Exclusive Excerpt From Ananda Lima’s Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil

Latinx in Publishing is very excited to partner with Macmillan Publishers to bring you an exclusive excerpt from Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (on sale June 18, 2024), written by inaugural Work-In-Progress fellow, Ananda Lima. Keep reading below for an exclusive sneak peak!

TROPICÁLIA

                               I’m only interested in what is not mine.

—Oswald de Andrade, The Cannibalist Manifesto, 1928

                            Fred, what we want is, I think, what everyone wants, and

                           what you and your viewers have—civilization . . . We want

                           to be civilized.

—Brain Gremlin, Gremlins II: The New Batch, 1990

Sunday, August 20 🌘 Waning Crescent

(Day minus 1)

I woke from unsettling dreams to my mattress jingling with loose change. I lay on my stiff back, armor-tight with tension. I raised my head a little and saw my brown belly divided into sections, striped by the sun slicing through half-open vertical blinds. The lines extended and covered the room with bars. With a monstrous hangover, I peeled off a penny stuck to the skin next to my belly button, then remem- bered my passport.

I stood up too quickly and shielded my right eye from a beam of sunlight. Wincing at something hard digging into the sole of my foot, I looked down and saw I stepped on my treasured Gremlins key chain, fracturing my poor Gizmo’s tiny plastic back. I was sweating. I closed the blinds. Part of my nightmare returned (sun, salt, me with an insect’s legs, scurrying south on city streets).

My phone hid in my papers on global localization strategies (I worked with semiautomated corporate translation), betrayed only by its limp cord, hopelessly disconnected from a power source. Reflected on my dead screen, I looked like vermin. A dream, I reminded myself, and plugged in the phone. As I waited, I stood up and readjusted a crooked white framed triptych of a winking Pop Art Carmen Miranda, her three heads heavy with fruit. The screen turned on and I wiped away the notifications. No missed calls. No emails from work. My nausea gathered and condensed into a singularity in my stomach. That part had not been a dream. No messages about my missing passport. My passport, holding my H-1B work visa, was gone.

Sunday, August 13 🌖 Waning Gibbous

(Day minus 8)

I was having Cheerios for lunch on the shelf I IKEA-hacked into a counter in my kitchen, which was also my living room. I’d worked late on an analysis of our human translator testers the night before. It had gone well, and I was excited about what I might bring to my boss, Meredith, the following week. But I had overdone it and needed a break. So I spent most of my Sunday morning on Pinterest. My prewar studio impersonating a one-bedroom apartment was not as I wanted it yet, but getting there. The view was still water towers on this end and a dumpster on the other. But I had an exposed brick wall, tropical plants, including a monstera, a berimbau I couldn’t play. Though I hadn’t found anything on Pinterest that day (a bad sign).

I swiped out of the news Google had selected for me (rumors of raids in Queens, seven steps to boost your career, tips for watching the Great American Eclipse), then checked there were no emails from work. I needed to stop thinking about work (it had become even harder since Meredith mentioned a possible promotion). On the Brasileiros de Nova Iorque group, a post advertising a facial had three likes. Seven likes on a picture of a Minnie Mouse cake surrounded by brigadeiros. And 137 combined sad faces, angry faces, thumbs-up, at least one laughing emoji, and fifty comments on a post by a woman thinking about divorce but afraid for her green card application. The top comment began, “I get that there are many out there that don’t respect the law. But if you choose to do things right (like I certainly do), there are only two ways: it’s either a real marriage or an employer sponsors you. Now if you choose not to educate yourself, not to work hard, or . . .”

I stopped reading, startled by something moving on a spoon on the counter, just under where I was holding the phone. I thought it was a cockroach but realized the dark lump trapped at the center of the spoon had been my reflection. I heard a buzzing coming from the window. There was a fly there, trapped between the glass and the screen. I didn’t want to kill it per se; I just wanted it gone. So I looked for help on YouTube, which led me to The Fly, a movie I hadn’t seen since I was a child. I watched it instead of dealing with the real fly, and that was my Sunday. Nothing else happened, but the comments from the Brasileiros de Nova Iorque group stayed with me the whole day and through the night.

Monday, August 14 🌗 Last Quarter

(Day minus 7)

That Monday, I missed my alarm and woke up late at eight thirty. I got ready in a panic. When Meredith had told me about a position opening up and briefly mentioned this one guy as my competitor, I’d imagined some guy in a skinny suit, with gelled hair and pointy, overly shiny brown leather shoes. I imagined him in the mirror, shaking his head at me as I hurried to brush my teeth. The position had to be mine. There were the usual things: yes, career, I needed more money. But mostly, I was entering the last year of my H-1B visa and needed to ask the company to sponsor my green card, as they had vaguely alluded to when I’d been hired.

I was about to leave but paused at the threshold of my open front door. I sent a message to Meredith, apologizing for running late. I told her there was trouble on the F line and that I would be there as soon as I could. Then I went back in and sat on my green velvet couch. I opened the Brasileiros de Nova Iorque group and scrolled through the posts on the president’s tweets, the eclipse, and microblading. The woman wanting a divorce seemed to be gone. But I wasn’t after her. I kept scrolling until I found the ICE thread. Those who had passports, visas, and green cards were arguing about whether to always carry them (“I thought that was just an Arizona thing,” “How will they be able to tell,” “In 25 years nobody has ever,” “Well, they asked me,” “If you have nothing to hide”). Of course, the rule didn’t fully make sense, as a Brazilian guy who appeared white in his profile picture had pointed out in the group. If they stopped noncitizens to check their papers, wouldn’t they have to stop citizens as well? How would they know whom to stop? It wasn’t like noncitizens put stickers on their lapels indicating noncitizenship. He reminded me of the guy in the studio control room in Gremlins 2, mocking the logic of the “don’t feed after midnight” rule, speculating what would happen to a gremlin crossing time zones. As he begins to laugh at his own jokes, a gremlin springs up and eats his face.

There it was, right after the comment on rumored ICE activity on the 7, the USCIS link. I clicked. The open-armed blue-and-white eagle greeted me in its familiar unnerving way. I read the passage (“every alien,” “at all times,” “personal possession,” “alien registration,” “comply,” “guilty,” “fined,” “imprisoned,” etc., etc.) again. Yes, supposedly, it applied to all of us. Anyone not considered a citizen had to be ready with the applicable papers. At all times.

I thought of my opponent for the promotion again. I imagined him thin, with a sharp jawline, blue eyes, black hair, walking into our building, taking confident sips of his morning kale smoothie. Fresh and ready for action, having started his day with yoga or spinning or both. I imagined Meredith’s boss, Mr. Koning, and his lot of higher-ups nodding to one another in approval. They’d notice a commotion in the background, turn, and see me being shoved into a van while trying to appear professional in a pencil skirt. Handcuffed, I’d still wave meekly at Meredith, who would admit, embarrassed, that the woman being taken away by the authorities was the candidate she’d suggested for promotion.

I went back in for my passport, safely cocooned in a ziplock bag, inside a shoebox, under my bed. I opened the H-1B stamp page, hovered my fingers over my picture, the signature, the seal, just short of touching it. I closed the passport and put it inside a compartment in my respectable brown leather Banana Republic outlet bag and zipped it, then closed and buttoned the top flap.

On the train to work, I let go of the pole momentarily and searched for any new posts about H-1Bs on the Brasileiros de Nova Iorque group. I grabbed the pole again and clicked with my free hand on the link someone had posted of a forum that crowdsourced updates from applicants for various visas and calculated current processing times. But I lost reception before it opened. I had looked at the forum repeatedly and most likely wouldn’t have found anything new, but I couldn’t stop checking.

I swapped the hand holding the pole, brushed lightly against the hand of a blond woman, and apologized. She looked straight ahead. A message from Meredith popped up on my screen: “Everything is fine over here.” Luckily, I was not meeting her first thing in the morning. And I still had a small buffer before the meeting with the translators. “I’m so sorry,” I texted Meredith. I took a deep breath and went over the plan for the translators meeting again. I would walk to their backroom, the same room where I’d worked when I first joined, then have them leave their cubicles and sit with me in a circle over cookies and coffee. Nothing formal. I would remind them again of how I had started just like them. How Marisa had helped me find everything on the first day of work, how Miki had stopped me from accidentally entering the men’s bathroom. Then I would pivot to introducing the basics of the new rewards system. Not all the details on the points this time. I just hoped they understood the opportunity available to each of them. If only they could see it. I was lucky to have had Meredith help me. Maybe I could do the same for one of them. After the meeting, I’d go over the new targets with Meredith. I knew we could increase the output on our end if we just tightened the ship a bit. I was also thinking of a new metric, a simple addition requiring translators to rate the work of their colleagues as it moves through the workflow. It would be a chance for them to get more credit when they worked hard. And it would address our concern about individual accountability. Meredith would love it.

The train sped up. A white man in a suit reached for our pole, squeezing by a Latino man wearing jeans and work boots, who reminded me of somebody, though I couldn’t tell whom. The blond woman sighed. I counted the five hands sharing the pole, including a woman—brown like me, but with electric-blue nail polish—who just managed to grab it with her fingertips. I couldn’t see her face. Across the car, I spotted a muscular white man with a crew cut, dark gray pants, and a black polo shirt, sitting on one of the orange seats. A photograph from the Brasileiros de Nova Iorque group sprung to my memory: men in black shirts and sunglasses, “ICE” written on white letters on their backs. Without thinking, I ran my hand over the pocket carrying my passport. I wished I could get to work.

I realized the man reminded me of Jeff Goldblum, which was strangely reassuring. I thought of The Fly. Brundle’s tragic and hilariously gross journey from scientist to giant fly. His skin smooth, then stubble, then blisters, then gooey raw meat. All done in analog in 1986. The whole thing had to do with movement, teletransportation, which fascinated me. He entered a pod a normal guy. He couldn’t see it, but by the time he stepped out of the other pod, he’d already become a monster.

As the doors finally slid open at my stop, another message from Meredith arrived: “Don’t worry about a thing.”

Sunday, August 20 🌘 Waning Crescent

(Day minus 1)

The passport lasted less than a week being carried everywhere in my bag. There were a couple of times when it felt right to have it there, close to me. That one time in the subway; that afternoon walking under the rows of American flags, by the rows of police (or military or both) at Penn Station; that time going through the security desk and turnstile when I joined Meredith for a client meeting in a different building. But mostly, there was the fear I would lose it. It was like being resigned to having a fly trapped in a room: Sometimes you forgot it was there, and then it came back buzzing, and you had to wait until it stopped and you forgot it again.

And now here I was. Two caplets of Tylenol, a mug of water, and my phone lay on my imitation-marble coffee table. I called the Mandarin Hotel bar. I balanced my phone between my head and my shoulder as I waited, squeezing the sides of my broken Gizmo key chain as if trying to undo the split along its back. With the back open, its head no longer stayed firmly in place. Nobody answered at the bar. I tried the main hotel, where the receptionist informed me the bar opened at four. I thought of the USCIS passage (“alien,” “at all times,” “personal,” “possession,” “guilty”), sitting among the other words on their site all this time. And the same text in dusty books before there was such a thing as a USCIS website, the letters set in bookshelves while I played in our muddy backyard in Brazil, my cousins laughing as I imitated ALF’s dubbed Portuguese voice. And the same words on other shelves somewhere in the US before that, long before I’d been born.

I put up my broken Gizmo up on my bookshelf, next to a sad baby banana seedling I’d ordered online, its two little leaves wilted and browned. The shelves were full of classics I hadn’t read. A few titles in Portuguese (Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, A Paixão Segundo G.H., O Estrangeiro), the rest in English. Part of an effort to convey that I am a particular kind of person I couldn’t have pretended to be back in Brazil. An ambition that is only possible because Americans don’t know what my accent in Portuguese, or my name, or my parents’ names convey about our place in the world.

Gizmo’s head fell off and rolled close to the edge of the shelf, butI caught it right before it dropped and carefully placed it next to itscracked headless body. At the vintage store where I’d found it my first year in the US, there had been a couple in mismatched plaid shirts ahead of me in line who saw the key chain first. They looked at it with mild interest and put it back. When the woman said the word “gremlins,” it took a second for my brain to map the word as she pronounced it to the way the word had lived in my head as a child. We said “gremilins” in Portuguese, that extra i added like a drop of water to the back of a mogwai, giving rise to an additional syllable. When I realized the key chain was Gizmo, I reached for it immediately. I estimated how many times I’d watched Gremlins 2 in Sessão da Tarde reruns in Brazil. Every afternoon I ate lunch with my brother and sister and watched the soap operas. After the novelas came the few movies TV Globo had dubbed in Portuguese. The same recognizable voices regurgitated out of the mouths of different actors, over and over in all the movies they showed. How strange to feel at that moment that the little Gizmo was more rightly mine than theirs, that American couple who’d clearly missed the movie’s brilliance.

I pushed the broken pieces back, farther into the shelf, to make sure they didn’t fall, and went to get ready to leave.

Saturday, August 19 🌘 Waning Crescent

(Day minus 2)

I last checked on my passport late Saturday afternoon, just before I walked out with Meredith. She had found a way to bring me along for drinks with Mr. Koning, her boss. As I’d been about to leave work the previous day, she had held my shoulders, looked me in the eye, and told me the timing was perfect. I had been giddy about it all afternoon, but now I was worried about what I was supposed to do, about not messing up my great chance. We were at an exclusive spot at the Mandarin Hotel. A place just like I’d imagined people like them went: a little Mad Men, somewhere along a lineage of leather Chesterfields, dark wood, and shelves filled with matching book covers, seamlessly mixed with dark mid-century furniture. And those floor-to-ceiling windows again. Here the city appeared brighter and closer. It felt as if the people in the other buildings could see everything and everyone, including me. It felt familiar, though I had never been there. A déjà vu. I couldn’t place it, and that made me more nervous. I ordered a Malbec.

I sipped it quietly as they discussed projects outside my department. Meredith alternated her posture: sometimes sitting back and propping her elbows on the back of the chair, grabbing her whiskey on the rocks in the relaxed “I don’t care” manner of Mr. Koning and other seemingly powerful men in the restaurant; sometimes sitting up, cross-legged, her arms close to her body as if trying not to occupy space; sometimes leaning into the table and touching her hair, almost flirtatiously. Mr. Koning didn’t notice how she advanced and retreated strategically, slowly gaining space. She indulged all his interruptions and came back around in a gentle way, until her points were made. Even after everything Meredith had taught me and what I’d learned by watching her, there was so much more. I was struggling to find an opening. I realized I was hiding behind my wineglass, not varying my posture, not saying anything. Mr. Koning didn’t seem to notice me. I put my glass down and leaned into the table slightly, bending toward him. I decided my focus now would be to appear fascinated by whatever he said (which was?). I knew Meredith would manage to bring me into the conversation in a manner that was most advantageous to me. I waited for her cue. She always looked out for me.

Maybe the strange familiarity I felt were the large windows, reminding me of the view in the office. Those nights when I’d snuck out of my cubicle to work alone by a window in the conference room, after everyone had gone home. Yes, this was familiar. But there was something else too.

When I was close to finishing my glass, she asked what I was drinking. Mr. Koning wasn’t looking, fiddling with his phone, so she shook her head and scrunched her face at her whiskey. We both smiled. Before I could answer, she said softly that I had to try her favorite drink, a passion fruit Caipijito. I always felt stupidly possessive of caipirinhas, which I didn’t usually drink. Already my brain was activating the heuristic script for expressing how the drink conformed or deviated from the elusive original and an explanation of how caipirinhas really were back at home (as if they were really that different). But I knew I shouldn’t deny her. Besides, it sounded like a good drink.

Mr. Koning answered his phone.

“Fantastic!” He nodded to both of us, still talking to his caller (the second time he had looked at me, the first being a glance during introductions). He stood and headed out toward the elevators.

Meredith audibly exhaled. Her body seemed to soften as she fluffed up her blond hair with both hands. She explained that she didn’t always get to come out with Aldert (Mr. Koning) and that we were only here for his pre-drinks, while he waited for whatever important people he was here to see. But it didn’t matter, she continued. It was still a good opportunity. She was excited she finally got to bring me this time.

“It’s good for you to be on his radar,” Meredith mock whispered, touching my hand with the corner of hers and looking about the room conspiratorially. “Sometimes it’s productive, but sometimes he’s just in the mood to be entertained. Then we just have to be agreeable and split without being awkward, before the big guys come.”

“Got it.” I nodded. The drink was delicious. I was so grateful to her. This place was perfect. I held both her hands in a way I had never done before. “Thank you, Meredith.”

Meredith smiled. She’d been happy with me the whole day. I wasn’t sure why. “How’s the cocktail?”

“So good.” I took another sip.

“Oh my God, isn’t it though?” She looked even more pleased. “You are doing great. I knew you would.”

Meredith had been a little guarded when I first met her. But with time, she saw that I both worked hard and didn’t cause trouble. I was able to understand things she could not talk about to anyone else at work, often to do with navigating power structures as a woman. I wouldn’t start petitions or go running to HR if she talked about things as they truly were. One day, she sternly called me into her office at the end of a quarterly status meeting, but her summons had only been an excuse to remove me from a conversation with a guy from another department, known to be creepy. She gradually opened up and became a mentor as well as my boss. Sometimes, like right then, I wanted to hug her, which would’ve been silly, so I smiled at her instead. She smiled back. I hoped she knew how grateful I was.

I looked at the moon through the windows of the Mandarin Hotel. A thinning curve, most of it disappearing into darkness, pulsating faintly, almost a mirage. I realized what this place, the large dark glass windows reminded me of: Gremlins 2. I had framed an eight by ten version of the film poster and hung it on the wall between my bedroom and bathroom. The illustration showed a solid wooden desk and the scratched back of a plush leather chair. Only the hand of the creature facing the view of the city at night was visible, its skin scaly and green, its black-clawed finger lingering in the air, about to tap down the ashes from a lit cigar. They hadn’t dubbed the gremlins when they sang “New York, New York.” The creatures performed and ran amok to the sound of Sinatra as the terrified humans did whatever they could to keep them from coming out of their dark glass enclosure—and now here I was. New York City outside those large windows. Meredith and I clinked our glasses with the last sips of our Caipijitos. She ordered two more.

I wondered what time it was (“always midnight somewhere”) as I stabbed an olive. I thought of the green skin on the hand dangling the cigar. I thought of how the green in steaming hatching gremlin cocoons looked like the neon-green light coming out of the pod in the promo poster of The Fly. I thought of myself sitting there, my body filled with American proteins. American water. American sugar. The alcohol taking over my brain and liver. I remembered reading that it took ten years for a human skeleton to be completely replaced through cell renewal. I had American bones now. I’d thought I was the eater, but America had been eating me the whole time, from within.

Excerpted from CRAFT: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, copyright © 2024 by Ananda Lima, provided by Tor Books, imprint of Tor Publishing Group, division of Macmillan Publishers.

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(photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan)

Ananda Lima is a poet, fiction writer, and translator, the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (forthcoming from Tor Books) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press), winner of the Hudson Prize.  She is also the author of four chapbooks, including Amblyopia (Bull City Press) and Tropicália (Newfound), winner of the Newfound Prose Prize. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Witness, and elsewhere. She was awarded the inaugural WIP Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers, and was a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the Chicago Review of Books Chirby Awards. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA from Rutgers University, Newark. Her voice was praised as “singular and wise” (Cathy Park Hong), and Craft was described as “an absolutely thrilling reminder that short stories can be the best kind of magic” (Kelly Link). Originally from Brasilia, Brazil, she lives in Chicago.

Exclusive Excerpt: All Bones Are White by Carlo Perez Allen

Latinx in Publishing is pleased to exclusively reveal an excerpt from All Bones Are White by Carlo Perez Allen, winner of the 2023 Victor Villaseñor Best Latino non-fiction book award from the International Latino Book Awards.

What does it mean to be American?

For a young immigrant boy named Carlo—who was forced to say goodbye to his birth name and country—the answer was a hard one to find.

When Carlo was just five years old, his Mexican mother, Camerina, married a gringo, Bill Allen. Wanting only the best for his three adoptive children, Bill moved his new family across the border. Bags packed and sights set for the sky, they left Mexico and set their sights on none other than the Big Apple.

From the start of this long trek across North America, Carlo's childhood was filled with exciting new experiences, harrowing odds, and cultural backlash.

Detailing one man's personal journey of self-discovery in a foreign land, All Bones Are White offers readers a rare firsthand glimpse into the seemingly insurmountable struggles of the lengthy Americanization process.

Told in Carlo Perez Allen's own words, learn first-hand how one person's identity can be forcefully molded, generalized, and lost within the struggle to obtain the All-American dream.

We arrived in Buffalo to unimaginably cold weather. We had no hats, or scarves, or thermals. Mother wore gloves, but they were simply a fashion statement. We strolled the station, studying our new surroundings. People walked cautiously bundled up with thick Lucha-libre masks, thick coats, hats, and gloves. Cesar found a brown paper bag on a bench and made a mask. He kept us entertained using different voices and making scary sounds until a passerby scoffed at the mask. Mother took it off.

We walked past a large mirror, and I noticed we looked out of place. We were the only Mexicans in sight. Everything blurred, and people moved in slow motion. The loud hissing of the steam engines stopped, and the drone of the crowd faded. We were in a different reality. Then, one image cut through the blurry crowd at a quick pace. We all turned around to see Bill’s smiling face. His friendly image grew closer, and he kissed Mother, whispering something that made her smile. Our hero came to our rescue. There was a collective sigh of relief.

Bill picked me up and held me above everyone else. I instantly felt safe with him in the United States, and I laughed hysterically. Suspended in his arms, I drifted to the memory of the first time Bill picked me up like this. It was in an open field across the street from our new apartment in Mexico. I had been prohibited from playing in the area ever since I came across the body of a dead soldier that smelled like cigarettes and alcohol. Mother and I had waited for Bill on the balcony overlooking the field. Eugenia stood behind me, trying to tame my cowlick while Cesar snuck peanuts from the bowl placed on the coffee table. It was the first day we would all eat together in the new apartment that Bill had rented and given Mother the keys to. It was a second-story apartment with lots of books and an unusual lampshade he had made from a custom ordered tortilla. This real tortilla draped over a lampshade. It was Bill’s sense of humor and ingenuity all in one. Mother glowed with excitement when she spotted Bill across the field. We all waved. I ran out the door, down the stairs, and across the area to greet the man I would call Dad for the rest of my life. I ran so hard I lost a shoe as I reached him. His sparkling blue eyes matched the sky above. And now there I was suspended just like before in the USA.

“Welcome to New York, Charlie,” he spoke in English, unlike in Mexico, where he had spoken in Spanish. His soft voice was music to my ears. I giggled and squirmed in the air, saying, “Que?Que?”

“You have to learn English, and it starts now. From now on, your name is Charlie.” Bill explained something I wouldn’t understand for a long time. “Charles Perez Allen,” he beamed. Charlie? I didn’t understand what Charlie meant nor why Oscar wasn’t going to be my name any longer. “New country, new name.” Bill smiled. “You want to melt right in. A new name will make it easier for you.” Okay, I got it. No crying, no Oscar.

Melt right in. It would be a phrase I’d learn about later as Bill would explain the importance of assimilation. I saw the pride in his smiling face. I felt protected from everything, including that mean man on the train. Losing my name was a small price to pay for the comfort of being loved by this man who wanted to be my father. He put me down and hugged and kissed Eugenia and Cesar before we walked to pick up our luggage. “Eugenia, you are now Mary,” Bill said. “Can you say, Mary?”

“Mary,” Eugenia repeated.

“And you Cesar are now Donald. Can you say, Donald?”

“Donald Duck,” said Don.

“I am Dad,” said Bill. “I am your father now, and you will call me Dad. Do you understand?” The three of us nodded. “Good. We are a family, and we each have a role, a responsibility. It’s like a rowboat, everyone helps make it work. We all have a job. Your mother will take care of our home. My job is to provide for all our needs.” He paused, looked at Mother lovingly, and continued. “And your job is to assimilate, become Americans.” Mother smiled and kissed Bill on the lips.

That was the end of Oscar Perez, Cesar Perez, and Eugenia Perez. From that day on, we were Charles Perez Allen, Donald Perez Allen, and Eugenia Perez Allen.

Excerpted from "All Bones Are White," used with permission from Fluky Fiction., www.flukyfiction.com. (c) Carlo Perez Allen.

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Carlo Perez Allen is a recipient of the Victor Villaseñor Best Latino non-fiction book award from the International Latino Book Awards for his debut memoir, All Bones Are White.

He is a member of WGA and SAG, member with feature film, television, and theater credits spanning forty years. He co-wrote the film Home Sweet Hell, Sony Pictures starring Katherine Heigl and Jim Belushi. His recent plays received high praise for strong social commentary on current issues.

He holds BA and MA degrees from U.C. Berkeley and is an AFI film studies graduate. He is proud of his twenty-five years of service as a Los Angeles Unified School District teacher.

His next book, 1851, received a five-star highly recommended award for excellence from the Historical Fiction Company and will be out next year.

Exclusive Excerpt: Aloha Compadre: Latinxs in Hawaiʻi by Rudy P. Guevarra Jr.

Latinx in Publishing is pleased to exclusively reveal a chapter from Aloha Compadre: Latinxs in Hawaiʻi by Rudy P. Guevarra Jr.

Aloha Compadre: Latinxs in Hawaiʻi is the first book to examine the collective history and contemporary experiences of the Latinx population of Hawaiʻi. This study reveals that contrary to popular discourse, Latinx migration to Hawaiʻi is not a recent event. In the national memory of the United States, for example, the Latinx population of Hawaiʻi is often portrayed as recent arrivals and not as long-term historical communities with a presence that precedes the formation of statehood itself. Historically speaking, Latinxs have been voyaging to the Hawaiian Islands for over one hundred and ninety years. From the early 1830s to the present, they continue to help shape Hawaiʻi’s history, yet their contributions are often overlooked. Latinxs have been a part of the cultural landscape of Hawaiʻi prior to annexation, territorial status, and statehood in 1959. Aloha Compadre also explores the expanding boundaries of Latinx migration beyond the western hemisphere and into Oceania.

INTRODUCTION:

The Deportation of
Andres Magaña Ortiz

On July 7, 2017, Andres Magaña Ortiz said goodbye to his wife and three children—all of whom are U.S. citizens—and boarded a flight bound for México, where he will remain separated from his family until he can be petitioned by his daughter Victoria to become a legal permanent resident. It is a process that could take up to ten years.¹ Andres Magaña Ortiz is forty-three years old, a Mexican immigrant who has lived in the United States for nearly thirty years. His family, community, and life’s work are all in Hawaiʻi. In 1989, at the age of fifteen, he was smuggled across the Arizona-México border to reunite with his mother, who was working in California at the time. They eventually made their way to Hawaiʻi, where he picked coffee as a migrant laborer in Kona, on Hawaiʻi Island (Big Island).² Within ten years he was able to save enough money to purchase six acres of farmland in Holualoa and begin his journey as a farm owner. He named his farm El Molinito (the mill), which had an old Japanese-style coffee mill that he began renovating in 2008.³ According to the Washington Post, in the years that followed, Magaña Ortiz “rose to prominence in Hawaiʻi’s coffee industry. In 2010, he allowed the US Department of Agriculture to use his farm without charge to conduct a five-year study into a destructive insect species harming Hawaiʻi’s coffee crops.” After that, he was the most sought-after coffee grower for his expertise in ridding coffee farms in Kona and other areas of Hawaiʻi Island of 98 percent of the destructive borer beetles.⁴

In addition, Magaña Ortiz was also responsible for managing over one hundred acres of land among fifteen other small farmers, which included the elderly and those who were inexperienced and could not do the work on their own.⁵ His dream of continuing to live in Hawaiʻi was short lived, however. In 2011, under the Obama administration, the Department of Homeland Security began removal proceedings against Magaña Ortiz.⁶ He was informed that he would be deported to México, a place he is simply no longer familiar with. In response, Magaña Ortiz petitioned for legal residency and was granted multiple stays, yet his most recent request to gain legal residency was rejected by the Trump administration. Under the guise of cracking down on immigration, the Department of Homeland Security ordered Magaña Ortiz to leave in March 2017.⁷ It did not matter that he already had petitioned for legal residency as the husband of a U.S. citizen—he had to go. As Magaña Ortiz noted, “I never tried to hide it. I always answered my phone when immigration called me and said come see us. . . . I come to each court on time. Everything, I tried to do all my best.”⁸ Given that Magaña Ortiz was a well-known and respected member of the community and a leader of Hawaiʻi’s coffee industry, his case made national headlines.

A team of attorneys assisted Magaña Ortiz by filing last-minute petitions to grant him more time in the United States. Even Hawaiʻi’s congressional delegation supported his case, speaking on his behalf to Homeland Security secretary John F. Kelly to halt his removal. As the four-member delegation wrote, “He is trying to do the right thing.”⁹ In addition, representative and onetime presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard introduced a bill to make Magaña Ortiz eligible for legal, permanent residency. Senator Mazie Hirono also spoke on Magaña Ortiz’s behalf, stating, “Andres’ ordeal speaks to the very real fear and anxiety spreading through immigrant communities across the country.”¹⁰

Federal appeals court judges also supported Magaña Ortiz’s case, calling him a “pillar of his community” and criticizing the Trump administration handling of his case. For example, Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit called Magaña Ortiz’s deportation “contrary to the values of the country and its legal system. . . . The government decision to remove Magaña Ortiz diminishes not only our country but our courts, which are supposedly dedicated to the pursuit of justice.”¹¹ Despite having a strong case, the inhospitable climate proved too much. Magaña Ortiz decided to depart voluntarily ahead of the deportation order. When interviewed by Hawaii News Now at Kona International Airport during his departure, he regarded the circumstances of his case: “Very, very sad and very disappointed in many ways, but there’s not much I can do. . . . Just follow what I have to do and hopefully, in a little bit, things can get better.”¹²

His family has fared no better because of this. Magaña Ortiz’s eldest daughter, Victoria, almost had to withdraw from college at the University of Hawaiʻi to help support the family as they struggled to keep their father’s business afloat.¹³ She graduated a little later than expected but was able to finish her education online. As Victoria noted about this sudden responsibility for managing the family business,

I think I would have liked to have my own business when I created it. You slowly go with it, but the thing was running and going full speed, and I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. So I think that was the pressure. My dad is now deported. My mom has had back surgery; she’s injured, so she doesn’t work. I have my brother and my sister, so I have all four of them on my plate all of a sudden. And my dad had always been the one to solve problems. My mom was always like, “We have a dentist appointment. Fill out these forms for me.” Normal Hispanic child, right? And my dad was always the one that I used to run to when I had issues. And suddenly my safety net is just gone. So I think it was really hard for me when that happened because suddenly I was the one to make the decisions and have all the responsibilities.¹⁴

Andres Magaña Ortiz’s journey took him to the municipal city of Morelia, México, to a village called El Rincon de Don Pedro, Michoacán, where he had once lived before coming to the United States. Magaña Ortiz will remain in México until he is reunited with his family back in Hawaiʻi, a place they consider home. As Magaña Ortiz shared before he left, “I love this country and I love these islands. If I have to leave, it’s going to be hard on everyone.”¹⁵ The separation of Andres from his wife and children left them with an urgent sense of fear and uncertainty. They said their goodbyes at home so that the younger children did not have to go to the airport and be further subjected to the trauma of seeing their father leave. For Victoria, it was all surreal. She shared, “After so much fight that we went through, for it to just end like this. I mean, it’s not necessarily the ending, but it is hard to see him go.” She added, “We’re still fighting to get him back here.”¹⁶

Political Context in Contemporary Hawaiʻi

Andres Magaña Ortiz’s story and that of his family speak to the current political situation around immigration in Hawaiʻi and across the continental United States. What makes his story both powerful and tragic is that Magaña Ortiz was not the exaggerated racial stereotype of a “criminal” that Trump had suggested was invading the United States. Rather, he was a husband, father, and business owner who contributed to the social and economic prosperity of Hawaiʻi’s Kona coffee industry. Andres’s daughter Victoria was also disheartened at how her father was categorized as a criminal and deported because of a previous charge of driving under the influence (DUI). Under the law, his DUI was enough to start deportation proceedings, despite having an exemplary record as a long-time resident of Hawaiʻi. Victoria remarked, “If my dad, being so loved here and being a workaholic and he’s still justified as a criminal for a mistake that he did, who else are you putting into these things [categories]? Are they getting traffic tickets? They’re not supposed to just take your life away like that.”¹⁷

Despite the outpouring of legal and political support in Hawaiʻi and the aloha (love and inclusion) Magaña Ortiz received from the various communities mentioned, under the Trump administration, he was ordered to leave. There was no consideration of the benefit his contributions were making to the state and his local community. Rather, because he is Mexican and undocumented—not by his choice—and subject to the racism of the justice system, he was forcibly removed from his family, friends, and longtime home to a place he no longer knows.¹⁸ His story reminds us of how poorly the United States has treated its citizens, whether legally documented or not. It is likely there were many conservative settlers in Hawaiʻi who applauded his deportation because they deem Latinx people a threat. However, there was a huge outpouring of support and aloha from the larger community who understood the humanity of his case and sought to support Magaña Ortiz through calls, petitions, and other means. Although he had to leave Hawaiʻi, his story and legacy resonate with me in terms of what it means to be Latinx in Hawaiʻi today in a national climate of increasing xenophobia and racism toward immigrants. I say this as someone who has been privileged to come to Hawaiʻi for more than twenty years, spending that time living, building intimate ties with the Latinx communities, and nurturing my existing networks of hānai and chosen family, friends, and colleagues who identify as Native Hawaiian, local, haole, and/or transplants to the islands. My observations reveal that although Hawaiʻi has long been a place known for its aloha, this seminal Hawaiian concept is being tested by the growing racist, xenophobic tide that is washing upon Hawaiʻi’s shores from outsiders, both haole and non-Native settlers.¹⁹

It is here that I turn to what Magaña Ortiz’s story represents to the larger Latinx community in Hawaiʻi, which has been the growing xenophobia and racism that is being fueled by the larger national climate through popular discourse in the media, writers, pundits, scholars, and politicians. This sentiment reveals the ever-present tension in Hawaiʻi that is now more visible because of the infectious nature of racism and white supremacy. At the same time, I am also mindful of the ways that Kānaka Maoli continue to be dispossessed and displaced from their homeland within a settler colonial system. They must also be included in this conversation, since Latinx migration is made possible through the suppression of Native Hawaiian self-governance. Seen by most residents as recent migrants or newcomers, the Latinx population of Hawaiʻi is increasing in numbers, but that growth is also hidden in plain sight. Due in part to Hawaiʻi’s already historically mixed population that also includes Pacific Islanders and Asians among other racial and ethnic groups, the Latinx population is often mistaken as “local” in Hawaiʻi depending on the context.²⁰

Though increasing with new migrations, the Latinx population is not new to the Hawaiian Islands. On the contrary, Latinxs have been voyaging to the Hawaiian archipelago for 190 years, yet their presence has been rendered invisible by the tourist industry and within the larger local population. Aloha Compadre demonstrates what historian Evelyn Hu-DeHart also notes about Asians in Latin America, that these histories are hidden in plain view. There is no single, monolithic story to explain migration, and Latinx movements to Hawaiʻi and the larger Pacific region are as varied as the cultures that fall under the umbrella term Latinx.²¹ A small but steady flow of migration has occurred since the early 1830s; this has been both interrupted at times and inconsistent. Their roots, however, remain, as they were part of the first groups of foreigners who came during the reign of the Kamehamehas.²²

As the first full-length study of the Latinx population in Hawaiʻi, in Aloha Compadre I offer the following: (1) I reveal how the Latinx population of Hawaiʻi is not a new phenomenon but a 190-plus-year journey of migration and intercultural community and identity building; (2) I expand our notion of how we understand and view la frontera (the borderlands) to include the ocean as a site of movement beyond terrestrial regions, which challenges us to see the continuous diaspora of Latinxs that spans globally across oceanic spaces; and (3) I explore how the Latinx population in Hawaiʻi has experienced both acceptance and aloha in their new home and also racism and “being racialized” in a climate that is increasingly becoming xenophobic. And precisely within this context, I explore how their acceptance or marginalization has occurred from the independent Hawaiian Kingdom to the twenty-first century, which seems to be contingent on their contributions, including but not limited to economic and cultural ones. My project analyzes how these experiences complicate the dominant narrative of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial utopia, an image shaped by early and contemporary writers who visited the islands. Aloha Compadre also documents the changing political climate in Hawaiʻi up to the early twenty-first century and how the Latinx population navigates the current tides of immigration policies, racism and xenophobia, and interracial relationships as they seek to build their communities and find a sense of belonging in the diaspora.

This is the story of the predominantly Spanish-speaking Latinx communities of Hawaiʻi and the social, political, and economic forces that influenced their migration thousands of miles across the Pacific for nearly two centuries. Similar to what anthropologist Sara V. Komarnisky has documented about the historical migrations of Mexicans to Alaska, the same can be said of Latinx migrations to Hawaiʻi in that “in some cases, the process of putting down roots requires mobility.”²³ It is why there is both a large and rising Latinx population in Hawaiʻi. Rather than focus on a continual historic-to-contemporary timeline of migration and community formation, I will focus on four pivotal moments when the Latinx population came to Hawaiʻi, from the era of the independent Hawaiian Kingdom in the 1830s to the early 2000s. These four pivotal moments all center on the labor of specific Latinx communities throughout the islands: (1) Mexicans in the 1830s, (2) Puerto Ricans in the early 1900s, (3) Mexicans and Central Americans in the 1990s, and (4) Mexicans and Central Americans in the early 2000s. I suggest that Latinx migration in these four moments was vital to the continuing legacy of specific industries in Hawaiʻi, including cattle ranching, sugar cane, pineapple, Kona coffee, and macadamia nuts. Indeed, the need for labor was one of the primary reasons Latinxs came to Hawaiʻi, but it did not define them as such. Others came as small business owners, students, or the military.

While labor was the impetus for Latinx migrations in these episodic moments, I look at the lives of my Latinx interviewees using a more complex approach to demonstrate that they are more than just workers.²⁴ I focus on the stories I uncovered while doing archival and ethnographic research and the oral testimonies of individuals who were gracious enough to share their stories with me. Their stories are central to this study and bring to life the human element of these moments. For me, it is important to hear the stories of those who labored in these industries, humanize them, and examine how they adapted to their new home and found ways to develop their identities and communities in the diaspora within a Pacific Island context. Their stories illustrate the hopes, dreams, disappointments, and challenges of the Latinx population by providing insight into what we can learn about migration, adaptation and belonging, and cultural multiplicity in Hawaiʻi. These stories also provide meaningful interpretations of historical events from the perspectives of those who lived through them. They help us understand why those moments mattered to both the interviewees and historical figures who left behind a written record.

Excerpted from "Aloha Compadre: Latinxs in Hawaiʻi," used with permission from Rutgers University Press., www.rutgersuniversitypress.org. (c) Rudy P. Guevarra Jr.

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RUDY P. GUEVARRA JR. is professor of Asian Pacific American studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. He is the author of Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego (Rutgers University Press), and coeditor of Beyond Ethnicity: New Politics of Race in Hawaiʻi.

Exclusive Excerpt: Our Otherness is Our Strength: Wisdom from the Boogie Down Bronx by Andrea Navedo

Latinx in Publishing is pleased to exclusively reveal a chapter from Our Otherness is Our Strength: Wisdom from the Boogie Down Bronx by Andrea Navedo, best known as Xiomara from The CW's Jane the Virgin.

Andrea Navedo didn't get to see many positive portrayals of Latinas in the media growing up. So when she had the chance to play a starring role on Jane the Virgin, a role that cast her as a complex, flawed, and genuine Latina single mother, she jumped all over the opportunity.

Now, she shares bits of her story of growing up in "da South Bronx—boogie down, burning"—to inspire young people who grew up like she did and who, after being counted out, still strive to succeed.

Expanding on her beloved commencement address to DeWitt Clinton High School and other speeches, Navedo offers the pithy, ghetto-honest, and at times laugh-out-loud funny lessons she learned from surviving abusive relationships, dealing with repeated rejection, and eventually triumphing in the entertainment industry. From how to listen compassionately to your own internal dialogue, to why fame and validation may not make you feel better about yourself, to how to never play the victim, she provides notes from life's trenches, the trenches of the South Bronx. She shows how the outer and inner challenges of what popular culture deems the horrors of places like the Bronx can instead be the very factors that bring out our superpowers.

Discover Your Roots

. . . when I was eleven my parents sent me to Puerto Rico to spend the summer with my other grandma, Grandma Benny. I went all by myself on a plane and I got to sit by the window! It was incredible to be in the air looking down at NYC, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, and the towers of the World Trade Center. The city looked like a miniature toy set and everyone looked like ants. As we ascended, we eventually flew past a layer of white fluffy clouds and spent most of the flight above them. It was weird; it made the world feel upside down. I had never had this point of view before. As we flew, I gazed out of the window and imagined myself outside, jumping on top of those clouds, like on a trampoline, bouncing from one cloud to another or lazily lounging on top of one and ripping off a piece of fluffy cloud to eat like cotton candy. The stewardesses (that’s what we called them back then) were super sweet. They would check on me from time to time to see if I wanted or needed anything. They asked if I wanted to eat breakfast and one of the options was pancakes. Woohoo, had I died and gone to heaven? Of course, I wanted breakfast and yes, “I’ll have the pancakes please!” I was so excited. This trip to Puerto Rico was turning out to be great! Then—record scratch—the pancakes arrived and I disappointedly discovered what the term “airplane food” meant.

Three hours later, we approached the beautiful island of Borinquen. (I learned that Borinquen was what the original native inhabitants, the Taínos, called the island, before it was invaded by Spain. Hence why people from the island refer to themselves as Boricua.) Soaring above the lush tropical landscape, I caught my first glimpse of the calm turquoise waters of Puerto Rico. Wow! I had never seen water that color. Hugging along the coastline and cruising above the palm trees I could see why its other name was La Isla del Encanto (The Isle of Enchantment), because it was so beautiful.

Once off the plane I was escorted to the terminal to meet my grandmother. I had no idea how we were going to find her because I didn’t know what she looked like. The last time I had seen her was probably when I was a baby when she was still living in NYC. Eventually we found her, along with my step-grandfather and my teenage aunt Patti. It was weird meeting them. They were complete strangers to me. Grandma Benny was blonde and had blue eyes and looked like my father. I knew my father was Puerto Rican, with white skin, light brown hair, and blue eyes, but I thought he was an anomaly—adopted or something. All the other Hispanic people I knew were dark. But there she was, this white woman who spoke Spanish and who hugged me like I was her long-lost child. As she bear-hugged me, I flinched in pain because in between us, digging into my belly, was a gift for grandma that I held in my arms. It was from my dad, an old-fashioned wooden coffee grinder, the kind that has an ornately designed cast-iron wheel that needs to be manually operated to grind the coffee. Her eyes lit up. She seemed very pleased.

We finally arrived at her house. My grandmother proudly told me that she and her husband had built the house themselves. They had immigrated to New York years back and busted their asses working, with the plan to save enough money to move back to Puerto Rico and build a home. And that’s exactly what they did. It was a humble home but it was nice. The neighborhood smelled like fresh-baked bread and, in the distance, roosters crowed almost constantly. Hold up! Shut the front door! Roosters crowing? At this hour? It was the afternoon! What were they doing crowing during the day? Everyone knows that roosters crow at the crack of dawn to wake everyone up. Nature’s alarm clock. That’s what I learned watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on TV. TV was the original homeschooling if you were from the hood. We didn’t have roosters back in The Bronx. Mister Rogers said they crow at dawn. Head scratch. It got me thinking— Mister Rogers, a white man, could be wrong?

The house was situated in a suburb of San Juan with a weird-sounding name, Bayamòn. I learned that was another Indigenous name. I had only just arrived and was already learning so much. I learned that “airplane food” means “bad food,” that Puerto Rico was originally inhabited by an Indigenous people called Taínos who called the island Boriquen, that roosters crow any time of day, basically whenever they feel like it, that white people can speak Spanish, and white people don’t know everything or white people can be wrong. Interesting.

That evening Grandma Benny served the most amazing meal. One I will never forget. She made sancocho. She said it was my father’s favorite dish. Sancocho is a hearty stew made of tender chunks of beef, chicken, and/or pork, with root vegetables like yucca, sweet potato, plantains, and more. She served it along with white fluffy rice and slices of aguacate (avocado). It was the most flavorful, satisfying, and comforting meal I had ever had in my life. I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. Especially after that “airplane food” experience. I ate that sancocho like there was no tomorrow. I could see the pride and pleasure in my grandmother’s eyes as I devoured that stew. She loved watching me eat with such gusto. She didn’t take her eyes off of me. Finally, I came up for air. I was pretty full. I leaned back, put my spoon down, and opened the top button of my shorts. Well, the look that came over Grandma Benny’s face. Pleasure turned to a look of dismay in two seconds flat. Grandma Benny immediately picked up that spoon and started to feed me like a baby. She said kids were starving in China, and that I had to finish everything on my plate. She kept scooping and shoveling it into my mouth until that huge bowl was empty. I could barely move. I could literally feel the food at the top of my throat. I was afraid to move for fear of it coming out. I carefully, ever so carefully, got up, sat down on the couch, opened my shorts completely, and didn’t move for hours.

Grandma Benny had served me a man-size bowl of sancocho, probably the same amount she would’ve served my dad. I was very skinny, didn’t weigh more than seventy pounds, and I’m sure she was determined to get some fat on my bones before she sent me back home to NYC.

Like I mentioned, the neighborhood smelled like bread because a few blocks away was a panaderia—a bakery. The bakery made bread all day long and the smell in the area was intoxicating. My first morning, at 7 a.m., Grandma and I went to the bakery to buy a loaf of pan de agua or “water bread.” Pan de agua is a long loaf of white bread. It has a hard and crispy crust with a fluffy airy center. When we got home Grandma asked if I wanted breakfast. I enthusiastically said yes, having discovered this woman was a queen in the kitchen. Ten minutes later she called me to breakfast and placed in front of me a cup of café con leche (coffee with milk) and a slice of pan de agua with a slathering of butter in the center. I was amazed that she was serving me coffee. I thought only adults could have it. It made me feel grown up. I took a sip of the coffee and it was delicious, better than hot cocoa. I then excitedly took my first bite of pan de agua and nearly fell out of my chair in ecstasy. It was warm, crispy, tender, and literally melted in my mouth. I was enraptured. I basically inhaled it and immediately asked for seconds. Grandma Benny smiled, then served me another slice. I inhaled that one too and quickly asked for thirds. But this time she said no, a surprise since she seemed to derive such joy from shoveling food into my mouth. She said the rest of the bread was for Grandpa and Patti but, if I wanted, I could have a whole loaf to myself next time if I went by myself in the mornings to pick up the bread. Bet grandma, I’m down with that!

One day grandma’s brother stopped by the house in his pickup truck. He looked like the male version of Grandma Benny, but he had a somewhat weathered look. He looked strong, with broad shoulders and big calloused hands. He lived and worked on the family farm. I had no idea my family had a farm!

In the back of the truck were big burlap sacks filled to the top with beans. All kinds of beans—black, red, kidney, and coffee beans. He had come by to bring her some of the beans he had harvested. He proceeded to unload the sacks and put them on the patio. After some chitchat in Spanish he left and grandma turned to me and asked if I wanted a cup of coffee. Since arriving to Puerto Rico I had become a real coffee addict. The coffee grandma made was so so good! It was like dessert, so of course I said yes!

“Okay, entonces ayudame,” Grandma said. “Help me carry the coffee beans to the back patio.” She took an empty burlap sack, laid it out on the patio floor in the sun, and then proceeded to show me how to spread the beans out on top of it. “Okay, we need to let it bake in the sun. Go and play.” About a half hour went by and Grandma yelled for me to come back. I thought she was calling me for my café con leche, but no. Instead she showed me how to rake the coffee beans and then sent me away again. This went on for hours. Every thirty minutes or so we raked the beans. Every so often she would bite into one of them to see if they were ready and every time she would say, “No, not ready.” Finally, after what seemed like forever, she took one last bite and announced, “Ya, they are ready. Búscame el coffee grinder that your Papi bought for me.” I ran to fetch it and she told me to sit down, hold it in my lap, place coffee beans inside the cast iron bowl, and crank the handle. Within a few minutes we had freshly ground coffee inside of the wooden drawer at the bottom of the grinder. It was so cool! She then said, “Okay, now I will make your café con leche,” and went inside the house.

I patiently sat waiting on the patio until she finally came out with the most amazing cup of coffee. It was hot, but not too hot. It was the perfect color of light caramel with a sweet, creamy, deep, smooth, almost chocolaty taste. Again I was in taste-bud heaven. To this day I still haven’t been able to duplicate that cup of coffee. It was a once-in-a-lifetime, unforgettable experience.

That month in Puerto Rico was one of the highlights of my childhood. I learned so much about my identity as a Puertoriqueña. My parents had originally offered the trip as an incentive for me to do well in school. However, my grades still sucked by the end of the school year. I thought for sure I wasn’t going get to go to Puerto Rico for the summer. Thankfully my parents sent me anyway. They most likely figured it would be good for me. They were right because eleven-year-old me got to go to the island of Puerto Rico! Borinquen! La Isla del Encanto! And finally feel some sense of belonging.

Excerpted from "Our Otherness is Our Strength: Wisdom from the Boogie Down Bronx," used with permission from Broadleaf Books., www.broadleafbooks.com. (c) Andrea Navedo

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Andrea Navedo is a Bronx-born-and-raised Puerto Rican American actress best known for her role as Xiomara, a complex and genuine Latina, on The CW’s series Jane the Virgin, for which she received critical acclaim. She is dedicated to various charities, including A Place Called Home in South Central Los Angeles, and the Fresh Air Fund in New York City. Navedo has a passion for self-improvement, growth, and healing, and through her experiences seeks to help those who see themselves on the outside looking in. She and her family divide their time between their homes in Toronto and Connecticut. 

Website: AndreaNavedo.com
Instagram: @andreanavedo
Facebook: /AndreaNavedoOfficial
Twitter: @andreanavedo

Review and Excerpt: Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air: A Collection of Poems

Note: The review and poems associated with this post majorly focus on author Ayse Guvenilir

Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air is an anthology written by six Muslim women and it is about how they view culture, identity, womanhood, and so much more. Afeefah Khazi-Syed, Aleena Shabbir, Ayse Guvenilir, Maisha M. Prome, Mariam Dogar, and Marwa Abdulhai are a dynamic group of women of various backgrounds who met as undergrads at MIT. Not only do they share a love of STEM, but they also have a passion for poetry. Aside from their studies, they spent their days discussing their shared love of the art form and that love proved to be strong as even COVID-19 couldn’t deter them from continuing what they dub their “grounding medium.” 

The poems “when i think sunshine” and “comb through from root to end” are written by Ayse Guvenilir. Ayse Guvenilir was born in Austin, Texas to a Venezuelan mother and a Turkish father. When I read her poems, I found them to be relatable and very interactive, which added to the experience of her serene and powerful writing. On their website, Ayse says that she sees poetry as, “a form of writing that can surpass the bounds of what words are expected to be.” I truly believe readers will find that sentiment in her entries as well as in the poems of Afeefah, Aleena, Maisha, Mariam, and Marwa.

Reading “when i think sunshine” felt like I was reading about almost every memory I have of enjoying the summertime when I was a kid. Remembering those feelings of running around with my siblings and many cousins, enjoying the hot weather, and feeling like stress didn’t even exist during summer. With being written in haibun, a combination of prose and haiku, there was that added emphasis on those endless summer days that always ended as quickly as they started. Ayse perfectly captured that with the haiku at the conclusion, which only further showcases her strong writing style.

I found “comb through from root to end” to be another powerful entry, not just because of the message but also because of its format. Some lines are written to the left, some to the right, with the last few lines placed in the middle. It felt like I was moving my head back and forth between a conversation of people giving their perceived notions of a person, how they think someone should present themselves based on their identity (or identities), and almost making that person feel less than in terms of who they are. When the format ended in the middle, it felt like a powerful stop to the side comments. Like going in the middle and forging your own path in terms of who you are and who you want to be.

There are many other entries that are uniquely written in terms of format and various poetry styles, making them incredibly immersive. What’s also noteworthy about this collection is that some of the poems come with notes containing extra information, personal and not, about the entry. The additional knowledge makes them even more captivating because readers get to see the inspiration behind the story.

Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air has many poems written by Ayse and her fellow co-authors that are incredibly immersive, captivating, and beautiful to read. They are multi-layered and there is always something to take away from their writing. It is a wonderful collection that contains their experiences and explorations into the many facets of their identity.

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Enough

Ayse Guvenilir

I have never been where

I will never go stuck

in this house with a heavy ceiling

reaching for the truth of what

I was trying to do

with you when I said

that I had to go

book the next flight out

would they ever trust me

a gringa—as Abuela dutifully reminds me—

otherwise?

Not that

given the current state of affairs

they would ever trust anyone

outside of whom could fix

every one of their problems bringing

them light

in the middle of the night

it’s so hot

they can hear

their brain sweating feel

their sense slipping waiting

hours upon hours for gas shifts switching

in a car that is going to burn

anyways

the ground beneath my feet has never

felt more unstable than it feels right now

kids in CAGES the world AVOIDING

the humanitarian CRISIS—

like they avoid every crisis—

does anyone hear their cries into the echo

of the storage building

is it real? Does it matter?

How can I be

and not be saving

my home once-removed y

gente who I feel are my gente

bonded by lengua y risas y cultura

rooted in over exaggerations y bendiciones y

Dios te cuide y no te amo te adoro y

seemingly excessive abrazos y besos

that keep us whole.

Will I ever be enough

to save them all?

Enough: The two crises referenced are the immigration deportation and detainment along the border in the United States, and the continued political and economic hardships faced by many in Venezuela.

Excerpted from “Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air: A Collection of Poems,” used with permission from Beltway Editions. (c) Ayse Guvenilir.

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Ayse Angela Guvenilir was born in Austin into a family with a Turkish father, a Venezuelan mother, and three older brothers. Growing up in Texas, France, and various parts of upstate New York, Ayse has always used reading and writing for connection, reflection, and relaxation as she moved from place to place. She sees poetry in particular as a form of writing that can surpass the bounds of what words are expected to be, in turn connecting her with others. Ayse got her bachelor’s degree in biological engineering with a minor in creative writing from MIT and is currently a master’s student in the Biomechatronics Group at the MIT Media Lab. Through her work, Ayse aims to empathize, educate, and inspire, the way that the works of others have always done for her.

Melissa Gonzalez (she/her) is a UCLA graduate with a major in American Literature & Culture and a minor in Chicana/o & Central American Studies. She loves boba, horror movies, and reading. You can spot her in the fiction, horror/mystery/thriller, and young adult sections of bookstores. Though she is short, she feels as tall as her TBR pile. You can find Melissa on her book Instagram: @floralchapters

Exclusive Excerpt: Are We Ever Our Own

THE BALLAD OF TAM LIN

Before the oyster folk took him from me, my father gave me his fiddle and told me the story it carried. On the island, he said, there were two sisters. I didn’t know if he meant his island—cane and tobacco fields wracked by war—or Mam’s—sea cliffs and highland meadows emptied by famine—or one of the many islands where he’d lived. The crowded island city where he met Mam. Or maybe an island he’d never even been to. My father held his fiddle up so that it seemed to hover in the air between us. Two sisters, he said, one dark-haired and the other one fair and they both fell in love with the miller’s son.

I rolled my eyes. I hated stories about fair-haired sisters and miller’s sons. My father cuffed my ear to make me listen. You’ll like how this one goes, he told me. Both sisters loved the miller’s son, but he had eyes for the fairer one. I scoffed again, but he just smiled. The smile that always made our audience—no matter what town we were in, how small, how ragged, how hungry they were for food other than flour and lard cakes—lean in and listen. The smile that told them he didn’t care how side-eyed the townsfolk had first looked at him, at Mam and him together, at Mrs. Zhao leading her wagon, her daughter June behind her. The smile that said, if they just listened, if they just waited, he’d give them some-thing as fine as stacks of cash-not-company-scrip, as the right amount of rain, as an answer to these hard times that wouldn’t end. I waited for him, just like his smile told me to, just like every audience always did.

My father said the miller’s son only wanted the fairer sister, so the dark-haired one went for a walk with her sister to the furthest point of their island. They passed palm groves and sea grape, walked until they were at the cliff’s very edge. Then the dark-haired sister pushed the fair one over the cliff and down into the waves.

My father paused and raised his eyebrows, as if daring me to stop him, knowing I wouldn’t now. Stories about

miller’s sons and fair sisters never went this way. The fair sister almost always died—on a riverbed or beneath a willow, run through by a saber, dropped by poison wine, or mad in an asylum like Cecilia Valdés—but never by her own sister’s will. My father said the waves swept the fair sister out to sea. Fight as she did, clawing at water, kicking at waves, she sunk beneath the surface. The sea tugged her and carried her and stole her final breath. The sea pulled her deep. Sharks fed on her ribs, shrimp clung to her fingernails, until she was just a body, not a sister anymore and no longer fair.

Finally, the waves spit her back up. A wandering musician found her washed ashore and he didn’t run away or call the priest or the mayor. The wanderer knelt down beside the mound of bones and hair.

My father asked me what I thought the wanderer did and I shook my head. I didn’t know.

The wanderer picked up her finger bones, my father said, and he cut off her long, fair hair. He plucked her sternum from between her ribs and, because he was in need of it, he made a fiddle out of her. Her finger bones became the fiddle pegs, her hair the long bow strings, her white sternum the fiddle bridge.

Then my father handed me his fiddle, which he’d never before let me touch. We’d just crossed the border from Oregon to Washington, and were camped outside a logging town. The mud streets were empty, everyone deep in the woods sawing down cedar and sitka, the ground too wet for our wagons to move through and the rain too hard for even us to play a show in. I crouched on my bunk, tucked in a corner of our wagon. The rain beat down on the canvas tent above us, but it was warm inside. We’d start off again as soon as it was dry, searching for a town with people in it, though what kind of people and what they might ask of us, we never knew.

The pegs of my father’s fiddle were deeply concaved, paper-thin in the middle and a pale yellow like old teeth, with hair-strand-wide dark cracks running over them. The bridge was the same color as the pegs, almost translucent in its delicacy. Since I could remember, I’d wanted to hold his fiddle: to trace the flor de mariposa and banana flowers carved across the back, to touch the wood stained almost black around the f-holes and deep red on the edges where it was constantly touched.

No matter what role he took in our show, my father always played his fiddle. He’d play a fast song at the beginning to rile up the crowd and a sad song at the end because everyone wants a lonesome ending. It brings the audience back again, hopeful they didn’t remember right, that we’ll give them the right ending the next time around. Though my father could play any instrument you could name, the fiddle was his favorite. But when he handed it to me in our muggy wagon—the horses chewing oats out of their feed box, Mam curled around him in their bunk, braiding the fringes on his jacket sleeve—I didn’t question that I should get it. I had wanted it, had wanted the sound it made, the catch and pluck, its power to mold a crowd, to decide how

well we would eat, how long we would stay by this mill or that farmstead. I had wanted the fiddle for what felt like an unimaginably long time. Back then, in our tent, steam rising off the horses and mixing with Mam’s wordless hum, I would have used the word forever.

I didn’t know how young I was. Didn’t doubt what was owed me. Now, I wonder if my father gave me his fiddle because he knew something I didn’t. If he had an idea of what would happen when we reached the oyster town we were headed towards. If he could scent some particular danger in the combination of mud, sea, and sawed cedar, and he gave me what mattered most to him. Offered me his fiddle for safe-keeping, heedless of my clumsy, too-small hands.

My father asked me what I thought the fiddle in the story sounded like. I was still holding his fiddle up in the air as he had handed it to me, not yet believing I could pull it close. When the wanderer first played the fiddle he’d made of the sister’s bones and hair? What was the song? I couldn’t speak, I shook my head again. Finally, I eased the fiddle down into my lap and traced its carvings: the flor de mariposa petals, the spider—intricate as a thousand I’d seen—perched on the flower’s stem.

The fiddle sounded like the wind, my father said. The wind off the sea that carried the sister away, like the water dragging her under and spitting her back a heap of scraps, like the fishes that eat drowned girls. The fiddle sounded like the dark-haired one pushing her only sister off a cliff and the sound the dark-haired one made when she did what she thought she’d wanted and the sea carried her sister away. The fiddle sounded like the dark-haired sister’s cruel heart, like her broken heart. Like the wind too, and like the rain that fell on her sister when she was only bones for a wanderer to comb through.

I nodded. He was right. That was how my father’s fiddle sounded.

Excerpted from "The Ballad of Tam Lin," published in Are We Ever Our Own, copyright May 24, 2022 by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes, BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.

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Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes is the author of Are We Ever Our Own, winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize, and the novel The Sleeping World (Touchstone-Simon & Schuster, 2016). She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay Artists in Residency, Yaddo, the Millay Colony, Lighthouse Works, and the Blue Mountain Center. Her work has appeared in New England Review, The Common, One Story, Cosmonauts Avenue, Slice, Pank, NANO Fiction, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Brown University, an MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia. She grew up in a Cuban-Irish-American family in Wisconsin. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland where she teaches creative writing and Latinx literature

Exclusive Excerpt: Charlie Hernández & the Golden Dooms by Ryan Calejo

Inspired by Hispanic folklore, legends, and myths from the Iberian Peninsula and Central and South America, this third book in the Charlie Hernández series follows Charlie as he fights against an army of the dead.

After hitchhiking across Central and South America to rescue the Witch Queen and face off against La Mano Peluda, Charlie Hernández is pretty much grounded for life. But after all he's been through, some quiet time at home with his parents might be nice. Though it would be better if he didn't have to share his room with his obnoxiously perfect cousin Raúl, who's staying with them.

But quiet is hard to come by when you're the fifth and final morphling, and it's not long before death walks back into Charlie's life. Or at least, the dead do, starting with a mysterious young calaca who corners him at school, dropping cryptic hints about trouble brewing in the 305. With the League of Shadows focused on repairing fractured alliances and tracking gathering armies, this one's up to Charlie to solve.

Following the clues only leads to more questions, and not even teenage investigative journalist extraordinaire Violet Rey can figure out how a sudden rooster infestation, earthquakes, missing persons, and a pet-napping gang of lizard-men--whom Charlie doesn't recognize from any legend--are all connected. Most concerning of all is when they learn a map has been stolen that reveals the locations of the Golden Dooms, the twelve ancient calaca watchmen who form the magical barrier between the realms.

To stop the impending invasion, Charlie and Violet must outwit an ancient evil and unravel the most sinister of schemes. That is, unless they'd rather watch the Land of the Living get overrun by the dead.

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Exclusive excerpt from Charlie Hernández & the Golden Dooms:

V and I stashed our bikes between the pair of big, stinky, rusted-out dumpsters at the corner, and then all three of us slipped into the trees, edging our way through saw grass and shadows until we were about twenty yards from the back of Pierre’s. A large green cargo truck with a canvas top and huge mud tires was backed up maybe five yards from the small loading bay door. The suspicious-looking dude we’d seen inside the shop was helping two other suspicious-looking dudes (these with a little less neck and a lot more hair) load something like boxes into the rear of the truck. Thick black cloths were draped over the boxes, which made it impossible to tell what they were or what was inside. The whole thing practically screamed ILLEGAL ACTIVITY UNDERWAY— AVERT YOUR EYES! 

“We have to get a closer look,” Violet whispered. And so we crouched in the tall grass, swatting at mosquitoes and moths, waiting for the three dudes to finish. 

When they finally did and had disappeared back into the store, we snuck up alongside the truck—on the opposite side—then quickly climbed into the back. The canvas curtains were so thick that they blocked out every scrap of moonlight, but Violet already had her phone out, the harsh white cone of her flashlight app illuminating the boxes we’d watched them load in. There were about ten of them, stacked two high and five deep. But the weirdest part? They seemed to be making the strangest sounds: I could just make out faint panting and sniffing, and some small, soft scratching sounds. 

“What do you think’s in ’em?” asked Raúl, sounding very much the part of a soon-to-be victim in some scary movie. 

“Let’s find out,” answered Violet, sounding like the very first victim. But when she lifted one of the covers, all we could do was gape. 

“A . . . golden retriever?” whispered Raúl, frowning. 

“And a Russian blue,” said V, peeking underneath another. 

So we peeked under maybe five or six more, and that was exactly what we kept finding: more dogs and cats. (Oh, and a hamster the size of a turkey.) 

Raúl, his eyes all big and round and shiny, glanced up at me. “Can we keep one?” he whispered. 

“What? No. Well—” I glanced at Violet. “Maybe?” 

“They’re not ours to keep,” she said. “Check it out. . . . They’re all wearing collars. They’re all somebody’s pets.” 

“But why would those guys have so many pets?” I rasped. I mean, I’m a huge animal lover and all. In fact, I’m part animal. But geez . . . 

“I don’t think they do,” Violet said. “Look at the collars again. All different owners.” 

She was right. In the glow of her phone, I could see five different tags, and all five had different addresses and different phone numbers. 

“So, what, then?” I said. “They’re a petnapping ring posing as an antique shop? These people are sick!” Honestly, that was the only thing that made any sense to me. The question was: What could any of this possibly have to do with Esperanza’s sister? 

Next thing, Violet was opening one of the cages. A cat’s. Its collar read Kitty Purry in swirling golden letters. 

The blue-furred kitty blinked and its eyes sparkled, and it purred appreciatively as Violet brought it out of the cold shadows of the cage.

“Hey, what are you doing?” I whispered, and Violet said, “I know this address. . . .” 

I shook my head. “Whose is it?” 

“Not sure, but I’m positive I’ve seen it before. Like, onehundo.” The cat purred again, louder this time. And now I watched Violet’s lips pull down into a frown. “Where’s Raúl?” she hissed. 

“Huh?” I glanced left, right, left, spun all the way around, in fact—and realized my cousin had flat vanished on us. Like poof! “Where the heck did he go?”

Just then I heard a click. Somewhere close by, a door banged open. Then came the sound of voices. And then of footsteps—approaching footsteps! 

“Someone’s coming!” whispered Violet. “Go, go!” 

We hurried out the rear of the truck, climbing backward down the tailgate, and had barely started to turn around when we ran into something—or rather, someone. 

And, unfortunately, it wasn’t my cousin. . . . 

“Hello, snoopers,” a voice whispered by my ear.

I didn’t need to turn around. 

I recognized it. 

And I recognized it because I’d just heard it. 

Then Mr. Sospechoso—aka the suspicious weirdo from inside the shop—wrapped me up in his bulky arms, lifting me off my feet even as I kicked and twisted, trying to wiggle free. 

Next to me, one of the other goons we’d seen helping him grabbed Violet. She struggled and screamed, and the cat leapt from her arms with a loud meoooow! to scamper underneath the truck.

“VIOLET!” I shouted. Then, yanking one arm free, I twisted around, already rearing back to pop this petnapping punk square on the nose— 

Only what I saw when I finally got all the way around nearly made me swallow my tongue! (And a couple of teeth, too . . .) 

What I’d expected to see—duh—was a human face. But what I actually saw was something else entirely. Up close, the best (and kindest) way to describe it was humanish . . . except there was waaay more ish mixed in there than I was completely comfortable with. The skin on the sides of his face and under his chin was scaly, greenish, and bonedry, like a crocodile’s. His nose, which had just looked a little busted from across the shop, was, in fact, upturned, U-shaped, and rounded at the end, sort of like a shovel. A few long, crooked teeth (too big to be human, too sharp and serrated to be fake) stuck down over his lower lip, and I could hear this totally creepy, rattlesnake-like hiss rising from deep inside his throat. But the freakiest thing about him? No doubt about it, his eyes! They were greenish, yellowish, and black, with dark vertical slits for pupils. Those are the eyes of a reptile, I thought numbly. The eyes of a PREDATOR! 

Resisting the temptation to go all Little Red Riding Hood and shout, “GRANNY, WHAT FREAKY EYES YOU HAVE!” I swung my head around and saw that his buddy (the one who’d grabbed Violet) had the same weird skin and the same reptilian eyes! Call me thick, call me slow—call me whatever you wanna call me!—but it was slowly beginning to dawn on me that these guys weren’t exactly human . . .

Panic rose like a hot-air balloon in my throat. But not just because we were outmuscled, outarmed, and completely outsized. But because I didn’t have the slightest clue what the heck these things even were! When I was growing up, my abuelita had taught me hundreds, if not thousands, of myths from all over the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world. She’d taught me them in order to protect me, knowing that one day I’d probably run into a few. And it had worked, too. Her stories had saved my life more times than I’d ever admit. (Especially to my mom, because she freaks out about stuff like that . . .) But now, as I took a panicky nosedive into the ocean of my hippocampus, searching through murky memories for stories of croc people, of walking, talking alligator monsters, I came back up with a big fat nada burger. Nothing! Which of course begged the question: Had my grandma never heard of these things? Had she forgotten about them? Or—and maybe most concerning of all—had she not told me about them on purpose? 

“What are we gonna do with ’em?” asked one of the goons—er, croc things. ‘

“Exactly what Mr. C would want us to . . . ,” answered the croc thing currently squeezing me like his favorite stuffed teddy. “Make ’em disappear.”

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Ryan Calejo is the author of the Charlie Hernández series. He was born and raised in south Florida, where he graduated from the University of Miami with a BA. He teaches swimming to elementary school students, chess to middle school students, and writing to high school students. Having been born into a family of immigrants and growing up in the so-called “Capital of Latin America,” Ryan knows the importance of diversity in our communities and is passionate about writing books that children of all ethnicities can relate to.

Read A Chapter of The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina by Zoraida Córdova Now

Latinx in Publishing is pleased to exclusively reveal an excerpt from

CHAPTER ONE

The Woman and the House That  Had  Never  Been

For many mornings, there had been nothing but barren land. Then one day, there was a house, a woman, her husband, and a rooster. The Montoyas arrived in the town of Four Rivers in the middle of the night without fanfare or welcome wagons or cheesy, limp green bean dishes or flaky apple pies offered in an attempt to get to know the new neighbors. Though in truth, before their arrival, the townspeople had stopped paying much attention to who came and went anymore.

Finding Four Rivers on a map was nearly impossible, as the roads were still mostly gravel, and the memory of the place lived only in the minds of those who remained on purpose. Yes, there had been railroads once, great iron veins hammered into the rocky ground connecting the dusty heart of a country with an identity that changed depending on where lines were drawn.

If a traveler took a wrong turn on a highway, they used the Four Rivers gas station and old diner. When any visitor asked what four rivers intersected to give the town its name, the locals would scratch their heads and say something like, “Why, all the rivers have been dried out since 1892.”

Other than Garret’s Pump Station and the Sunshine diner— offering bottomless coffee for $1.25—Four Rivers could claim a population of 748 people, a farmer’s market, a stationery store, the world’s eighth largest meteor hole, the site of a mass dinosaur grave (which was debunked by furious paleontologists who had nothing nice to say in their journal about the prank pulled by the graduating class of ’87), the only video rental store for miles, Four Rivers High School (winners of the 1977 regional football championship), and the smallest post office in the country, which was the only thing preventing them from becoming a ghost town.

Four Rivers was special for reasons the living population had all but forgotten. It was, in the most general sense, magic-adjacent. There are locations all over the world where power is so concentrated that it becomes the meeting ground for good and evil. Call them nexuses. Call them lay lines. Call them Eden. Over the centu- ries, as Four Rivers lost its water sources, its magic faded, too, leaving only a weak pulse beneath its dry mountains and plains.

That pulse was enough.

In the dip of the valley where the four rivers had once intersected, Orquídea Montoya built her house in 1960.

“Built” was a bit of a stretch since the house appeared as if from the ether. No one was there when the skeletal foundation was laid or the shutters were screwed in, and not a single local could remem- ber having seen tractors and bulldozers or construction workers. But there it was. Five bedrooms, an open living room with a fireplace, two and a half bathrooms, a kitchen with well-loved appliances, and a wraparound porch with a little swing where Orquídea could watch the land around her change. The most ordinary part of that house was the attic, which only contained the things the Montoyas no longer had use for—and Orquídea’s troubles. The entire place would become the thing of nightmares and ghost stories for the people who drove to the top of the hill, on the only road in or out, and stopped, watching and waiting for a peek at the strange family living within. Once they realized they had a new permanent neighbor, the people of Four Rivers decided to start paying attention again to who came and went.

Who exactly were these Montoyas? Where did they come from? Why don’t they come to mass? And who, in God’s grasshopper- green earth, painted their shutters such a dark color?

Orquídea’s favorite color was the blue of twilight—just light enough that the sky no longer appeared black, but before pinks and purples bled into it. She thought that color captured the moment the world held its breath, and she’d been holding hers for a long time. That was the blue that accented the shutters and the large front door. A few months after her arrival, on her first venture into town to buy a car, she learned that all the ranch-style houses were painted in tame, watery pastels.

Nothing about Orquídea’s house was accidental. She’d dreamt of a place of her very own since she’d been a little girl, and when she’d finally acquired it, the most important things were the colors and the protections. For someone like Orquídea Divina Montoya, who had attained everything through stubborn will and a bit of thievery, it was not just important to protect it, but to hold on to it. That is why every windowpane and every door had a gold laurel leaf pressed seamlessly into the surface. Not just to keep the magic in, but to keep danger out.

Orquídea had carried her house with her for so long—in her heart, in her pockets, in her suitcase, and when it couldn’t fit, in her thoughts. She carried that house in the search for a place with a pulse of magic to anchor it.

In total, Orquídea and her second husband had journeyed for 4,898 miles, give or take a few. Some by carriage, some by ship, some by rail, and the last twenty solidly on foot. By the time she was done traveling, the wanderlust in her veins had dried up. Eventually she’d have children and grandchildren, and she’d see the rest of the world on the glossy postcards that covered the entire refrigerator. Like some, for her one pilgrimage was enough. She didn’t need to measure her worth by collecting passport stamps and learn- ing half a dozen languages. Those were dreams for a girl left behind, one who had seen the pitch-black of the seamless sea and who had once stood at the center of the world. She’d lived a hundred lives in different ways, but no one—not her five husbands or her descendants—really knew her. Not in the way you can know someone, down to their bones, down to the secrets that can only be augured in bloody guts.

What was there to know?

Five foot one. Brown skin. Black hair. Blackest eyes. Orquídea Montoya was untethered to the world by fate. The two most important moments of her life had been predetermined by the stars. First, her birth. And second, the day she stole her fortune.

Her birthplace was a small neighborhood in the coastal city of Guayaquil, Ecuador. People think they know about misfortune and bad luck. But there was being unlucky—like when you tripped over your shoelaces or dropped a five-dollar bill in the subway or ran into your ex when you were wearing three-day-old sweatpants—then there was the kind of bad luck that Orquídea had. Bad luck woven into the birthmarks that dotted her shoulders and chest like constellations. Bad luck that felt like the petty vengeance of a long-forgotten god. Her mother, Isabela Montoya, had blamed her sin first and the stars second. The latter was true in more ways than one.

Orquídea was born during a time when the planets converged to create the singularly worst luck a person could ask for, a cosmic debt that was not her fault, and yet fate was coming to collect like a bookie. It was May 14, three minutes to midnight, when Orquídea chose to kick herself out of the womb before getting stuck halfway, as if she knew the world was not a safe place. Every nurse and doc- tor on shift rushed to help the lonely, young mother. At 12:02 a.m. on May 15, the baby was finally yanked out, half dead, with her umbilical cord wrapped around her little neck. The old nurse on shift remarked how the poor girl would lead an indecisive life—a foot here and the other there. Half present and half gone. Unfinished.

When she left Ecuador for good, she learned how to leave pieces of herself behind. Pieces that her descendants would one day try to collect to put her back together.

It took twenty years and two husbands, but Orquídea Divina made it to the United States. Despite having been born on a cosmic convergence of bad luck, Orquídea had discovered a loophole. But that’s to come later in her story.

This is about the woman and the house that had never been— until one day, they were undeniably there.

On their first morning in Four Rivers, Orquídea and her husband opened all the windows and doors. The house had been enchanted to anticipate all of their needs and provided them with the basics to get them started: bags of seeds, rice, flour, and salt, and a barrel of olive oil.

They’d need to plant right away. However, the ground surrounding the property was cracked, solid rock. Some locals said the fissures in the ground were so deep, you could drop a penny straight to hell. No matter how much it rained in Four Rivers, it was like the clouds purposely neglected the valley where their house now stood. But that didn’t matter. Orquídea was used to making something out of nothing. That was part of her bargain, her power.

The first thing she did was cover the floors in sea salt. She poured it between the floorboards, into the natural grooves and whorls in 

the wood. She crushed thyme, rosemary, rosehips, and dried lemon peels, scattering them into the mix. Then she swept it all out the front and back doors. It was magic she’d learned on her travels— a way to purify. She used the oil to restore the shine of the wood floors, and then to make the first breakfast she and her husband would have in their new home—fried eggs. She sprinkled fat crys- tals of salt over them, too, cooking the white edges until perfectly crisp, the yolks so bright they looked like twin suns. She could savor the promise of what was to come.

Decades later, before the end of her days, she would recall the taste of those eggs as if she’d just finished eating them.

The house at Four Rivers saw the birth of each one of Orquídea’s six children and five grandchildren—as well as the death of four husbands and one daughter. It was her protection from a world she didn’t know how to be a part of.

Once—and only once—did the neighbors arrive with shotguns and pitchforks trying to scare away the witch who lived in the cen- ter of the valley. After all, only magic could explain what Orquídea Divina Montoya had created.

Within their first month there, the dry bedrock had sprouted spindly grass. They grew in prepubescent patches at first, and then blanketed the earth. Orquídea had walked every inch of her prop- erty, singing and talking, sprinkling seeds, coaxing and daring them to take root. Then, the hills around them softened with wildflowers. The rain returned. It rained for days and then weeks, and when it stopped, there was a small lake behind the house. Animals returned to the area, too. Frogs leaped across mossy rocks and lily pads floating across the surface. Iridescent larvae hatched thousands of fish. Even deer wandered down from the hills to see what all the fuss was about. Of course, the shotguns and pitchforks didn’t work. The mob barely got halfway down the hill before the land reacted. Mosquitoes swarmed, ravens circled overhead, the grass grew tiny thorns that drew blood. Discouraged, they turned around and went instead to the sheriff. He would run the witch out of their small town.

Sheriff David Palladino was the first Four Rivers local to introduce himself intentionally to Orquídea. And though they would go on to have an amiable relationship, which consisted of his keeping her grounds clear of nosy neighbors and her providing a daily hair- restoring tonic, there was a brief moment during their first encounter when Orquídea feared that, though she’d done everything right, she would have to go away.

Back then, Sheriff Palladino was twenty-three and on his first year of the job. He still had peach fuzz on his upper lip that wouldn’t grow and a full head of hair that made up for his too-wide nostrils, which let you see the tunnels of his nasal passages. His bright blue eyes gave him the effect of an owl, not wise but scared, which wasn’t good for the job. He’d never made a collar, because in Four Rivers there was no crime. The only murder on record would happen in 1965, when a truck driver would be found gutted on the side of the road. The killer was never caught. Even the fifty-year feud between the Roscoes and Davidsons was resolved just before he took up the seat of Sheriff. If the last Sheriff hadn’t died of an aneurysm on his desk at the age of eighty-seven, Palladino might still be a deputy.

After days of pressure from the townsfolk to find out about the newcomers (Who were these people? Where were their land deeds, their papers, their passports?), Palladino drove down the single dusty road that led to the strange house in the valley. When he arrived, he could hardly believe what he was looking at.

As a kid, he’d ridden bikes with his friends, shredding their shins on the bare rocks. Now, he inhaled the dark, freshly turned earth and grass. If he closed his eyes, he’d think he was far away from Four Rivers, and in some verdant, distant grove. But when he opened them, he was inarguably in front of the house owned by Orquídea Divina Montoya. He lifted his wide-brimmed hat to scratch his wheat-blond hair, matted at the temples in worm-like curls. As he rapped his knuckles against the door, he noticed the way the laurel leaves on the wood shimmered.

Orquídea answered, lingering at the threshold. She was younger than he’d expected, perhaps twenty years old. But there was something about her nearly black eyes that spoke of knowing too much too soon.

“Hi, ma’am,” he said, then stumbled on his clumsy tongue. “Miss. I’m Sheriff Palladino. There’s been some coyote sightings around the area, killing off livestock, and even poor Mrs. Livingston’s pure- bred hypoallergenic poodle. Just wanted to swing by and introduce myself and make sure y’all are all right.”

“No coyotes that we’ve seen,” Orquídea said in a crisp, regionless English. “I thought you might be here about the mob that tried to visit me a week ago.”

He blushed and lowered his head in shame at being caught lying. Although the story about coyotes was mostly true. Among the com- plaints he’d received was that the new Mexican family were witches who used coyotes as familiars. Another call had said that the dried- up valley no one ever went to except for vagrants and vagabond youths looking to skip school was being changed and they couldn’t have that. Four Rivers didn’t change. Palladino couldn’t understand why anyone would be opposed to change that looked like this—fresh and strong and vibrant. Life where there was nothing before. It was a goddamn miracle, but he had to do his duty by the townspeople he was sworn to protect. Which brought him to the next complaint. Illegals, a woman had whispered on the phone before hanging up. The family in the valley had shown up in the middle of the night, after all. Land was not supposed to be free. It had to be owned by someone—a person or the government. How had it gone for so long without being claimed?

“Would you like some coffee?” Orquídea asked with a smile that left him a little dizzy.

He’d been raised to never refuse a kind, neighborly gesture, and so he accepted. Palladino tipped his hat, then cradled it against his chest as he entered the house. “Thank you, miss.”

“Orquídea Divina Montoya,” she said. “But you can call me Orquídea just fine.”

“I studied Spanish at the community college. That means ‘or- chid’ right?”

“Very good, Sheriff.”

She stepped aside. A young woman about half his height, yet somehow, she felt as tall as the wooden beams above. She looked at his feet, watching carefully as he stepped over the threshold. He couldn’t have been sure, but it looked like she was waiting to see, not if he would enter, but if he physically could. Her shoulders relaxed, but her dark eyes remained wary.

As tall as he was, he felt himself shrink to put her at ease. Even left his gun in his glove compartment.

For the most part, David Palladino was like every other citizen of Four Rivers who’d never left. He didn’t need to be anywhere else, didn’t want to go. Before he found his purpose as a police officer, most days he was happy to get out of bed and get through the day. He believed in the goodness of people and that his grandmother’s soup could cure just about any injury. But magic? The kind that people were accusing Orquídea of? He chalked it up to old folks with dregs of lost myths stuck under their tongues. Magic was for the nickel machines at the summer carnival.

But he couldn’t deny that when he entered Orquídea’s home, he felt something, though he couldn’t truly name the exact sensation. Comfort? Warmth? As she led him through a hall filled with family portraits, he ignored the feeling. The wallpaper had been sunkissed and the floors, though shining and smelling of lemon rind, were scuffed. There was an altar on a table in the foyer. Dozens of candles were melting, some faster than others, as if racing to get to the bottom of the wick. Bowls of fruit and coffee beans and salt were front and center. He knew some of the folks from the Mexican community nearby had similar reliquaries and statuettes of the Virgin Mary and half a dozen saints he couldn’t name. He sat through every Sunday mass, but he’d stopped listening a long time ago. His grandmother had been Catholic. His memory of her had faded but, standing in the Montoya house, thoughts of her slammed into him. He remembered a woman nearly doubled over with age, but still strong enough to roll a pin across the table to make fresh pasta on Sundays. He hadn’t thought of her in nearly fifteen years. The scent of rosemary that clung to her salt white hair, and the way she wagged her finger at him and said, “Be careful, my David, be careful of this world.” Ram- blings of an old woman, but she was more than that. She’d watched him while his mother was sick and his father was breaking his bones at the mill. She’d prayed for his soul and his health, and he’d loved her infinitely for so long. So why didn’t he think of her anymore?

“Are you well, Sheriff?” Orquídea had asked, glancing back at him. She waited for his reaction, but he wasn’t sure what it was he should say.

He realized that he was still standing in front of the altar, and his cheeks were wet. His pulse was a frantic thing at his throat and wrists. He pressed his lips together and did his best impression of politeness.

“I’m peachy.” He wasn’t sure if he was, but he shook the emotion out of himself.

“Make yourself at home. I’ll be right back.” Orquídea went into the kitchen and he heard the water running. He sat in the large dining room, the barest part of the house. No wallpaper or decorations. No drapes or flowers. There were stacks of papers out on a banquet table fit for a dozen people.

Now, he wasn’t trying to pry. He believed in the rights of the people of his township, his small corner in the heart of the country. But the papers were right there inside an open wooden box. The kind his mother had once used to store old photographs and letters from her father during the war. From his cursory glance, he recognized a land deed and bank records with her name on it. Orquídea Divina Montoya. Part of him was bewildered that it was all here in plain sight. Had she been putting everything away? Had she known he would come? How could she? It didn’t make a lick of sense. But there was the proof in front of him. Documents that could not easily be forged. He was relieved. He could tell the very concerned citizens of Four Rivers that there was nothing out of the ordinary about the house and its inhabitants except—well, other than that they had appeared out of nowhere. Had they? The valley had been abandoned for so long. Maybe no one in Four Rivers had been paying attention, like the time a highway sprung up where there hadn’t been one be- fore. Surely there was no harm done here.

“How do you take your coffee?” Orquídea asked as she walked into the dining room clutching a wooden tray offering two cups of coffee, milk in a small glass jar, and a bowl of brown sugar.

He drummed his long, thin fingers on the table. “Plenty of milk and plenty of sugar.”

They smiled at each other. Something like understanding passed between them. Neither of them wanted any trouble, he was sure of it. So, they talked about the weather. About Orquídea’s distant family, who had passed the house down to her. He didn’t remember any Montoyas from Ecuador around these parts. He wasn’t sure where Ecuador was, if he was being truly honest with himself. But then again, it was possible that he didn’t know everyone. Perhaps the world was bigger than he thought. It had to be. It certainly felt that way while he sat there drinking her strong coffee. Coffee so rich that it made him stop and sigh. It was not possible but somehow, he could taste the earth where it had been cultivated. When he smacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, he tasted the minerals in the water that helped the plant grow. He could feel the shade of the banana and orange trees that gave the beans their aroma. It shouldn’t have been possible, but he was only learning the beginning of it all.

“How did you do all of this?” he asked, setting the cup down. There was a chip on the side of the roses painted against the white porcelain.

“Do what?”

“Make coffee taste like this.”

She blinked long lashes and sighed. Afternoon light gilded her soft brown skin. “I’m biased, but the best coffee in the world is from my country.”

“I say you’ll be sorely disappointed if you stop by the diner. Don’t tell Claudia that. But the pie is to die for. Have you had pie? Is your husband home?” He knew he was rambling, so he drank his sweet coffee to quiet himself.

“He’s out back, gardening.” She sat at the head of the table, resting her chin on her wrist. “I know why you’re really here. I know what they say about me.”

“Don’t listen to them. You don’t look like a witch to me.”

“What if I told you I was?” Orquídea asked, stirring a clump of sugar into her cup. Her smile was sincere, sweet.

Embarrassed, he looked down at the dregs of his pale coffee, when a birdsong called his attention. There were blue jays at the window- sill. He hadn’t seen one of those around these parts—maybe ever. Wondrous. Who was he to judge that? To judge her. He’d sworn to protect the people of Four Rivers, and that included Orquídea.

“Then I’d say you make a bewitching cup o’ joe.”

They shared a laugh, and finished their coffee in a comfortable silence, listening to the creaking sounds of the house and the return of birds. It wouldn’t be the last time that the surrounding neighbors tried to question Orquídea’s right to take up space on that land, but that coffee and those papers would buy her a few years at least. She had traveled too far and done too many things to get where she was. The house was hers. Born from her power, her sacrifice.

Fifty-five years after Sheriff Palladino came to call, she’d sit at the same table, with the same porcelain cup, stirring the same silverspoon to cut the bitter out of her black coffee. But this time her stationery would be out, crisp egg-shell paper and ink she made herself. She’d send out letters to every single one of her living relatives that ended with: “I am dying. Come and collect your inheritance.” But that is yet to come.

As Orquídea walked the young man to the door, she asked, “Is everything in order, Sheriff Palladino?”

“Far as I can see,” the Sheriff said, returning his hat to his head. She watched his car amble up the road and didn’t go back inside until he was gone. A strong breeze enveloped her, hard enough to make the laurel leaves on her doors and windows flutter. Someone out there was searching for her. She felt it only for a moment, but she doubled the protection charms on the house, the candles on her altar, the salt in the grain.

There would come a time when her past caught up to her and Orquídea’s debt to the universe would be collected. But first, she had a long life to live.

Used with permission from . Copyright (c) Zoraida Córdova, 2021.

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