Vincent Tirado is a nonbinary Afrolatine horror author who has written the 2023 Pura Belpré Award-winning Burn Down, Rise Up. Their newest novel We Don’t Swim Here publishes on May 2 from Sourcebooks Fire.
People often ask what inspired me to write Burn Down, Rise Up, and the answer has always been an easy one. I got into horror as a genre sometime toward the end of my college career. I had finished up most of my pre-med requirements and was taking fun classes to get the credits I needed to graduate. I remember watching movies like John Dies at the End, Insidious, The Cabin in the Woods, etc. Get Out hadn’t come out yet, so if I wanted to watch Black horror, I would have had to reach back to the ’90s to watch the original Candyman films. I don’t think I ever considered too heavily why there was so little Black horror. At that time, I think most Black people kind of had a tongue-in-cheek joke about horror—that it couldn’t happen to us because we were never in those stories. Still, I really loved the dread and unease that horror movies instilled in me.
Around the same time, I got into Stranger Things and found myself very emotionally involved in its compelling characters and their individual stories, but most of all, how it wrapped around this single nugget of history, the experiments of MKUltra. Before then, I hadn’t consumed many horror stories that pulled inspiration from history, so this really stood out to me. I thought about how I would go about writing a horror novel, and had this single idea: What if something like Stranger Things happened in the Bronx? And I don’t mean recreating the same character archetypes and painting them Black and Brown. I mean, what if I pulled inspiration from Bronx history to tell a horror story? What would that look like?
I’m from the Bronx, and a lot of the stories I had seen written about it were contemporary fiction, usually crime-related, like A Bronx Tale or The Warriors. I rarely saw stories where people from the Bronx were engaged in a supernatural battle or going toe-to-toe with dangerous monsters. I don’t dislike contemporary fiction, but I’m more drawn to fantastical works. I’d rather watch a protagonist fight a demon instead of a serial killer.
I wrote Burn Down, Rise Up purely for me. Years after I graduated from college and grad school, I got a seasonal job at Nike. The work mostly consisted of me grabbing boxes of shoes and other merchandise for customers. Retail isn’t incredibly fulfilling, especially when you know the job will end in a few months, so I started drafting Burn Down, Rise Up in the back corners of the store. I carved out Raquel’s personality and her love story with Charlize while on short breaks and came up with the mechanics of the Echo Game—a dangerous survival game that takes a train’s passengers to an upside-down world of the “Bronx is Burning” during the predawn hours—while I rode the subway to work every morning. I never thought it would get published, or that it would resonate with so many other Latines. I wasn’t writing specifically to include Latine representation. I was just writing what I knew and what I needed to get me through a shift. If I wanted a horror story set in the Bronx, it would follow logically that most of the characters would be Afrolatine. To suggest otherwise would paint a very inaccurate picture of the Bronx.
It wasn’t hard to instill history into the novel because I had done much of the research while I was still a teenager. I learned about the “Bronx Is Burning” period during an afterschool program at a grassroots organization called The Point CDC. The program itself was called A.C.T.I.O.N. and the acronym stood for Activists Coming to Inform Our Neighborhood. It taught us how to enact real change in our neighborhood through community organizing. Despite living in the Bronx all my life, I learned about Bronx history through A.C.T.I.O.N., speaking to residents who lived through that time period firsthand, and carried those lessons with me as an adult. While drafting Burn Down, Rise Up, I watched a documentary to make sure I got the facts correct, but most of it I remembered from the vivid lessons I learned as a kid. In that way, Raquel’s experience learning about the Bronx Is Burning mirrors my own. She is the same age I was when I learned about my neighborhood’s history.
One thing most people would be (pleasantly) surprised to know is that during the publishing process, no one ever told me “no.” No one in publishing ever told me that a book about a gay Afrolatina living in the Bronx wouldn’t sell, or that no one would be interested in reading it. My only perseverance was really just in the writing process. Neither my agent nor my editor ever asked me to turn down the gayness or the Black aspects of it. At no point did I have to fight to include any of the identities that are represented in Burn Down, Rise Up.
It’s very possible that my agent and editor shielded me from any internal publishing pushback, but I also think the ease with which Burn Down, Rise Up was received had to have indirectly been because many other Black and Latine have already been told! There was already proof that our stories would sell! Authors like Julia Alvarez and Daniel José Older pushed those doors open, and more Black and Latine authors helped keep them open. By the time it was my turn, I had a pretty smooth time getting my story out there.
I know there are other authors who are still experiencing racism in the publishing community, and my personal story is not meant to diminish their struggles in any way. Book bannings, which overwhelmingly target books written by marginalized authors, are still ongoing. I hope my experience is some indication that things are getting better. The fight continues, and it is important that we don’t concede any ground. Our stories are valuable, even if we’re only writing them for ourselves.
There aren’t any words to express how ecstatic I am to have made it this far as a published author. To be presented with the Pura Belpré Award goes beyond my wildest dreams. I have not only my agent and publisher to thank, but the librarians, educators, reviewers, and retailers who pushed my book out into the world. Special thanks to my Bronx community and all the Black and Latine authors who have come before me. Thank you for always fighting for you, for me, for us. May we continue to fill bookshelves and inspire those who come after.
