Author Daniel A. Olivas writes about Chicano Frankenstein, his modern retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the story’s timeless themes. A still from the 1931 film Frankenstein. Public domain.
by Daniel A. Olivas|
In 2022, I found myself reaching back to my childhood’s favorite monster for literary inspiration.
That year’s midterm elections had brought with them another round of angry MAGA candidates promoting the Trumpian lie of a stolen 2020 election. Part and parcel of their rhetoric was—yet again—an attack on immigrants and anyone who just didn’t fit in with their image of “real” Americans.
Trump’s wrathful rallying conjured images of the torch-bearing mobs of black-and-white horror films. I thought about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s 1818 tale—and the inherently political implications of being a “monster” in a society that created you on the one hand and is repulsed by you on the other.
Like that, Chicano Frankenstein was born. In the tradition of novelists, playwrights, filmmakers, animators, and graphic artists before me, I wanted to use Frankenstein to explore how, under the right circ*mstances, anyone can become a destructive force in society. And that sometimes it can be difficult to know who the monster really is.
My first exposure to Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus came from the 1931 classic Universal Pictures film adaptation. That celluloid creature imprinted itself on my 5-year-old psyche like no other horror movie of my 1960s childhood.
What was it about the monster—gamely played by Boris Karloff—that captured my imagination from the start? Was it the drooping eyes added by makeup artist Jack Pierce at Karloff’s suggestion that made the creature look half-dead? Or perhaps it was the flat skull shaped in such a way to ease the implantation of a cadaver’s brain? Or maybe the monster’s grunts and growls? I wonder if even back then, lurking in my young mind, there was some connection to, and sympathy for, this monster, who didn’t really mean to hurt anyone, right?
When I read Shelley’s novel for the first time in high school, I was surprised, like so many, to discover that the monster remains nameless throughout the book (the name Frankenstein belonged to his obsessed creator, a doctor who dared play God). But the real shock came when I realized that in the book, the monster learns to read and eventually speak rather eloquently. While the creature of the movie evokes fear and sympathy with his grunting monosyllabism, the monster of Shelley’s novel explains in perfect English what drove him to murder: “I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?”
In the tradition of novelists, playwrights, filmmakers, animators, and graphic artists before me, I wanted to explore how, under the right circ*mstances, anyone can become a destructive force in society.
In both the original Shelley novel and all the adaptations that followed, it’s telling that one plot point has remained more or less the same: Dr. Frankenstein’s creation is eventually shunned by both his creator and society, and it is this rejection that turns the creature into a monster.
I wanted to reflect on that theme in my modern retelling. As I planned my novel, I envisioned the creature not as a singular entity but as a class of people—reanimated corpses who’ve been brought back from the dead to replenish an aging workforce. After a decade’s worth of reanimation, 12 million of these cruelly mocked “stitchers” now walk among us in the United States—including the hero of Chicano Frankenstein. Other than having been brought back to life after a horrific car accident, our hero is just like any other person holding down a job: He earns a paycheck, attends work-related events, rents an apartment, and runs each evening. But having also lost his left arm and leg in the car accident, the man—described as brown-skinned—has had a replacement arm and leg, both of which are white, “stitched” onto his body. The mismatched limbs flag him as a reanimated subject, marking him for jeers from people who disdain the reanimated population as monsters created by science, who threaten to replace “real” Americans. The story follows his journey, as he attempts to maneuver a world that both needs and resents him.
In my worldbuilding, I determined that the reanimation process should wipe the subjects’ first lives while saving their education and skills. By setting that rule, I could mirror the immigrant’s journey of leaving behind home, family, and friends to become a stranger in a strange land. The “stitcher” epithet also let me explore how those who resent immigrants often rely on dehumanizing language (such as “illegals”) to strip people of their individuality. The irony, of course, is that our country needs immigrants at all levels of employment to replenish our aging population.
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For those of us whose “belonging” is constantly questioned, Shelley’s monster is a kindred spirit. As a Chicano, I have experienced too many situations where my presence in this country was questioned, and my self-worth challenged. For example, I remember the time when my football coach in high school called me a “stupid Mexican,” or when police stopped and frisked me when I was just walking in my neighborhood in my teens. My parents and I were born in the U.S.—still, on an Amtrak trip from Los Angeles to San Diego a few years ago, an ICE agent asked what city I was born in.
Writing Chicano Frankenstein, I reckoned with the enduring question Shelley left for us: Who is the real monster? Put another way, what person is truly free from bias? Even the most open-minded person carries assumptions, accumulated at home, work, and the world beyond. It can take great effort to see another person’s full worth.
In Chicano Frankenstein, I present an extreme through a virulently bigoted president concerned with her “legacy,” who wields the specter of the unfamiliar to goose her midterm numbers. But even my character Faustina Godínez, the hero’s love interest, wonders at one point if she could ever have a life with a person who has no history.
This range of behavior makes sense to me. I am a writer, but I’ve also been a practicing lawyer for almost 40 years. I’ve learned in that time that there is seldom a “slam dunk” case. Most disagreements come in shades of gray, and there are two (or more) sides to every conflict. I’ve also observed how an irrational fear of difference is often the driving force behind such behavior. Like the fictional president in Chicano Frankenstein, people throughout history have weaponized “the other”: through slavery, Jim Crow laws, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the so-called “Operation Wetback” immigration enforcement campaign of the summer of 1954, which resulted in the mass deportation of at least 300,000 Mexican nationals.
Most people at least attempt to quell their biases. But fearing those who are different appears to be an intractable human trait that continues to be used to turn others into monsters. Regrettably, I suspect that the monster may very well be within each of us.
