Don’t Call Me Jotín: A Mother & Son Journey

Before he knew the language for who he was, Abel Olivas knew the names he was called.

Raised in a Mexican American family of ten children, Abel came of age in a world shaped by poverty, faith, and the unwritten codes of masculinity. In a home where survival often took precedence over self-expression, silence became both refuge and burden. Yet through it all stood his mother—a woman of remarkable strength and sacrifice, whose love both sustains yet undermines who Abel feels he is becoming.

As he confronts the realities of alcoholism, machismo, and internalized shame, Abel is forced to reckon with the distance between the life expected of him and the life he longs to claim. What unfolds is not only a journey toward self-acceptance, but a tender and complicated portrait of a mother and son learning to meet one another across generations of fear, misunderstanding, and through homophobia.

Don’t Call Me Jotín is a luminous memoir about belonging, identity, and the enduring bonds of family. With honesty and grace, it traces the path from self-loathing to self-love, revealing how truth can emerge from silence and how love, though imperfect, can become a bridge toward healing.

At once intimate and universal, this is a story of what it costs to hide, what it takes to be seen, and what becomes possible when we finally allow ourselves to live in the light.

Don’t Call Me Jotín: A Mother & Son Journey

ISBN: 9781997918165

$29.95 CAD | Paperback / softback

Height: 8.125"

Width: 5.5"

Pages: 342

Publication Date: January 1, 1970

Abel Olivas has Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from The University of Notre Dame, and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Currently, he works as a high school Spanish teacher in San Jose, CA, where he presents his story in talks to the student body geared toward LGBTQ+ advocacy and publishes newsletters created by the school’s Gender and Sexuality Alliance, an organization he has advised for over twenty-six years. His own works of nonfiction have won several prizes, including one judged by Richard Rodriguez. Don’t Call Me Jotín is his first book.