ISBN: 979-8-9877197-1-8
Trade paperback
Publication date: March 25, 2025
The new Republic of California is forcing Marisol, a Mexicana woman, to marry a white man to create a homogenous race in the new nation. She had until she was twenty-three to find her own match before Combination Nation® made the match for her, and now she has to give her body to a man who treats her like property. But Marisol chooses instead to spend her time with a contaminado goatherd and his political-minded punk band who share and respect her cultural identity. With them, she reclaims her body, her language, and her freedom.
This story explores cultural erasure, forced assimilation, and political resistance through a near-future dystopia. The author drew upon many real-life examples of the assimilation and expulsion of marginalized ethnic groups, and history repeats itself many times in this story.
Advanced praise
“Marisolandia swept me up from its first page and didn’t set me down till the end. Here is a new brave world Latinx style, rendered unapologetically and forcefully by Marisol herself, the eponymous character living the undream in the crazy, dangerous times depicted in this fully realized vision of America coming. Things are crazy and too real for me, this tech-heavy dystopia envisioned in Marisolandia, the national monitoring of our mating leading to a ‘superior’ species trenchant and revealing of our American obsession with race and ethnicity, the whole brown bag. But the struggle to remain human is universal, and that is where Marisolandia beats the loudest, its living heart, spirit, alma a beacon of hope in our maddening times. It’s a righteous, funky, soulful, necessary libro.”
—Stephen D. Gutierrez, author of Captain Chicano Draws a Line in the American Sand
“Cocky, brash, disturbing! With Marisolandia Michelle Cruz Gonzales creates a speculative and playful literary punk rock novella, a warning we should all listen to!”
—Tomas Monez, author of All Friends Are Necessary
“The chilling vision of the near future in Marisolandia is rivaled only by the power of these characters’ underground imaginations that lead them in pursuit of love in resistance. Michelle Cruz Gonzales is a writer of dazzling range.”
—Ariel Gore
Marisolandia
Michelle Cruz Gonzales is a punk writer who writes about the intersections between race, class, and gender. Her memoir The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band (PM Press) documents her experiences traveling with Spitboy as the drummer, one of the primary lyricists, and the one woman of color. She and the band are featured in the movie Turn It Around: Story of East Bay Punk. She has published in literary journals such as The Los Angeles Review of Books, anthologies, including Listen To Your Mother: What They Said Then, What They’re Saying Now (Penguin Random House), and online publications such as Latino Rebels, Longreads, Razorcake, and Alta Journal.Gonzales holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College and has been on the English faculty at Las Positas College since 2005. She lives with her marido, J.Inés, in Oakland, California.