A covenstead? (2007) | neiljmh / CC BY-ND 2.0
In his debut novel, The Witches of El Paso (Primero Sueño Press and Atria Books, 2024), Luis Jaramillo provides readers a sweeping multi-generational story about Nena, a woman living in World War II–era El Paso who begs for a new life and finds herself transported to colonial Mexico, where she learns to cultivate her magical powers with an aquelarre (coven) of nuns. Nena’s story is interwoven with a modern timeline about her grandniece, Marta, and the two women’s search for Nena’s lost daughter.
Jaramillo has also published a collection of short stories, The Doctor’s Wife, and is an assistant professor of creative writing at The New School. He graciously sat down with Marisol Aveline Delarosa to discuss the power of family stories—and the danger of family secrets.
Marisol Delarosa: One of the things that really struck me in this book was its representation of the convent setting. I have a very irrational fear of convents. We used to drive by this building near our church that my father said was a convent, and he would always threaten to leave me there.
Luis Jaramillo: Oh, well, okay. There’s the reason.
Delarosa: But the scenes in the convent in this novel are just so rich and visceral, and I imagine there must have been quite a lot of research that went into it. There’s a section where Nena starts to reveal the truth about how families with money often pay a dowry to have their daughters go into the convent. And thus the convents became sort of these financially powerful systems. I was really intrigued by all of these themes about how women had to find power throughout this book and in these different civilizations. I was wondering if you could talk a little about the role of the convent. Did you visit any, or was it something you just researched?
Jaramillo: I’m definitely not a scholar of the convent in colonial Mexico, but I researched. One I visited was in Mexico City. And the thing that struck me about that one was that when the women entered this convent, they never left until they died. That finality was so powerful to me—I can only imagine that a lot of the women didn’t choose to do that. On the other hand, there weren’t a lot of really great choices for women in colonial Mexico, anyway. So I think it’s really interesting to set things in places that they’re very confined and that have very strong rules because you know that both the rules are going to be broken and that the walls are going to be breached in that situation.
Delarosa: Then there’s this juxtaposition with the women that exist in the modern day contemporary storyline; there are the women involved in the sexual harassment case who are probably of questionable citizenship status. So many restrictions exist for women’s choices in every timeline. I was particularly moved by the scenes depicting the border, especially when Marta brings Nena to Juárez. You describe how, when you cross over the border, the light changes, the smells change, and Marta says, “It’s miraculous how total the change is across a border that, like all borders, is an imaginary line.” And you must have felt a certain responsibility about this place that obviously has a lot of personal meaning to you.
Jaramillo: My grandfather used to say that we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us. That’s where my family lived and the border shifted. And so that’s also what I was thinking about, that the way that this imaginary line changes people’s lives and continues to change people’s lives in different ways. But the thing that I really wanted to get at is the popular imagination: in the news, it seems like the border is a very chaotic place and that there are just hoards of people rushing across—and that it is extraordinarily violent, especially in Juárez. And to a certain extent that’s true. But on the other hand, there are people just living their lives there. And El Paso is one of the safest big cities in the country.
Most of the time, those people are moving legally or they’ve declared asylum and they’re waiting for their asylum cases, but they don’t stick around in El Paso. So El Paso itself is a different kind of a place where cross border movement is something that’s a day-to-day activity for a lot of people. It’s really important to the economy of the US too. It’s a place where a lot of goods travel through. There are still big factories in Juárez, and part of NAFTA was setting up ease of passage and lowering of tariffs if certain things were built. While at the same time, immigration and other kinds of movement of people is made very difficult. So it’s like, How do you make money? Then there’s this other underground economy on the border too. So I wanted to write about all those complications, but I had to be okay with knowing that I wasn’t writing a book that was primarily focused on that, and that I couldn’t encapsulate all of it.
Delarosa: I’ve been particularly drawn to this character of Nena. Women like her were institutionalized and made to live on the margins of society. When she returns to her sisters, they put her into an insane asylum, and Marta even considers having her put it into a care facility. There’s a statement here in general about how cynicism prevents us from believing that there are greater forces and that it’s easier to write off the ideas of magic and hide people away. Is that something that you had considered?
Jaramillo: I was thinking about mental illness and the way that people who are mentally ill are pathologized. In this book, Nena actually does have power, it’s not just that she’s mentally ill. One of the themes of the book is that people without power, especially women without power, are so often not believed. And so I wanted an extreme version of that, which was that she has this completely fantastical story that actually doesn’t make sense but that did happen to her. And that feeling of frustration of trying to communicate that this thing happened and no one believing her. I think that we all have some experience with, maybe not to that extent, the frustration of trying to communicate. That feeling of not being understood is extremely magnified in the story.
Delarosa: Yeah, definitely. So there is a story in my family about the Aswang, which are these mythical sort of vampiric creatures, and my great grandmother: she supposedly sold her soul to the Aswang in return for riches and beauty. Filipinos are superstitious and religious people!
And the deal was that she had to sacrifice all of her children, and she did have 13 children, and 12 of them mysteriously died at very young ages. So the story my family always told was that this is what happened, and I just took it as a matter of fact. It wasn’t until I was older very recently that I started researching, and I found out that she had actually been put into an arranged marriage when she was about 15, and he was 26. And so a lot of the stories about her being very depressed and angry at the world probably had something to do with that. And then all of her children were alive during the Spanish flu, so that’s probably why a lot of them died early.
Stories are often crafted to explain things that are too difficult to explain. There’s a lot of Philippine myths that are centered around white people that seem to have originated around colonization time. And there’s this wonderful line in your book—“Family stories teach us how to live. Family secrets teach us to kill parts of ourselves. Marta wants to know what this secret has passed down to her, what she has taught to kill.” I sat with that sentence for a long time because it made me think about how family secrets often get lost in translation through storytelling, but there’s a reason for it.
Obviously family storytelling was a big motivation for this book.
Jaramillo: When you do research, you do find out things that you didn’t know before. And so one thing that I found out was just looking at census records. I saw that during World War II, my grandmother and her sisters were living with their mother but they were also living with somebody who was listed as a boarder, who I knew as the guy who married my great-grandmother. But then my aunt told me that my great-grandmother somehow gave her dead husband’s identity to someone else so that they could live in the United States legally. I don’t know how that happened exactly, but there’s a lot of stuff like that—that I didn’t actually know, but I could sense that there were a lot of these things that people were ashamed of, that they hid. So it turned into a story of triumph or a funny story or a story of survival.
The book really is about inheritance and the passing on of knowledge. I also wanted that feeling of things moving on after the end of the book—the ending is not completely settled. I want it to be the case that the story of generations of women continues.
Delarosa: One of my hallmarks of a book that I love is that I think about those characters after the book is over. I wonder about what’s going on in their lives. Have you fully exorcised this book from you, or do you still have moments where you’re thinking about these characters?
Jaramillo: It’s interesting you ask it that way. I think about the characters still. They’re part of my family, sort of in a weird way. I can see them and think about them, but I don’t think about what happens after the end of the book. When I write, and when I read too, I’m not super concerned with plot. It’s what keeps things going forward in a book. But what I remember about the book is its characters and their relationships and the images of what those relationships and characters look like. That’s what sticks with me.
Read an excerpt from The Witches of El Paso, courtesy of Luis Jaramillo and Primero Sueño Press and Atria Books.
