Cover image of The Witches of El Paso by Luis Jaramillo (Primero Sueño Press and Atria Books, 2024)
On the bridge to Juárez, Marta peers down at the Rio Grande trickling along its concrete ditch. The air is heavy with diesel exhaust. People walk across the bridge carrying bright blue and red plastic bags, pushing granny carts toward El Paso.
Marta thinks back to when she was a girl, and women from Juárez would knock on Olga’s door, looking for work. The women crossed the railway bridges, or they waded through the water of the river, finding a hole in the fence, walking across the highway. They went door to door, asking to do the ironing, to scrub the kitchen floor, to wash the windows. Olga never denied them, and the women would leave the house with food, with bills pressed into their hands as she whispered a quick prayer, dios la bendiga.
The clinic Marta’s parents ran in California served migrant workers, people who picked fruits and vegetables, moved irrigation pipes, drove tractors. For them the crossing was way harder, the cost enormous, the journey brutal. It wasn’t something to be done often or easily.
In El Paso, the situation was different. It was almost like the border wasn’t there, como no existe, people used to say. Nobody thought anything about driving to Juárez for lunch and back. Marta remembers arriving at the US border on the way back from lunch at the old market. Luna would say “American citizen” to the guards, and they’d wave her through, without even glancing at her driver’s license. Things have changed, especially after 9/11, when the checkpoints were fortified, the lines of cars and people grew longer, and passports were scanned by computers only to be scrutinized again by unsmiling ICE agents. It was the drive back home that made the journey to Juárez not worth it for Marta most of the time, though more recently, it’s been fear. It hasn’t seemed safe or smart to go, even if many other people do it every day.
Today, Marta’s calculations have changed. “There’s no such thing as safe,” Nena said to Marta on the day of the fire. Marta understands better why Nena would think that. She was orphaned as a child, she lost her daughter and then she lost her freedom.
Marta’s taking Nena to Juárez because she has the overwhelming sense that if she doesn’t something bad will happen to her own family. What the bad thing is, she doesn’t know, but the fear is real, bitter in her mouth. There’s no way to use reason to take that fear away. Logic died when the coyote brought the tooth. Marta doesn’t know the rules of this new would she entered. She’s not sure Nena does either, but Nena’s all she’s got by way of a guide.
At the end of the bridge, Marta turns toward the old plaza, making her way to Avenida Benito Juárez, a clean street lined with quartz-embedded sidewalks that glitter under the bright summer sun. The buildings are low, none over two stories tall, almost all of them painted a blinding white, so that the whole street appears lit from inside. They drive past the old casinos, the jewelry stores, the pharmacies, the Kentucky Bar, where the margarita was supposedly invented, where Marilyn Monrow once bought a round of drinks to celebrate her divorce from Arthur Miller, and where Marta threw up on her shoes one night, when she and her friends from the tutoring program went out.
Even in the heat, people are walking in and out of the stores, making the center of Juárez busy and social in a way that El Paso hardly ever seems to be. It’s odd to think that people have been kidnapped right here, shot in the street. At the city’s lowest point, those with money moved north of the border, as far away from the violence of the cartels as possible. Not that violence is the beginning and end of the story of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. Cristina’s family lives on both sides of the border, and for them the crossing is more inconvenience than deterrent. For both individuals and businesses, the border creates opportunity.
Soto Logistics only exists because there’s a border, and Soto makes his money because his company knows how to deal with the complicated rules of shipping from Mexico to El Paso. Marta wouldn’t at all be surprised if he pays bribes in Mexico, or worse, so that he makes as much money as he can. Soto can afford to hire the best attorney in El Paso, get her case dismissed with a flick of the wrist. This is what money and influence buys, the ability to evade justice.
If Marta had access to the pure power that Nena claims the nuns had, she would use it to get a Soto. She’d cast a spell to make Soto liquidate his companies, divide the money among the women he’s hurt.
“Are there spells that can make someone do something?” Marta asks.
“I know what you’re asking, mija.”
“You do?” Marta asks, surprised.
“You could leave him,” Nena says.
“Leave who?”
“Alejandro.”
“Nena, why would you say a thing like that?” The last thing Marta wants to do is leave Alejandro, and she doesn’t need to cast a love spell on him.
“For too much of life we’re asleep. Don’t you give me that look. I’m not criticizing. You do good work, helping people. You have a beautiful house. You have two handsome and smart boys. But being comfortable isn’t the same as being happy.”
“I don’t disagree with you there.”
“The problem is that no matter what you do, magic always complicates. You try to make one thing go in a certain direction, but the energy goes where it wants. It’s like when Señor Leon went to Señora Beatriz to get Daisy to fall in love with him. Señor Leon ended up dead, with his pants down and his thing out, sprawled out on the floor of his store.”
“Where to even start with that!”
“You must understand, Marta. La Vista isn’t a tool, it’s a force. An energy that enters you and uses you, not the other way around. If you’re an artist or a muscisin, and you accept the energy of La Vista, you can end up with a painting or a piece of music. But if you fight the energy, try to push it in another direction, then bad things happen. You start drinking too much, or you hurt yourself in other ways, and all of a sudden, La Vista stops visiting you, poof! You’re left with nothing. La Vista is pure energy, not good or bad, not love or hate. It’s creation and destruction in both, half-and-halfsy. If you’re a volcano in the ocean, then La Vista might make you erupt, throwing lava and ash everywhere, killing people and fish. But even as you’re causing destruction, you’re also giving birth to a new island. This kind of energy is too wild to be used to control anyone or to change their mind. That I learned the hard way.”
Excerpted from The Witches of El Paso by Luis Jaramillo, published by Primero Sueño Press. Copyright © 2024 by Luis Jaramillo. Reprinted courtesy of Primero Sueño Press and Atria Books.
Read a conversation about The Witches of El Paso between Luis Jaramillo and Marisol Delarosa.
