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More Than A Romance
The Grasshopper Lost Its Wings centers around the tender love story between a poor young juice vendor and a wealthy university student, and the class pressures and family expectations that threaten their relationship. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration came from my own life and from the people I have known along the way. I went to university in Mexico City, and many of the people who appear in the beginning of the book are inspired by people I knew there. I saw how love, friendship, ambition, and family expectations could be shaped by class, money, and social pressure.
Later, when I moved to Chicago, I met many immigrants and listened to their stories. I heard about what they had left behind, what they missed, and what they had to do to survive in a new country. I wanted to share those stories too.
So the love story between a poor young juice vendor and a wealthy university student became more than a romance. It became a way to show the divisions in Mexico City, the pain of leaving home, and the dreams that follow people when they cross borders.
How much research did you conduct into Mexico’s political climate during the 1990s?
I conducted a great deal of research, but I also lived through that period, so the political atmosphere was not abstract to me. I was in Mexico City during the 1990s, and I remember the uncertainty, the conversations, the fear, and the shock surrounding the assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio.
There are many movies, documentaries, articles, and interviews about that moment, and I wanted to understand not only the facts, but also the confusion and fear people felt in Mexico at that time.
After I finished the book, I wanted to keep the same format of my first book: a novel where history, memory, and personal stories are woven together. But this time, I also wanted to bring in stories from Mexicas and other Indigenous traditions from central Mexico. I spent almost a year reading, learning, and trying to match each chapter with the right story or legend.
For me, the research was not only political. It was also cultural and emotional. I wanted the history of the 1990s, the Colosio assassination, and the older Indigenous stories of Mexico to speak to each other inside the novel.
What does the image of the “grasshopper losing its wings” symbolize for you?
Chapu is a diminutive of chapulín, which means grasshopper. In Mexico City and central Mexico, the grasshopper is not just an insect; it carries many cultural references. Grasshoppers are everywhere in our language, our parks, our food, and even our popular culture. We eat chapulines, there are places named after them, and many people remember television characters like El Chapulín Colorado, a kind of comic grasshopper hero.
So for me, the image of the grasshopper losing its wings is connected to Mexico itself. It is playful, humble, and familiar, but also symbolic. Chapu carries that name because he comes from that world: a world full of humor, memory, survival, and cultural identity.
I do not want to give away too much of the story, but there is a reason I chose the word lost. For a while, I thought about using the word grow, because the story is also about change and survival. But lost felt more honest. Sometimes life does not simply make us grow; sometimes it takes something from us first.
The title is about that loss, but also about the strength to keep moving.
When readers finish the novel, what feeling or question do you hope remains with them?
When readers finish the novel, I hope they really like Chapu. I want them to see him as a nice guy, a good person, someone with a big heart who is trying to survive the circumstances around him.
I also hope readers understand immigrants a little better. Many times, people do not leave because they stop loving the place where they were born. They leave because life, family, money, politics, or opportunity push them into circumstances where they have to move.
I believe most immigrants love the place they come from. They remember it constantly: the food, the streets, the sounds, the people, the small things that made them feel at home. Those memories travel with them.
And immigration is not only between countries. It can also happen between states, cities, or communities. Anytime you leave the place that shaped you, a part of you stays behind, and another part of you has to learn how to belong somewhere new.
So I hope readers finish the book with more tenderness and compassion, not only for Chapu, but for anyone who has had to leave a home they loved.
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Eric—known as Chapu—grows up in the margins of Mexico City, selling juice at dawn while dreaming of something larger than poverty. When he falls in love across class lines and is drawn into the inner circle of a presidential campaign, he glimpses a future once unimaginable. But as the nation moves toward the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, Chapu becomes entangled in events that fracture both his country and his own innocence.
A single turning point forces him to flee—first to California, then to Chicago—where survival requires reinvention. In exile, he finds unexpected friendships that help him mature into manhood. Yet growth cannot erase what has been done. The past follows him across borders, insistent and unresolved.
For an immigrant, homeland is never fully left behind; it lives in memory, in language, in conscience. Blending Indigenous Mexican methodology with modern political history, The Grasshopper Lost Its Wings explores identity, responsibility, and the enduring truth that history must be faced before it can be healed.
The Grasshopper Lost Its Wings
The Grasshopper Lost Its Wings is a historical fiction novel with strong elements of romance, immigrant drama, and political suspense. It follows Chapu, a poor young juice vendor in Mexico City, and Tere, a university student from a wealthier family, as their tender love story becomes tangled in class pressure, family expectations, the assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio, exile, guilt, and the long ache of becoming someone new in another country. At its heart, this is a story about love, survival, and the heavy cost of chasing a life that keeps asking you to leave pieces of yourself behind.
I liked the way the novel refuses to keep love simple. Chapu and Tere’s relationship begins with sweetness, saved parking spots, fresh juice, inside jokes, music, and that bright feeling of being seen. Then the world crowds in. Money matters. Class matters. Politics matters. Fear matters. I liked that the author lets those pressures build slowly instead of treating them like background noise. Mexico City feels alive in the book, full of traffic, food, myth, old wounds, family rules, and sudden beauty. The use of Mexica, Nahua, Totonac, and Mayan legends gives the story a larger shape, as if the characters are living inside both modern history and older stories about fate, sacrifice, transformation, and loss.
I also found the author’s choices ambitious, sometimes almost overflowing. The book moves from campus romance to political conspiracy to immigrant survival story, and that gives it a wide emotional range. Some scenes are intimate and warm, while others are tense, brutal, or deeply sad. Chapu’s journey in the United States was especially effective for me because it shows success as something complicated. He makes money. He builds a life. He finds chosen family. But he is still lonely, still afraid, still carrying Mexico in his bones. That felt honest. I did sometimes feel the novel wanted to do many things at once, but I also respected that largeness. Life is messy, and this book leans into the mess instead of smoothing it out.
I would recommend The Grasshopper Lost Its Wings to readers who enjoy historical fiction that blends romance, political history, family drama, and immigrant experience. It will especially appeal to readers interested in Mexico in the 1990s, cross-class love stories, and novels where personal choices are shaped by forces much larger than the characters themselves. This is not a light romance, even when it is romantic. It is a reflective, sorrowful, and heartfelt novel about what people survive, what they regret, and what they finally have to release.
Pages: 291 | ASIN : B0GRVPKKX6
