MORE THAN MONEY

About the Book

More Than Money: A Memoir recounts the true story of how Claudia Dominguez and her family endured the kidnapping of her father in Mexico City and worked to bring him home. In the spring of 2013 he was held for four days before being released for ransom. The book renders the helplessness and fear of those days, but its emotional register is wider than terror: Dominguez also draws the humor, warmth, improvisation, and stubborn family intimacy that survive inside a crisis.

A year after the kidnapping, Dominguez finally returned to the experience through painting. Trained as an artist, she built the story with spare text and stark, expressive imagery, transforming private trauma into graphic narrative. The result is at once a family memoir and a lens onto the corruption, lawlessness, and everyday uncertainty that can shape life in Mexico City.

The family at the center of the book are not superheroes; that is precisely the point. More Than Money follows ordinary people forced to negotiate an extraordinary emergency, while refusing to reduce Mexico, migration, or its characters to violence alone. The book continually makes room for affection, culture, memory, anxiety, and resilience.

Its visual grammar is equally central to the story. Dominguez moves between open watercolor fields, tightly controlled sequential panels, silence, and abrupt changes in pacing. The book's design turns waiting, uncertainty, and the exchange of money into felt experiences rather than merely narrated events.

The Book That Launched Amatl Comix

More Than Money became the inaugural title of Amatl Comix, the graphic-narrative imprint of San Diego State University Press. The imprint grew out of SDSU Press director William Nericcio's interest in comics, experimental literature, and the growing number of university presses treating graphic narrative as serious literary and scholarly work. With the approval of the SDSU Press editorial board, Amatl Comix was created with Dominguez's book as its premiere publication.

That origin matters to the book's history. Rather than treating comics as a side project, SDSU Press built an imprint around the form, and More Than Money became Amatl Comix #1: a work of visual storytelling grounded in lived experience, Latinx life, formal experimentation, and the politics of representation.

Graphic Memories

SDSU's 2019 profile of Dominguez traces the manuscript back to the aftermath of the kidnapping. After a year of avoiding the trauma, she began painting the four-day ordeal and discovered that the images carried a narrative force of their own. The graphic form gave her a way to make the story accessible while continuing to develop as an artist.

The profile also places the book inside a larger discussion of how universities and university presses were beginning to take comics and popular culture seriously as fields of study. Dominguez's memoir became both a deeply personal book and the work around which SDSU Press launched a new publishing initiative.

In 2019, the making of More Than Money was also featured in an exhibition at San Diego's Athenaeum Art Center, extending the book from page to gallery and foregrounding its relationship to watercolor, illustration, memoir, and visual testimony.