Abel Torres Cuemanco (1942-2005) rose to fame for his only novel, “La irreverencia en la cama del púgil” (Irreverence in the Boxer's Bed), which won him the American Book Award in 1985, where he put into practice a sophisticated cross between the literature from his native Tepito with a style very similar to the literature of the wave and Chicano literature in Carlsbad, California. In this science fiction and somewhat autobiographical novel, the author takes us through his childhood in the neighborhoods of Barrio Bravo and the appearance - during the end of his life already in California - of an extraterrestrial race that has secretly infiltrated his community and conspires to take over the planet.  

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Born in the Barrio Bravo of Tepito on July 12, 1942, son of Julio Torres Zapata and Maricarmen Trujillo Arriaga, he soon stood out at the “Lorena Rosales” elementary school by winning a short story contest in which, the author assured, he had to tell a story about how beneath said school a network of tunnels had been settled that ran from Barrio Bravo to Mesones Street in the Historic Center. On the subject, Cuemanco said, “I grew up among those stories. 

First I heard Don José “la Zarigüella”, the school janitor – who when I was a kid was already about 70 years old and could barely hold a broom – speak about how those tunnels were full of little bones on the walls, if you scratched them a little, since the first construction of the school housed middle-class young ladies and nuns of the order of the Discalced Carmelites who supposedly committed amorous misdeeds with some of the workers who were dedicated to the maintenance of the facilities and who, in order to hide their sin, used the walls as an ossuary where they hid the bodies of those fetuses that did not see the light. Just imagining that scene made all the students afraid to go to the bathroom, the place where the tunnel was supposedly started and then divided and where it was necessary to enter with a flashlight and a map because it was impossible to see and locate oneself inside.

And it is precisely that Torres Cuemanco later in his “Biografía Confesa (2005)” would assure that he as an author would come to establish an almost schizophrenic relationship with science fiction thanks to the fear that all the stories that were told in the neighborhood. He assures: “There it seemed unreal to me all those stories of ghosts that were told at the dances that were held within the neighborhood. That if the crazed Bride had appeared to the death squad in the early morning on Calle Jesús Carranza, and here I open quotation marks because that story also marked me in a big way, because those of the gang assured that it was better not to be present at around three in the ... Chuchin, because there was already more than one who had seen a woman running by and who claimed that the figure belonged to the deceased Antonia Segura, a woman who had been given an amulet with duck feathers and the entrails of seven different web-footed birds; her crime was marrying a man and her mother-in-law not wanting her, Antonia was a victim of that witchcraft and everything went wrong because the ghost was able to communicate with the widower who did not hesitate to find his mother and cut her up with an axe.

Abel Cuemanco would also tell about those experiences that, upon his arrival in the United States, would help him to keep himself in the midst of a hostile environment. In his own words, although the Latin community protected him, there was always a certain reservation among his fellow countrymen: “Of course, people felt threatened by my presence and that of all the migrants who arrived. It was not exactly a bad time, there was an economic boom. In the end, the US won the war with the Allies. Kennedy had taken the presidency and was so popular that people spoke of a new royal caste. We felt part of the American dream, but it was not exactly a consolation because there were other implications, such as the subsequent development of the Cold War, which, whether we like it or not, made us all think about the end of the world. At that time, I arrived with my uncle Venustiano, who had been there for about ten years. I didn't come from a small town and I had certain mornings, too, I liked to hang out with certain types of people and that's how I got into the world of bands and got started in one of them."

You might wonder why I first joined one of those gangs and not got interested —although I later did— in political movements like the Mexican Youth Organization (MAYA) or the United Mexican American Students (UMAS) that already had a huge group of members in California, well it was because I came from a place where the system of protection among young people was provided by the gangs that dominated the streets and through which you obtained more rights and more pre-sales than if you waited for the government to recognize a damn thing.” 

Abel Torres Cuemanco was a writer of minor results, let’s say, compared to other representatives of the Chicano movement of the time or who wrote mainly in the middle of the last century. Names like the feminist, novelist and poet Gloria Anzaldúa (1946-2004), the novelist Rudolfo Anaya (1937-2020) or Sandra Cisneros, among many others, resonate as representatives of said movement. Torres Cuemanco was at the same time a misanthrope, like Onetti, who, in his last days, had to be brought things and when they asked him –his followers– if he was there, he would answer: “Onetti is not there, he leaves the food under the door.”

Torres Cuemanco spent his last days at the Carlsbad By the Sea nursing home. Until his death in 2005 due to kidney failure, the authorities of the institution allowed him to give a weekly workshop from which the famous magazine Kranky emerged, whose main purpose was to pay heartfelt tribute to the quintessential Chicano magazine that was published in the 70s at the University of Berckley called El Grito. 

In one of his last interviews he said that the story of the novel “Irreverence in the Boxer’s Bed” was not an invention but a testimony of what his life was like in the nursing home, where much of the fiction of the novel is set. In that same interview he answered where he had gotten the surname Cuemanco and said that as in his novel everything had started on a sunny day in the Cuemanco canals, being with his girlfriend in a canoe, when they were 17 and 16 years old respectively. She fell into the canal and he jumped in to rescue her, but he could never find her. He does not know how they rescued him and it was from there that he assured that the canal had given him a second chance. Abel Torres Cuemanco would also assure that UFOs do not come from outer space, but that he was sure that they came from the depths of the waters and that he did not know exactly, but he was almost sure that they were the ones who had saved him that tragic day.

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