“The most rewarding part of stories,” said author Jonny Garza Villa at a book signing hosted by Austin’s Little Gay Shop, is “realizing that I can write something that’s hyperspecific, a Mexican-American experience in a specific city in Texas, and how what that character is going through can relate to anyone, anywhere.”
Garza Villa’s young adult fiction is imbued with rich cultural details of Latiné Texas life, including the perhaps unlikely queer joy one can find here, despite the hostility that LGBTQ+ Texans face. One rising form of such hostility is book bans. Since 2021, Pen American found Texas has banned more than 1,500 books in public schools and libraries, many of which featured LGBTQ+ identities. In the U.S., only Florida has banned more books. And, as Garza Villa has experienced first-hand, that antipathy may be extending to authors.
Garza Villa had a rapid rise to success since they published their first book in 2021. “Fifteen Hundred Miles from the Sun” — about a long distance relationship that forms when a teen comes out on social media — was selected as a 2022 Pura Belpré Honor Book (named for the first Latina librarian at the New York Public Library). In their second book, “Ander & Santi Were Here,” a nonbinary muralist falls for the newest waiter at their family’s taqueria; that novel won honors in the 2024 Stonewall Book Awards. They’ve got three books out now and a fourth (“Futbolista”) on the way in 2025.
In the midst of that churn — and the subsequent acclaim — in September 2023, a librarian offered Garza Villa a paid opportunity to lecture to students at Roosevelt High, part of San Antonio’s North East Independent School District, which has the distinction of having banned more books than any other district in Texas.
“She wanted to do two or three events with different authors in the area about a creative writing career,” they recalled, of the librarian who extended the invitation. “Thousands of dollars was being offered.”
But after Garza Villa accepted, the librarian went silent. Then the offer was rescinded.
“The administration said they just don’t want authors, point blank period, in their school, because if a parent says something, then it’s just going to create a whole scandal that they didn’t want,” Garza Villa told The Barbed Wire.
In response to emailed questions from The Barbed Wire, the district confirmed the decision not to host Garza Villa for an event with students last year. “The campus administration did not want an author’s visit to interrupt instructional time for a large group of students. In addition, the librarian felt the campus administration may have concerns about some of the author’s work,” wrote Aubrey Mika Chancellor, director of communications at North East Independent School District. Neither the district nor the librarian responded to further questions about the nature of those concerns.
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Despite this, San Antonio’s largely been good to Garza Villa. They grew up in a town north of Corpus Christi, “hiding from my queerness and even hiding from my brownness and my Mexican identity.”
Like so many young LGBTQ+ adults, they blossomed when they escaped to college, in this case St. Mary’s University, which they attended for an unfinished political science degree. There, they met other queer Mexican-Americans their age and began figuring out their own identity.
“San Antonio really has been that place where I have been able to come out of my shell,” they said. “It’s the place where I became the person who was able to write these sorts of stories and celebrate those identities.”
“They’re gonna wake up one day and it’s not going to be their society anymore, and it’s going to be our society now, and there’s nothing that they can do about it.”
Their third book, “Canto Contigo,” published in April by Wednesday Books, introduces Rafael Alvarez, forced to move from his high school near the border — with its competition-winning mariachi band — to a more diverse school in San Antonio that always takes second place. Painfully full of himself — as only a teenager can be — “Rafi” falls in love with his rival for lead vocalist of his new group, a young trans classmate named Rey Chavez.
Although “Canto Contigo” depicts a circle of supportive queer high schoolers and allies, Garza Villa hasn’t felt the same welcome from San Antonio schools.
“Even up to now, I have not had a school visit in San Antonio, or even Texas in general,” Garza Villa said. “That’s just kind of the environment in which we’re living, that I’m writing in. Being a queer, Chicané/Mexican storyteller writing queer, Chicané/Mexican stories for young people isn’t the easiest job in the world for a lot of reasons.”
But, it is vital, they say, because — whether schools approve or not — their readers crave these kinds of stories. When they’ve met young fans at bookstore or library events, “they’re just always so grateful to see stories that are more reflective of them.”
The Barbed Wire interviewed Garza Villa just days after Attorney General Ken Paxton imposed a new policy preventing transgender Texans from updating the gender marker on their driver’s licenses or birth certificates. It’s the latest in a steady drumbeat from state politicians who’ve attempted to pass dozens of anti-LGBTQ+ laws and policies since Garza Villa’s writing career began.
“These older politicians that are in control of things now recognize the way they are losing and see the way in which society in this country, and I think the world at large, is becoming more equitable, colorful, and queer regardless of whether they’re passing legislation,” Garza Villa said.
“Ultimately, what will be next is they’re gonna wake up one day and it’s not going to be their society anymore, and it’s going to be our society now, and there’s nothing that they can do about it at that point, as much as they try to teach our younger generations to think backwards.”
