The Author: Santiago Jose Sanchez
The Book: Hombrecito (Riverhead, 2024)
The Elevator Pitch: Hombrecito is a boy’s ultra-queer journey from Colombia to America and back, seeking belonging across cultures and navigating his mother’s fierce, complicated love.
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The Rumpus: Where did the idea of your book come from?
Santiago Jose Sanchez: I started with an image: a young boy waiting for his mother after school. He doesn’t know why she’s been unreliable lately, only that it involves his father and the badlands of Colombia. Eventually, his older brother picks him up. While I don’t remember living such a moment, I gave him my name and a life parallel to my own. As I followed the boys on their adventure through their hometown at night, the sentences felt like they were illuminating the dark corners of my own past.
I had grown up hearing about the time my mother disappeared for a weekend to search for my father. He had drained their bank account and hidden with his mistress in the badlands. My mother and aunt set off to find him. This wild tale was first told by my mother, then later by my father and aunts when I returned to Colombia as a teen. What astonished me was how much everyone loved telling this story, how central it was to our family lore. I came to think this story held the key to the greatest mystery to my life: my mother’s decision to leave my father and homeland, a choice that forever altered our lives.
This first story, which would later become the opening chapter of Hombrecito, was an unconscious response to this family legend. It was sometime before I realized that I was writing my own version of that weekend, the story one no one else could tell: Where was I when my mother went looking for my father? Where was I when she banged on his motel room door, and he yelled that he needed to shower? Where was I when he finally opened the door and she saw feet squirming under the mattress?
Rumpus: How long did it take to write the book?
Sanchez: Hombrecito took nearly a decade to write. The project evolved into a nonlinear network of stories, each a portal into intense moments of a life that was and wasn’t mine. For much of this time, I didn’t realize I was writing a novel. I was simply exploring, writing out of order and from different perspectives—including my mother’s—while learning to trust my storytelling instincts.
I collected scenes and stories, letting them unfold organically without forcing linear connections or cause-and-effect. Continuity, the very thing my life had lacked, didn’t concern me. Some pieces were short, others lengthy, some came quickly, others took years. I was repeatedly drawn to the fractures in my life—the gaps between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and my relationships with sex, my mother, and my motherland.
With each iteration, the fictional Santiago became more distinct from me, and the story more alive, less bound by reality. Figuring all this out took time. I’m immensely grateful for the life that has allowed me the time and space to make this kind of art. This is a life the characters in the novel couldn’t have imagined.
Rumpus: Is this the first book you’ve written? If not, what made it the first to be published?
Sanchez: The one and only.
Rumpus: In submitting the book, how many no’s did you get before your yes?
Sanchez: I found my agent during my first semester of grad school. She saw potential in my handful of stories and wanted to see the project through. Her early support was just what I needed to take this work seriously. Four years later, we were on submission with Hombrecito. I understood it wouldn’t be for everyone. This is an unconventional novel. Its mode is to disrupt and discomfort, plunging the reader into high-intensity moments where self-making and self-destruction become indistinguishable.
As weeks passed, friends in the industry reported that various people were reading and loving it. One editor fought hard to buy the manuscript but couldn’t convince their publishing house to take the leap. A mentor reassured me: the right person would be interested.
It was all over in a month. We received two offers, one from a dream editor: Laura Perciasepe at Riverhead. I’d loved her books with Katie Kitamura and Bryan Washington. She understood Hombrecito on every level. It was surreal to have a dream come true like that. I couldn’t have asked for a better editor.
Rumpus: Which authors/writers buoyed you along the way? How?
Sanchez: I’ve been blessed with great mentors and friends. My teachers—Michael Cunningham, Lan Samantha Chang, Kevin Brockmeier, Adam Haslett, and Garth Greenwell—all helped shape my understanding of fiction and the music of my own voice. My friends—Ada Zhang, Belinda Tang, Arinze Ifeakandu, Larissa Pham—are all making beautiful and inspiring work that motivated me to keep pushing. And since selling the book, I’ve connected with so many writers, both online and in person, who have been nothing but supportive and kind: Patrick Nathan, Emma Copley Eisenberg, Kyle Dillon Hertz, Peter Kispert, Melissa Mogollon, and August Thompson are just a few.
Rumpus: How did your book change over the course of working on it?
Sanchez: Hombrecito underwent many transformations before reaching its final form. After writing about twelve stories, I started to see the overall structure.
Two key pieces anchored the novel: the opening story of Santiago waiting for his mother, written in a distinct third-person POV, and the closing story from the mother’s perspective. Between these bookends, a three-part chronological structure developed, following Santiago as a child, teen, and young adult.
Each section took on a particular voice and tone. The childhood part became tender and heartbreaking, capturing a child’s raw, beautiful vision of the world. The teen years turned quietly angry, full of sexual exploration and playful riskiness. The adult section grew more tentative, exploring different paths and attempts to heal and build a life.
This linear structure also revealed a homecoming arc: Santiago’s journey from leaving Colombia as a boy to returning with his mother as a young adult. With each revision, I realized how many of my decisions along the way were working to capture Santiago’s fractured consciousness. The gaps between chapters and focus on singular scenes, the tension between the body and language, it all reflected his experience of a life split between two countries.
There was an inevitability to the process. Structuring the book any other way would have felt artificial to Santiago’s experience. To own how I’d written the book was to own myself. By the end, I could stand behind every decision I’d made, both in my life and in these pages.
Rumpus: Before your first book, where has your work been published?
Sanchez: Joyland, Subtropics, ZYZZYVA, and McSweeney’s. Each of my editors at these publications—Michelle Lyn King, David Leavitt, Laura Cogan, and Claire Boyle, respectively—had a hand in shaping the stories that would become Hombrecito.
Rumpus: What is the best advice someone gave you about publishing?
Sanchez: I want to say that it was Adam Haslett who gave this advice out in Iowa: “Keep the merchants out of the church for as long as you can.” The merchants, in this case, are the publishing industry, and the church is the practice of writing fiction. It’s never the same after you let the merchants in, their voices will be difficult to ignore or keep separate. You’ll be tempted to think that publishing and writing are the same thing, but you have to remember that the real work, the part that matters, happens in the writing itself. The merit and value of your writing is there, in how much you give to your practice, in your devotion to it. If that’s what matters most, no one else can tell you your worth.
Rumpus: Who’s the reader you’re writing to—or tell us about your target audience and how you cultivated or found it?
Sanchez: It changed along the course. Sometimes I was writing for a younger version of myself, trying to bring order to the chaos of his experiences. Then, I could be writing for my mother, attempting to bridge the distance between our worlds, finding all the ways we are alike and different. There were chapters I wrote with my first boyfriend in mind, telling him things I never could say to his face, wanting to hold him close again. Sometimes it felt more like I was channeling these loved ones from the inside out, wanting to know them more deeply for myself, wanting others to witness them, too. Maybe—perhaps—that moves the reader who finds this work to reflect on their own lives and the people who’ve made them who they are.
Rumpus: What is one completely unexpected thing that surprised you about the process of getting your book published?
Sanchez: That I could’ve gone on writing this same book another ten years. Well, maybe not ten—but this book had become such an expansive home to me and my experiences that finally leaving it felt almost painful. I’d heard the saying before—a [insert work of art] is never finished, only abandoned—but I always imagined it was the story that was suddenly orphaned, not the author. Maybe I’m just prone to homesickness.
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Author photograph courtesy of Santiago Jose Sanchez
