Reading this while visiting Mexico City for the first time, amidst social media driven US radical identity politics, and having conversations with Mexico City natives about the multiple positions one can exist in with regard to race and class and ancestry, this 1992 cyberpunk story made for an interesting read. Set in 2045ish, it's rife with themes of origin, racial purity, contradictions of mixed/mestizaje diaspora, and religion and nationality in daily life, taking place in a time when the North American US empire has fallen and Mexico, experiencing an Aztecan revival, is a new global power. We experience the current cultural and political climate through the eyes of a skeptical poet protagonist. There is an annoying amount of fetishized and hollow female characters which I had to roll my eyes at many a time, though the protagonist's straight male gaze forms an interesting juxtaposition when he frequently points out machismo and other cultural-performance-as-legitimacy type stuff... There's also a fuck ton of invented slang, Españahuatl, a combo of Spanish and Nahautl, necessitating a glossary in the back of the book. So, it reads kind of pulpy and campy, and predictably, but at the same time i think it's a pretty fascinating read for mixed race kids like me living in these hashtag times.