Luis Jaramillo on Creating a Multigenerational Speculative Story of the Borderlands

I highlighted Luis Jaramillo’s first book, the short story collection The Doctor’s Wife—a gathering of 91 ultra-short chapters, some as brief as a sentence, that add up to a portrait of a family—as a best book of 2012 for NPR. His first novel further reveals his wide-ranging literary talents. The Witches of El Paso is a luminous, seductive, at times surreal chronicle of the lives of several generations of women who inherit a mysterious gift. Through a literary form of time travel, Jaramillo’s own magical invention, their lives intersect in various incarnations of the shifting borderlands of El Paso and Juarez. Our email conversation between the West Coast and East Coast was followed by an in-person meeting for tea in New York City.

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Jane Ciabattari: How have these past years of Covid and conflict affected your life and work, your teaching, your time on the water, the writing and launch of The Witches of El Paso?

Luis Jaramillo: That’s a big question! When Covid hit, I was the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at The New School. Like a lot of other people, my work turned into long days of Zoom calls. Students, faculty, and staff were going through extraordinarily difficult times. I had a couple hundred people depending on me to be stable in a world that wasn’t. This made my regular writing schedule even more important—for many years I’ve gotten up every morning and written, no matter what.

Through the stages of the pandemic, I worked with my agent on several rounds of edits for The Witches of El Paso as we passed through the stages of Covid restrictions, and in the fall of 2022, I sold the book. One great thing about having a book under contract is that there are hard deadlines, and I love a due date. Tell me what to do and when you want it by, and I will make it happen.

Thanks for asking about sailing. It’s one of my big loves. After twenty years of not sailing, in 2018, I started sailing and volunteering with Hudson River Community Sailing, a nonprofit with boathouses in Chelsea and Inwood in New York. That first Covid summer, we wore masks on the water. After our sails, we sprayed down the boat with some sort of solution containing hydrogen peroxide. Baking under a mask in the humidity of August is a special experience that I never want to repeat.

The thing that I’ve always loved about the water—being in it, on it, or near it—is that it instantly changes your perspective. I live in Manhattan, which, as we all know intellectually, is an island. But it’s different to see it from the water, shrunk down to its proper size. We live on a planet that’s covered mostly in water. We are mostly made of water, and I take every chance I get to remind myself of that.

JC: When did you begin writing this novel, and what sparked its existence in your imagination?

LJ: I started writing the precursor to this novel in 2013, the year I began as the director at The New School. That was an overwhelming year work-wise. I didn’t write as much as I wanted to, but I chipped away at a novel that had at its core stories from my family in El Paso. I was thinking especially about my grandmother and her sisters, very spirited and vivacious women who had a lot to say, who never sat still. One working title was The Three Sisters of El Paso, but the Chekhov play only really lent me one thing, the name Olga, the grandmother of one of my main characters, Marta.

At the end of the year, I had written maybe a couple hundred pages when a new character emerged, Nena, who wasn’t based on any of my relatives. In her first scene, she throws open the door, scrapes the cream out of two Oreos with her teeth, and then peers into the bottom of a teacup, telling the future or the present, she’s not sure which. That summer, I was a fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Part of the deal was that an excerpt from my manuscript would be read by one of the faculty members. At the last minute, I threw in the scene with Nena, even though I was somewhat embarrassed by this character. I didn’t want to write about magic.

But at Sewanee, the novelist and short story writer Tony Early read my manuscript, and he said something like, “This is a mess, but here, this character, that’s where the story is.” He was right. Once I gave Nena my full attention, she started to tell a story about what it was like to live in World War II era El Paso, longing for something else, asking to be taken away. Like in most fairy tales, she gets what she wants, and this begins the trouble.

JC: El Paso has had many incarnations. In this novel you write of the contemporary city, home of Marta, a legal aid attorney and her great-aunt Nena (Elena Eduviges Montoya);  El Paso in the 1943, as World War II rages, when Nena is a teenager; and, after Nena has a vision that transports her back to 1792,  El Paso del Norte,  part of colonial Mexico/New Spain. How were you able to re-create these three historic moments? What ties do you have to El Paso? What sort of research was involved?

LJ: My dad’s side of the family has been in El Paso and in New Mexico for hundreds of years. I lived in El Paso when I was in first grade, and I visited every summer growing up. As a kid, I was fascinated by how different El Paso was from where I grew up in California. A border town is unlike any other kind of place, even other multi- or bi-cultural places. In El Paso and Juarez, people cross the border back and forth every day, for work, shopping, school, and entertainment. If you go back in history to before 1850, the current El Paso didn’t exist. El Paso del Norte was a Mexican city, and before Mexican Independence, it was part of the Spanish Empire.

In my book, I wasn’t trying to bore the reader with a bunch of history, but I had to educate myself on how the place came to be. I read a lot of books, I visited El Paso, and Juarez, and I went to New Mexico to do research on what Colonial Mexico would have been like. I was looking for the details that would make the place feel real, for example in an eighteenth-century traveler’s account of visiting El Paso del Norte, he notes that the sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe Cathedral was used for storage, and that pigeons roosted in the vigas.

JC: We first meet Nena at ninety-two, and learn her story through flashbacks.  In 1943, teenaged Nena, who has seen visions since she was twelve, hears a hum that buzzes in her ears, loud as the cicadas outside. She also begins to have ladybugs following her around. These are signs of an approaching otherworldly connection. Do humming and ladybugs figure in traditional stories of visions like Nena has?

LJ: At this point, I’m not sure what I absorbed and adapted from reading books about magic, and what came to me when I was writing. I wrote about ladybugs and magic for Lit Hub, telling the story of how I kept seeing ladybugs appear on the windowsill by the couch where I write, which was odd, since I live in a busy part of the city with very few trees. When I write, I’m a hoarder, shoving everything that comes my way into the book. I can’t exactly say where the humming came from, though I love reading stories about space, and the constant hum of gravitational waves.

JC: Nena hears someone calling her at 4 a.m. She goes outside, where she has another  vision—a woman who introduces herself as Sister Benedicta; together they time travel back to a 1792 nunnery. Was this element always part of your narrative? What inspired it?

LJ: I didn’t have a plan to make Nena move in time, and I didn’t know she would spend time in a convent. One morning while writing, I was in Nena’s dark garden. I heard the sounds of the creatures of the night, and I saw a strange woman in old-fashioned clothes that stunk of wood smoke and mold. I heard this woman’s imperious voice, and in that voice, in those clothes, was a whole story. Writing historical fiction worried me, but not more than writing about time travel. What was I doing telling this crazy story! I had to reassure myself that as long as the story worked, I could go wherever I wanted, I was writing fiction.

JC: Nena becomes part of an aquelarre, a secret group of nuns who are connecting to La Vista. La Vista is “Another word for God,” Madre Inocenta tells Nena. “La Vista is chaos and nature,” Sister Benedicta adds. “and if we don’t control it, to channel it we’ll be destroyed by it. La Vista is to be feared, not venerated.”  How did the vision of La Vista and its power to make change within this novel evolve?

LJ: I’m in a writing group with Alexander Chee, and one thing he said when he read an early draft was that “magic always complicates.” I repeat the line in the book. This idea made me really focus on how I was using magic, how it functioned in the plot, and how it worked in the world I was creating, but I had farther to go. My agent Kent Wolf pushed me to clarify what La Vista was. I’d thought of it as a force of nature, neither “good” or “bad,” but instead the power behind creation and destruction in nature. Maybe part of me resisted pinning it down. But as a reader, I always appreciate declarative sentences that clear up needless confusion.

JC: How were you able to capture life in that nunnery? And the characters! Sister Benedicta, Madre Inocenta. Eugenia. Sister Benedicta’s brother Emiliano and her father, Don Javier? How did you come up with Nena’s love connection with Emiliano? And La Vista as the intriguing magical connection between them?

LJ: In early drafts, the convent was only in backstory about Sister Benedicta, but the stories I was writing about the convent were too rich in detail and drama to leave out of the main plot. Even though I knew this was the right course to take, I felt very underequipped to write about a convent in the eighteenth century. One book was particularly helpful, Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico, which gave me details about the daily rituals of the convent. I hunted for any mention of witchcraft, and found some gems—a nun is convinced that she’s been cursed because she pees rotten thread. That was so disgusting and vivid I had to take use it.

A part of this book is a hot love story between Nena and Emiliano, a young man she meets in Colonial Mexico. There’s nothing like being young and falling in lust, with the predictable consequences, but like with the convent scenes, I needed to be able to see and smell the places these two lovers occupy. Visiting museums in New Mexico, where I could see objects from the eighteenth century arranged in rooms from that time, really helped me build out their world.

Before my research, I didn’t know that for hundreds of years there have been vineyards along the Rio Grande, irrigated by a network of ditches, acequias, that were originally built by Indians and the Spanish colonizers. There are still vineyards along the Rio Grande, right outside  of El Paso. Visiting the vineyard of my aunt’s friend in Anthony, New Mexico, I could imagine the place where Nena and Emiliano fall for each other. In the philosophy of the book, everyone has La Vista in them, the power of creation and destruction. Love is a manifestation of this drive to create at all costs.

JC: Nena’s story alternates with a contemporary plotline in which her grand-niece Marta  begins to show signs of her gift. These two become collaborators in a risky attempt to bridge the worlds and bring Nena’s daughter Rosa back into her life. The transitions into the magical realms are seamless. How did you arrive at this artful approach to a narrative based on the supernatural? 

LJ: I’m glad you think they were seamless! I’m a big believer in the power of smell to put you into a time and place. I used smell and the other senses to go from one world to the other. I think the best kind of speculative writing doesn’t call attention to itself, the world just is, the setting and circumstances told in simple detail. I usually edit like crazy, obsessing about sentences, words, but for some of the wildest scenes I wrote, very little changed from what I first put down. I think I learned how to stay out of the way, describing what was happening as I imagined it, no matter how weird. I certainly didn’t intend to write a book where someone coughs up a coyote’s tooth!

JC: Nena’s father, gassed in World War I, is a narrative conduit to their family’s past, telling young Nena stories of her ancestors. By taking Nena back to 1792, you sketch in multiple generations. Is this novel a portal of sorts, preserving  your own family’s past?

LJ: Absolutely. I suppose I could have written a memoir, but sometimes I don’t trust myself to write nonfiction. Or maybe I should say, it seems too limiting. I have too much of an urge to make things up, to smooth out the edges, to change a timeline to make a story snappier. But I did include a lot of real stories from my family’s history, even if I changed big and small details.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

LJ: I’m working on a novel set in Salinas, California, where I grew up. It’s about the birth of the lettuce industry. There’s a gay marriage plot. But since August, I’ve been cheating, sneaking off to work on a novel set in the Caribbean. There are sailboats, characters running away from their lives in New York, grifters, and rich vacationers. People die.

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The Witches of El Paso by Luis Jaramillo is available from Atria/Primero Sueno Press.