RAFAEL alejandro
ACERO hernandez
Queer Mexican American Writer | Memoirist | Stories of Love, Loss & Resilience
ABOUT RAFAEL (ALEX) Rafael Alejandro (Alex) Acero Hernández is a Mexican-American writer and Creative Director at Mode Salon in Arlington, Texas.
His work bridges lyric memoir, cultural testimony, and queer poetics.
His debut memoir, Love in the Time of Grief, explores love, loss, and transformation through a bold, bilingual lens—fusing emotional depth with irreverent humor.
Drawing from the traditions of testimonio and confessional writing, his work reclaims the sacredness of personal narrative as a tool for resistance and healing.
Across every project, Rafael lives his mission: to inspire, motivate, and empower through truth, grief, and love.
Love in the Time of Grief is a memoir about love, loss, and the messy miracle of survival.
After a devastating goodbye to my husband Israel—my best friend and compañerito—I was left to rebuild from the wreckage. What followed was heartbreak and humor, rituals and rage, and a grief that’s queer, brown, sexy, sacred—and defiantly alive.
This isn’t just a story of loss.
It’s about love that refuses to die.
It’s about healing in unexpected places.
It’s about choosing yourself when the world gives you every reason to fall apart.
PHILOSOPHYMy philosophy is simple: love hard, tell the truth, and rise from the wreckage.
I believe grief and love are two sides of the same coin—and both deserve to be felt fully, messily, and unapologetically.
Healing isn’t linear, and it sure as hell isn’t pretty, but it’s possible—and it starts with reclaiming your own story.
As a queer, brown creator, I know the power of showing up as you are—broken, beautiful, angry, grateful—all of it. I don’t believe in tidy endings or sugarcoated lessons.
I believe in honoring what’s real: the heartbreak and the humor, the sacred and the profane, the losses that change us and the love that refuses to die.
At the core of everything I do is this:
Love is the legacy. Growth is the rebellion. And choosing yourself—again and again—is the real victory.
“This wasn’t an ending.
This was a rebirth- me crawling out of grief’s uterus with a full face of makeup and something to say.” - Chapter 61
Rafael (Alex) Acero • Multi-hyphenate creative