Aya de Leon: Fiction of Empathy and Escapism
Aya de Leon wasn’t always known as a novelist. She was an activist first, a teenaged organizer with the anti-nuclear movement in the 1980s. In the late ‘90s, her writing career took off as she toured independently as a spoken word artist and slam poet. That led to her appointment, in 2006, as director of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley.
She’d been trying to write novels since early ‘90s, though, and it was through her fiction that I was first introduced to her. De Leon’s 2016 debut novel Uptown Thief is an adrenaline rush: It follows Marisol Rivera—a former sex worker, director of a public health clinic, and the madam of a high-end escort service—who adds another line to her resume when she and her employees become thieves, targeting a group of rich white men who traffic in young women. (It’s a plot that feels freshly relevant, with the surge of news about Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes.) Since then, de Leon has published three more books in her Justice Hustlers series: The Boss (2017), The Accidental Mistress (2018), and this past June, Side Chick Nation, one of the first fictional depictions of Puerto Rico during and after the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria.
wasn’t supposed to exist; in 2017, when Hurricanes Irma and Maria hit Puerto Rico in quick succession, de Leon was working on a different fourth novel for her series. But as she watched the grim reality of Maria’s aftermath—and how it was compounded by the US government’s (lack of) response—she put aside that novel-in-progress and began writing through her grief and rage. It was personal as well as political: De Leon’s maternal grandmother was born and raised in Puerto Rico, married a US serviceman and immigrated to California with him, and was widowed shortly thereafter. She and De Leon’s mother (who was also a single mom) always felt a deep connection to the island, and the family’s link was kept alive in this matriarchal legacy. No stranger to the news cycle, nor to the long history of the island’s “lesser than” status as a US
