An interview with Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón

Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón—what doesn’t he do? Originally from Caguas, Puerto Rico, Sergio is an author, translator, professor, and editor based in Oberlin, Ohio. His most recent books are the novel Los días laborales (Business Days), the academic work México, Interrupted: Labor, Idleness, and the Economic Imaginary of Independence, and the Spanish translation of Yvonne Weekes's Volcán, Memoria de Montserrat. And in 2025, he served as a judge for the National Book Awards. He was kind enough to do this interview with us at the end of 2025.

First, I’d like to ask you about your recent academic book, Mexico, Interrupted. How would you describe that book to someone who hasn’t read it yet?

Mexico, Interrupted is the story about how Mexican elites, in the immediate aftermath of their 1821 independence, attempted to answer the question of why, if the now-national territory was so rich, was the state that was supposed to contain it so poor. It is a book of cultural studies so, in a way, it’s a story of the stories these elites told themselves about what they saw as Mexican underdevelopment vis-a-vis the United States. 

What inspired you to write that book? Why is that topic interesting to you?

I’m from Puerto Rico and, naturally, I have always had a deep curiosity about stories and histories of national independence. It’s not even necessarily a political thing: independences were weird events. Let me share an anecdote: I was about ten—or even twelve, I’m not sure—, and walking around a sports complex in San Juan while my parents were out doing something—can’t remember—, and I remember that I went to a payphone, to see if there were leftover quarters in the coin thing, and I saw, graffitied in the little glass enclosure the words: REPÚBLICA DE PUERTO RICO. I was struck by that. I had taken history classes, bad ones, and I “knew” that Puerto Rico wasn’t independent, but only when I saw those words did I think “hey, that’s weird”, but also immediately “republics are weird”. Eventually politics came in, much later, but I never lost that feeling that there was something weird about the certainty with which we talk about the independence of nations. Fast forward a few decades and I was researching, in theory, the late 19th century and, while doing background reading of the sources, I stumbled with similar narratives coming from people who participated and lived in the aftermath of Mexican independence. For them, the War of Independence, the succeeding First Mexican Empire, and then the Republic were all weird, accidental historical turns and there they were, bregando or dealing with all sorts of things. The most hopeful of them quickly became disappointed and depressed, and I wanted to understand why and what they did with that feeling.

In addition to being an academic, you also write fiction and operate in the literary world. Do those two worlds feel similar or different to you? Does being in the one help in the other? Or hurt? Or do they overlap so much that you don’t think of it?

Until very recently, I haven’t been good at finding common threads between fiction and scholarship. Often, the imperative to scholarly rigor undermines literary risk. At least, it does so in my case. That sort of internalized sense of rigor forces me to try to be as truthful as possible, whether I'm writing literature or scholarly work. I have plenty of friends and know plenty of writers who have no problem making claims as writers that they wouldn’t—or couldn’t, for the moment—make as scholars—or vice versa. On the other hand, what that rigor takes away in terms of risk, it pays back in nuance, in perspective. It allows for taking a step back, from questioning—narratively, as fiction does—the clichés and cultural memes of our age. 

Since you do all kinds of things, how do you describe what you do professionally/for work? If someone met you at a party, what would you say?

It depends! For the longest time, I sort of defaulted to a geographic and linguistic fiction. When in English and in the US, I’d introduce myself as a scholar and a professor. When in Spanish and in Puerto Rico or elsewhere, I would present myself as a writer of fiction, as a reader. It was a good way to plot a life, I think, but in the past few years, that clear cut division has become unstable, and half the time I just go by whatever feels good at the moment—if I’m working on a novel and feel positive, I’m a novelist; if the fiction is not going well but the classroom is giving me joy, I’m a prof, etcetera. Life is messy and so are our identities, I guess. 

You’ve also started a literary magazine. Can you say a little about that? What made you want to start a literary magazine? And now your magazine is making the leap to be a small press. What inspired that move?

Yes, I’ve run La pequeña (The small one) with my long-time friend and collaborator Juanluis Ramos for about ten years. It’s online only and, from the very beginning, we called it a sporadic literary magazine, so we’ve had perhaps 11 or 12 issues in ten years. We are proud to say that, little by little, we’ve published a selection of amazing writers from Puerto Rico, all of whom were already doing or are now doing amazing things. 

Perhaps the Puerto Rican literary scene is similar to all literary scenes in smaller contexts. It’s very much people-centered and it works almost by the grace of the holy spirit. 

In an event earlier this year, when we were talking about our press, we noted that publishing in Puerto Rico is a sort of relay-race, managed by the invisible hand of the muses. One, two, or three small-presses and magazines—behind which there’s always only one, two or three people, friends, mostly— emerge out of nowhere, work, work, work, and, when they become exhausted, they stretch their hands with the baton, without really knowing what comes next. Suddenly, somebody—often somebody unexpected—runs and grabs it and takes it forward, and, so it’s gone for decades now.

So, in this context, Juanluis and I wanted to create a space or platform for writers and poets. We’ve been lucky in literature since we were undergrads in the University of Puerto Rico and have always felt some sort of responsibility to Puerto Rican Literature, capitalized—but again, that’s just people on the ground who read and write and edit and publish. It began with the literary magazine, because that’s what was possible for us, and then, last year, it expanded to the small press. 

We publish three books a year, which is about just right for Puerto Rico. We launched last year with a sort of statement slate: we had a book of travel narratives by the amazing Mexican writer Luis Felipe Lomelí; a personal memoir of the volcanic eruptions in Montserrat in the nineties and the displacement it caused, by the amazing Montserratian writer based in Barbados, Yvonne Weekes; and a genre-bending autofictional novel by an incredible writer, Daniel Rosa Hunter, called La máscara del santo. Two wonderful scholars wrote about the latter in Full-Stop (https://www.full-stop.net/2025/05/28/reviews/rodney-lebron-rivera-and-heather-houde/the-mask-of-el-santo-daniel-rosa-hunter/).

We just announced our first two books of the 2025-2026 collection: a collection of non-fiction pieces by writer Francisco Félix, called Tito Rojas ha muerto; a book of short stories by a new writer we’ve been working with since she published in the magazine, Lorena Franco. The book is titled Del huerto una cicatriz. The third book, to be announced next week, is Lugares para estar solo, stories by Orlando Javier Torres, a Puerto Rican filmmaker currently based in New York.

It’s a labor of love and we hope to keep it going for a few years. Perhaps another decade, until somebody else is able to take the baton. 

You have a close network/friend group in the literary world, going back to your early days in Puerto Rico. How important is a group of like-minded people in individual success and in putting together successful projects?

Yes, I’ve been closely and not-so-closely involved with a constellation of people who just happened to coincide during our university years and who have continued writing and being active, and are now some of the most talented poets and writers in the island. Among these, I count some of my closest friends—including Juanluis, mentioned above.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to write by myself. I mean, we always write by ourselves, surely, but I sort of write in the horizon of that constellation of people. A lot of this is, of course, imagined. These other writers and friends are busy people. They can’t always read my stuff, give comments, etcetera. But I can always reach out, talk to them, hang out with them. And because they were there at a particularly generative period, I’ve sort of internalized them and, so, feel I am always writing in the context of this constellation. 

What would you recommend to other people who are looking to get a group together? How do you find your like-minded people?

I met Juanluis and some of my best friends in a workshop at the university of Puerto Rico, circa 2006, led by Mayra Santos Febres. I think many of us in the constellation mentioned above went through some iteration of that workshop and eventually came together. So, I tell students and friends that workshops (not only university-based ones, there’s a tradition of unaffiliated workshops in Puerto Rico and Latin America) are a good place to look for possible interlocutors. That said, I’ve also met plenty of awesome people through social media, so that’s also an avenue. 

You do a lot of things, are you more pushed or pulled to doing things?

The problem is I can’t tell if I’m being pushed or pulled into things, but I definitely do a lot and am learning to let go. 

What is your next writing project? What are you working on?

I’m between a lot of things. I’ve finished a bunch of things that remain unpublished. I’ve begun dipping into a potential second historical novel.

Now you've just served as a judge for the National Book Award--what was the experience like? Was there anything you learned doing that which surprised you?

Imagine an overly ambitious book club that decides to discuss nearly two hundred books over the span of six months. That’s essentially what our panel of judges did—month after month, over Zoom. What did I learn? It was illuminating to look at a year’s worth of translated prose and glimpse the trends in what, at least in theory, resonates in the United States right now for writers, translators, and editors. The view is of course slanted, shaped by all the filters and kept gates along the way, but it was refreshing to be pushed to engage with dozens of literary traditions and, with each new book, to have to reset our expectations. I came out of that dizzying period reading things differently, as a result both of the experience and the sheer amount of literary styles and proposals as well as a result of the fact that a group of well-read and very different strangers were forced into conversation about works they knew nothing about beyond what the books themselves offered. By the last few months of the process, we had developed our own amalgamated collective way of reading. I just finished a book yesterday, one that I read because of something I’m teaching next semester, and for a second I forgot myself and wondered “I wonder what this other person from the committee will say about this book?”. I guess I have to learn how to read “alone” again. 

What is a book you wish you had written?

If I think of US fiction examples, I wish I’d written Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. 

Those are great. What are some books you regularly recommend to other people? 

I normally recommend Puerto Rican Magali García Ramis’s Felices días, tío Sergio, the late Mexican novelist Daniel Sada’s Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe; I recently re-read Karen Tei Yamashita’s Brazil-Maru and it’s so amazing, that I’d like to mention it so that it’s out there, again!