“There are different categories of fancy Mexican,” says one character in Nicolás Medina Mora’s debut novel, América del Norte.
These include fresas (“harmless, except for their accents, which are known to cause aneurysms,”) pipopes, mirreyes, progres (“fresas who read Open Veins of Latin America”) and juniors (“the nepo babies of someone in the Cabinet”).
In this mock taxonomy, the novel’s protagonist, Sebastián Arteaga y Salazar, is a junior. His father, one of Mexico’s most powerful men, is a Supreme Court judge. Raised in a climate of overwhelming, even suffocating privilege—trailed everywhere by bodyguards since the age of 10—Sebastián, who has literary ambitions, decides to become an American writer instead.
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