail to capture.

Speculative Technology as a Lens

Rather than utilizing technology for escapism, Reyes employs concepts like fictional technologies the “Defractor” and “SyncALife” to examine the limits of the human experience. As a digital native, he critiques the “too-muchness” of the algorithmic age. In his narratives, technology often serves as a proxy for what humans cannot achieve alone—such as the digital resurrection of a father’s consciousness—only to reveal that even the most advanced tools cannot resolve the fundamental complexities of human relationships.

Challenging the Border Paradigm

Reyes critiques the traditional, geographic borders defined by Gloria Anzaldúa, shifting the focus toward digital borderlands. For the Salvadoran diaspora, the border is not merely a physical line or an “open wound” in the dirt, but a transnational connection maintained through remittances, WhatsApp, and glitchy video calls. In his concluding reading from There is a Rio Grande in Heaven, Reyes reimagines the river as a celestial site where “water is like spools and spools of cheap tulle” and eventually “an empty wound” left behind. By collapsing time and place, Reyes challenges neat national histories, arguing instead for a hemispheric understanding of identity that is as interconnected as it is complex.

This thematic framework serves as a prelude to the specific power found in the author’s direct testimony.

Transcending the Multicultural Boom of the 1990s: Reyes consciously moves past the nineties multiculturalism that focused on trauma for a white gaze. Instead, he utilizes the “weird and wacky” to address a community-specific audience, prioritizing complexity over explanation.
The Architecture of Inner Conflict: By introducing Latino villains and exploring extractivism within families—most notably in the story “He Eats His Own”—Reyes moves the focus toward the inner Latino conflict. This literalizes the nuanced class and power dynamics that exist within the diaspora itself.
Technology as a Fragile Archive: The author posits that while we rely on technology to bridge distances, it remains a mediated experience. His work serves as a warning that digital tools can supplement, but never replace, the physical presence of ancestral history.
Hemispheric Interconnectivity: The rejection of neat borders in favor of a hemispheric perspective allows for a more honest retelling of history. Reyes demonstrates that the Salvadoran Civil War was a node in a global, transnational conflict involving the United States, Nicaragua, and Cuba.
Speculative Fiction as Historical Necessity: For communities whose histories have been silenced or erased, the speculative genre is a tool for survival. “Critical fabulation” and the weird become the means of cutting through the noise to examine the empty wounds of the past.

“I think a lot of my work is inevitably informed by the education I’ve gotten… I was writing in conversation with who I was as a student.” — Ruben Reyes, Jr.
“I am often using the speculative to try getting to some kind of truth… I’m not really trying to use the speculative for escapism. I’m trying to use it to kind of loop back to our world.” — Ruben Reyes, Jr.
“The borderland there isn’t physical, but it’s very, very real. And intense… in my work, it is often actually going back to the digital—it’s about this digital borderland.” — Ruben Reyes, Jr.
“I wanted Latino villains as much as I wanted Latino heroes… let me write about inner Latino conflict because it’s real and it’s interesting and it hasn’t been explored as much.” — Ruben Reyes, Jr.
“We cannot teach Latin American country histories in isolation… we have to bring in how the US intervened in very violent ways… it’s an injustice to have these borders present even in our historical retellings.” — Paulina Hernandez-Trejo