Juli Delgado Lopera's Fiebre Tropical
by Emily Donovan
Image via Feminist Press
I spent most of the past year of quarantine with goop for a brain. I kept trying to read serious books for real adults, but my brain would slosh around until I gave up and rewatched another kids movie. Then I picked up Fiebre Tropical. My faith in literary fiction revived with fog and dramatic lighting like Mushu in the waking the elders scene.
Fiebre Tropical is about a 15-year-old girl who gets yanked from Colombia and everything she knows to move to Miami. The rest of her family gets swept up in an Evangelical church. Our narrator Francisca is too punk rock for the Jesus craze – until she catches feelings for the pastor’s daughter. It’s a debut novel by a trans writer, Juli Delgado Lopera, published by an indie press.
When writer types review books that we like, we often say that we liked “the language.” Not only do we want a good story, we want every sentence to be a piece of art. One of the biggest compliments that we can give “the language” is when we call it “refreshing.”
Fiebre Tropical’s language is refreshing. It’s a Spanglish that remixes English turns of phrases and inspired me to google Colombian slang. Things are sexy and weird all at once, with the likes of drive-through chicken grease on kissable upper lips.
It’s also really funny: The Pastora had already pulled me aside many times for “una charladita” on matters concerning my soul burning after the Rapture and yada yada yada Cristo was still waiting for me and yada yada yada wouldn’t it be nice to join my family eternally? I wondered what exactly Mami had revealed about our house to the Pastora that made her think we all wanted to spend our afterlives together.
This voice was stunning for me. Our narrator Francisca is a surly teenager. She’s irreverent and resentful. But she’s also scared. She’s realizing that she’s queer in a new country where everyone important in her life is increasingly Evangelically homophobic. That’s petrifying and isolating. Fans of Luster will recognize how exciting it is to find a protagonist that is simultaneously flippant, bruised, and yearning – the delicious contradictions that make for interesting people and characters that feel real.
The sides of Miami that Fiebre Tropical makes into art are refreshing, too. Before I moved to South Florida for school, all I had heard about Miami was cocaine and nightclubs. One of the rare times that I drove the hour of stand-still interstate traffic from Retirementville, Florida where I lived down to Miami proper, I met up with a friend at a mall. There, the perfume store clerk was annoyed to discover that neither of us knew enough Spanish to purchase what we wanted in her native language. My friend, from South Florida, was unsurprised, but I was so delighted at the novelty of not being able to complete an everyday American transaction in English that I turned to Google. The perfume clerk was right to be annoyed. The vast majority of people who live in Miami Dade County speak Spanish at home (66%, according to the Census). It was also interesting to note that the majority of Miami residents (52%) were born outside of the U.S. Why hadn’t I heard more about this?
As a tourist, you don’t have to notice the real Miami. I, like most Midwesterners who have been to Miami, once paid $35 (this was an obscene amount of money for me) for the glory of parking my car in a Miami Beach parking garage. I was high off my vision of walking in the fabled white sands along the clear blue ocean water. But the $35-a-day parking garages, upscale clothing stores, and overpriced oceanfront restaurants of Miami Beach aren’t really for the locals. The Miami metro area may have one of the highest concentrations of billionaire residents in the world, but, with an economy dependent on tourism, hospitality, and service, it also has some of the shittiest-paying jobs in the country. According to a report for an F.I.U. think tank, Manhattan is the only place in America with worse economic inequality than Miami-Dade County.
Fiebre Tropical sets the cultural imagination of Miami right. And it’s not just the demographics. It’s the obsession with the fast-food chain Pollo Tropical. People trying to sell you on God and Girl Scout cookies in Publix parking lots. Having to drive everywhere and your car AC never working hard enough. The temperature and humidity feeling hostile to human life. A sample from page 1: The heat is a stubborn bitch breathing its humid mouth on your every pore, reminding you this hell is inescapable, and in another language. Much like the narrator, the author Juli Delgado Lopera was born in Bogotá and moved to Miami with their family when they were 15. They and Francisca are both queer.
Last year, a best-selling book named American Dirt was canceled. The controversy wasn’t just that a privileged author was writing a story about impoverished Mexican-American refugees while she herself was none of those things. It was that the publishing industry often passes over marginalized people from those backgrounds and pays white and privileged writers with no such personal experiences to write about them instead. American Dirt in particular was also widely panned because the privileged author did a pretty bad job of it. The book was full of stereotypes and clichés. The New York Times called it “determinedly apolitical,” one of those sick burns that simmer until the recipient can cry in the safety of their bathroom. Surely someone with lived experiences could have written a more nuanced, interesting, and challenging book. Why hadn’t the publishing industry given its support to one of those writers instead? Why wasn’t the literary community book-clubbing something like that instead?
Well, here one is, friends. Fiebre Tropical, now in print and audio. I can’t recommend it enough.
Fiebre Tropical is about a 15-year-old girl who gets yanked from Colombia and everything she knows to move to Miami. The rest of her family gets swept up in an Evangelical church. Our narrator Francisca is too punk rock for the Jesus craze – until she catches feelings for the pastor’s daughter. It’s a debut novel by a trans writer, Juli Delgado Lopera, published by an indie press.
When writer types review books that we like, we often say that we liked “the language.” Not only do we want a good story, we want every sentence to be a piece of art. One of the biggest compliments that we can give “the language” is when we call it “refreshing.”
Fiebre Tropical’s language is refreshing. It’s a Spanglish that remixes English turns of phrases and inspired me to google Colombian slang. Things are sexy and weird all at once, with the likes of drive-through chicken grease on kissable upper lips.
It’s also really funny: The Pastora had already pulled me aside many times for “una charladita” on matters concerning my soul burning after the Rapture and yada yada yada Cristo was still waiting for me and yada yada yada wouldn’t it be nice to join my family eternally? I wondered what exactly Mami had revealed about our house to the Pastora that made her think we all wanted to spend our afterlives together.
This voice was stunning for me. Our narrator Francisca is a surly teenager. She’s irreverent and resentful. But she’s also scared. She’s realizing that she’s queer in a new country where everyone important in her life is increasingly Evangelically homophobic. That’s petrifying and isolating. Fans of Luster will recognize how exciting it is to find a protagonist that is simultaneously flippant, bruised, and yearning – the delicious contradictions that make for interesting people and characters that feel real.
The sides of Miami that Fiebre Tropical makes into art are refreshing, too. Before I moved to South Florida for school, all I had heard about Miami was cocaine and nightclubs. One of the rare times that I drove the hour of stand-still interstate traffic from Retirementville, Florida where I lived down to Miami proper, I met up with a friend at a mall. There, the perfume store clerk was annoyed to discover that neither of us knew enough Spanish to purchase what we wanted in her native language. My friend, from South Florida, was unsurprised, but I was so delighted at the novelty of not being able to complete an everyday American transaction in English that I turned to Google. The perfume clerk was right to be annoyed. The vast majority of people who live in Miami Dade County speak Spanish at home (66%, according to the Census). It was also interesting to note that the majority of Miami residents (52%) were born outside of the U.S. Why hadn’t I heard more about this?
As a tourist, you don’t have to notice the real Miami. I, like most Midwesterners who have been to Miami, once paid $35 (this was an obscene amount of money for me) for the glory of parking my car in a Miami Beach parking garage. I was high off my vision of walking in the fabled white sands along the clear blue ocean water. But the $35-a-day parking garages, upscale clothing stores, and overpriced oceanfront restaurants of Miami Beach aren’t really for the locals. The Miami metro area may have one of the highest concentrations of billionaire residents in the world, but, with an economy dependent on tourism, hospitality, and service, it also has some of the shittiest-paying jobs in the country. According to a report for an F.I.U. think tank, Manhattan is the only place in America with worse economic inequality than Miami-Dade County.
Fiebre Tropical sets the cultural imagination of Miami right. And it’s not just the demographics. It’s the obsession with the fast-food chain Pollo Tropical. People trying to sell you on God and Girl Scout cookies in Publix parking lots. Having to drive everywhere and your car AC never working hard enough. The temperature and humidity feeling hostile to human life. A sample from page 1: The heat is a stubborn bitch breathing its humid mouth on your every pore, reminding you this hell is inescapable, and in another language. Much like the narrator, the author Juli Delgado Lopera was born in Bogotá and moved to Miami with their family when they were 15. They and Francisca are both queer.
Last year, a best-selling book named American Dirt was canceled. The controversy wasn’t just that a privileged author was writing a story about impoverished Mexican-American refugees while she herself was none of those things. It was that the publishing industry often passes over marginalized people from those backgrounds and pays white and privileged writers with no such personal experiences to write about them instead. American Dirt in particular was also widely panned because the privileged author did a pretty bad job of it. The book was full of stereotypes and clichés. The New York Times called it “determinedly apolitical,” one of those sick burns that simmer until the recipient can cry in the safety of their bathroom. Surely someone with lived experiences could have written a more nuanced, interesting, and challenging book. Why hadn’t the publishing industry given its support to one of those writers instead? Why wasn’t the literary community book-clubbing something like that instead?
Well, here one is, friends. Fiebre Tropical, now in print and audio. I can’t recommend it enough.
Emily Donovan is a lesbian writer and Midwesterner. She is the co-writer of Donald August Versus the Land of Flowers, a comedy fiction podcast, and her other writing has published in Musing the Margins: Essays on Craft, FIVE:2:ONE, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Florida Atlantic University. You can listen to the comedy fiction podcast here or find her on Twitter here.
