A Deep Breath Kept In: Carrying Edgar Gomez’s Alligator Tears Home to Chicago
I started reading Alligator Tears in January 2025 while processing a flurry of political news. Inspired by the book and by my homesickness, I bought an impromptu ticket to my hometown of Chicago. I needed to remind myself why I did what I did, and why I had spent so much time away from the first place that inspired me to write, to teach, and to share our history of resilience and ever-persistent struggle. “Orlando Royalty” offers a glimpse into that struggle, one that reading saved Gomez from. They explain that “books gave [them] a sense of stability of what [they were missing] from [their] life,” so much so that one of their teachers began giving them books after realizing Gomez was stealing from the library. In an era of banned books, especially under the policies Gomez’s home state of Florida is passing, where will youth like Edgar find the books that give them what their state’s laws deprive them of?
“In an era of banned books, where will youth like Edgar find the books that give them what their state’s laws deprive them of?”
That question, one of many Alligator Tears prompted me to pose, served as both a catalyst and a reminder of the meaning of home as place and as people. Gomez loves a mother who struggles with their choice to live honestly. In “Papi Issues,” Gomez gives us a glimpse of the internal struggle that compels them to meet their father where he is. Their forgiveness and compassion toward the choices their parents made under difficult circumstances complement the vulnerability that runs throughout the book.
Of the friends with whom they frequented nightclubs like Pulse, Gomez writes: “We took care of each other: with a ride, a meal, a place where we could let our guards down.” Gomez’s essays offer medicine, seeds, and containers for the ongoing work of collaborating to uplift, hold accountable, and celebrate our communities as the alternative kinship networks we are proud to belong to.
“Gomez’s essays offer medicine, seeds, and containers for the ongoing work of collaborating to uplift, hold accountable, and celebrate our communities.”
Moved by grief, I brought Gomez back to Chicago with me, letting their meditation on coming of age carry me through a return almost seven years in the making. I am staying in a room not far from where my mother landed when her family left Puerto Rico. Arriving in a neighborhood so drastically changed from the one in my mother’s sixty-year-old stories feels telling, a call to what needs remembering.
Their essay “Kids with Guns” deepens the connection through the way they felt in a criminal justice program. It meant living out the story everyone expected of them, and yet “being around teenagers who looked and sounded like [them] was like letting go of a deep breath [they] hadn’t noticed [they were] keeping in.” So many young people, especially queer young people grouped under the term “Latinx,” seek places and people with whom to release that breath. Gomez’s literary returns home show the reader that not all breath can be released without facing why we held it in the first place.
“Not all breath can be released without facing why we held it in the first place.”
After years away, Alderperson Jessie Fuentes greets me with a hug. In our exchange, my breath is renewed and my heart swells. It is the breath I found when Gomez reunites with their father, a moment of new beginning that challenges Gomez’s claim that “the Gay Kid was irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.” The ebb and flow of communication, compassion, tenderness, and holding each other accountable brings moments of luxuriousness and moments of unexpected relief that, as for Gomez, alter the possibilities of what family can mean.
"What is at stake when we tell and share our stories: the risk that our truths will not be met with the respect they deserve, and the promise of an abundant American dream that brainwashes us into believing hard work, even now, is still enough.”
Edgar wants as much for the reader and for the communities of people who taught them to love themselves. “It frustrates me to think that the people I love may never be rewarded with everything they deserve,” they write, “but I’m comforted by the fact that they don’t let the current bleakness of the world keep them from fighting to make it a better place.” These words remind me, as they should remind all of us, what is at stake when we tell and share our stories: the risk that our truths will not be met with the respect they deserve, and the promise of an abundant American dream that brainwashes us into believing hard work, even now, is still enough.
“We can leave, heal, grow, and come back: come back on our terms, and come back to test the air that time and space have changed.”
Gomez honors the pragmatism and exhaustion of their generation by acknowledging that hard work wasn’t enough for them or their families. And it is through the difficulties they face that they can return and repair their understanding of their parents’ choices. Between “Images of Rapture” and “Papi Issues,” the vulnerability and self-accountability of Gomez’s craft offer critical lessons, if not reminders. Of their father, after years of estrangement, Gomez writes: “It’s easier to say my father was a deadbeat dad than address how gentrification, domestic violence, lack of mental health resources . . . and housing insecurity put people in desperate situations.” As we navigate these barriers in our classrooms, in our neighborhoods, and within our families, Gomez’s book shows us that we can leave, heal, grow, and come back: come back on our terms, and come back to test the air that time and space have changed.
Alligator Tears: A Memoir in Essays by Edgar Gomez (Crown, 2025) is available on Amazon.
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