Former Brownsville educator pens wrestling-themed children’s book

Former Brownsville educator and Brownsville Herald reporter Kevin Garcia has published a wrestling-themed children’s book, “Dragon Lee and the Monster of Salty River.” (Courtesy Photo)

A children’s book about a famed family of Mexican professional wrestlers written by former Brownsville educator and journalist Kevin Garcia has risen to the top (currently No. 3) of the Amazon.com MX best-seller list.

“Dragon Lee and the Monster of Salty River” recounts heroic battles against the title monster by the wrestlers Dragon Lee, Rush and Dralístico as children growing up in Tala, Jalisco, Mexico, although the city and country are never mentioned so readers can decide for themselves where it takes place.

The wrestlers are members of the Muñoz wrestling family. William Arturo Muñoz González (known as Rush), Carlos Muñoz González (Dralístico), and Emmanuel Muñoz González (Dragon Lee), are famous as professional wrestlers in both the U.S. and Mexico. Their father Arturo Muñoz Sánchez also wrestled under various ring names, including La Bestia del Ring and Toro Blanco.

Garcia said Masked Republic, a company that promotes professional wrestling, hired him to do a children’s book based on a family of wrestlers, and left the rest up to him.

“Part of the idea was they wanted it to be bilingual and they could use it as a teaching tool, as an educational tool. I said that was a great idea, I really loved it,” Garcia said.

The book was four years in the making, from idea generation to writing, editing, translation and publication, he said.

“I loved the Santo movies growing up, you know where the Santo and his friends go fight werewolves and men from Mars, that kind of stuff. I wanted to do that, but I also wanted to throw in cultural history… and frame it around the idea of these kids coming into their own as heroes,” Garcia said.

In Mexican “lucha libre” tradition, wrestlers who wear masks never take them off, Garcia said, adding that in the Santo movies, wrestlers would go to bed in the mask, wake up in it, eat their breakfast in the mask, take a shower wearing it, or answer the phone in a mask.

Cover art for “Dragon Lee and the Monster of Salty River” (Courtesy Photo)

“It didn’t matter, because in lucha, the mask doesn’t hide your identity. It shows who you really are. The mask is a way of presenting their true power. This is something that I think goes back to pre-Spanish culture, where masks were used to become as a god or to become who they really were intended to be. And for these boys, that was the idea, they’re wearing the masks,” he said.

In the first chapter, Dragon Lee is seen from behind without a mask, not showing his face. Once he gets his mask he wears it for the rest of the book.

“The children are trying to prove themselves as wrestlers, but in the sense of a wrestler being a cultural hero, not in the sense of just winning in the ring, although that, too, and in doing so, they fight monsters. They fight monsters from Mexican folklore,” Garcia said.

The title character, the monster of salty river, “which by the way is a literal translation of the river near their hometown, is a ‘tlilcoatl’ … basically a giant snake, like the size of a couple school buses put together, in the wild, and it can breathe with the force of a hurricane. It can shoot itself across the sky with the force of a bullet.”

Other creatures include “ahuizotls” or wild dogs that have a long tail with a monkey’s paw at the end.

“An ahuizotl will sit in the dark near the river and whimper like it needs help, and if you go to it, it will grab you and pull you down underwater, and when you encounter one, well, for that you need to read the book,” Garcia said.

Garcia is no stranger to monsters, heroes and superheroes.

For 10 years as a side gig, he helped write the official handbook of the Marvel universe

“There were eight to 15 of us at any given time. Every person on the official handbook team could be anywhere in the world, and we all had varied day jobs. The head writer for our department during that time was the head of veterinary medicine for (a university in) north Florida. So that means for 10 years I was basically paid to read comic books, and I could occasionally write in the voice of characters, but for the most part I was writing prose about comic book characters for Marvel,” he said.

Garcia’s day job is professional educator.

For the past seven years he has taught at the Liberal Arts and Sciences Academy in Austin, one of the top academic schools in Texas.

Before that he taught at Porter Early College High School for nine years, and before that he was a features writer at The Brownsville Herald.

All the while, he’s also been a freelance writer. He recently self-published a comic book called “Teoatl,” which takes place before Mexico City’s founding and relies on the excellent records kept by the Aztec empire.

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