Luis Jaramillo’s novel The Witches of El Paso is rich, captivating, propulsive. Jaramillo has created a complex world that asks the reader from the very beginning to open their eyes to magic, to greater possibilities in our lives. Through two alternating timelines, Jaramillo introduces us to present-day Marta, an overworked attorney and mother who has been recently tasked with taking care of her great-aunt Nena in present-day El Paso. When Nena burns a mysterious hole in her kitchen, Marta wonders if it’s finally time to put Nena in a home for the elderly. No, Nena insists. She will never be put in a home again. What is Nena talking about, Marta wonders? It is only through Nena’s storyline, beginning in 1943 El Paso, Texas and traversing borders of time and space to colonial Mexico in 1792, that we learn of Nena’s magical, witchy youth, as well as the people she has left behind.
Jaramillo deftly alternates between present-day Marta and past-Nena, weaving a tantalizing story about the permeability of borders—both physical and otherworldly—as well as the force of family, love, land, legacy, and home.
I corresponded with Jaramillo over the course of a few days about what called him to write about witches, El Paso, family, and the presence of magic-making in our world.
Crystal Hana Kim: In The Witches of El Paso, Marta and Nena are given the powers of La Vista, which could be described as visions or simply, magic. These women, similarly, could be described in many terms—bruja, curandera, mystic, clarividente, guide—but you chose ‘witch.’ How did this title come to you?
Luis Jaramillo: “Witch” is a word that provokes a response. When I told people I was writing about witches, I heard many variations on the question, “And these witches aren’t in Salem?” Throughout the novel, characters insist that they are not witches. “Witch” is a term that, until relatively recently, has been placed on women who were healers, midwives, brewers of beer, or even just women living their lives, while those in power used unjust laws to keep them in their places. El Paso, in the popular mind—to be simplistic—is a border city inundated with immigrants, right next door to Juarez, a city torn apart by cartel violence. The title, I hope, sets up some expectations that the book both plays with and subverts. El Paso is actually one of the safest big cities in the US, and though Juarez has issues with violence, the residents of Juarez are proud of where they live, insisting that El Paso is boring, lacking in culture. The Witches of El Paso was a working title that stuck. The book is in fact about witches and El Paso, and I liked having two strong nouns butting up against each other.
CHK: Tell me about the writing process. Were there different iterations of the story?
LJ: There were so many versions of the story! Too many. When I began to write the book, I was most interested in telling stories about my grandmother and her sisters—I included some of these in the novel, like how my great-aunt Luz wanted to be a gangster’s moll when she was in high school. Even when she was old, Luz kept herself trim, her nails long and red. She wore tight dresses, also red in my memory, and she smoked in a way that looked fun. My grandmother was the eldest, the studious sister, and she seemed to know everyone in El Paso. While trying to figure out the plot, I wrote a deadly dull story about two children of El Paso, a U.S. Congressman and his cousin, a doctor accused of Medicare malpractice. Nothing was working until the character Nena appeared. She wasn’t modeled on anyone in my family, or anyone that I knew, but she arrived fully formed, with a voice and a lot of opinions. She was an old woman who didn’t want to lose her independence. She had a gift, able to see and talk to the dead, and she had a story to tell about what happened to her when she was young. If I ever felt like I was losing the thread, I made myself listen to what Nena had to say. The other main character in the story is Marta, a public interest lawyer and mother, who is facing down middle age. Initially, I had her begin an affair, but as I revised the book, I came to see that the central relationship is between Marta and Nena. The plot started to make sense to me once I fit them into a kind of love plot—two unalike people who grow closer together, and more truly themselves, as they find connections.
CHK: I love the way you describe La Vista throughout this book, as both “chaos and nature.” At first, both Marta and Nena thrill at their newfound power, the way it makes their bodies hum with music. They learn though, that La Vista has no moral center. It is power, undiluted. Where did the idea of this book, and its rootedness in magic, come from?
LJ: At first when Nena appeared, I was scared to really go for it with the magic. It seemed unserious, silly even, I guess because of how genre writing is so often seen as less-than. But growing up, books having to do with magic were basically all I read! As an adult, I’ve kept reading books of fantasy, magical realism, and other kinds of speculative works, and more and more I’ve felt that with certain topics realism doesn’t cut it, it’s too limiting, especially when a book is set in a place like El Paso. My dad’s side of the family has been in the region for hundreds of years, and there are old stories from Spain that are still told in the family that feature witches and fantastical creatures. In New Mexico, which shares a state border with El Paso, car license plates bear the motto “Land of Enchantment,” a tourism slogan, but also a phrase that communicates the beauty of the high desert, the harsh physical landscape that is a showcase of extremes. It’s amazing to be in the desert after a rain, when everything blooms at once. With the idea of magic, La Vista, I was also thinking about it as a metaphor for creativity, the force that exists in all of us. Like the creativity of sex and childbirth, but also the creativity of artmaking, especially writing. Anyone who writes knows that you have to be careful what you write about. Writing makes things happen.
CHK: What is your own relationship with magic?
LJ: I’m a deeply skeptical person, but at the same time, I know that there are things that can’t be easily explained. When I was writing the book, ladybugs kept showing up on the windowsill next to the couch where I write, even though I live on a high floor of an apartment building in a busy part of New York. I did a google search about ladybugs, and on a New Age website I read, “Ladybug’s medicine includes the golden strand that leads to the center of the universe, past lives, spiritual enlightenment, death and rebirth, renewal, regeneration, fearlessness, protection, good luck, wishes being fulfilled, protection.” This seemed a bit much, but I also wanted all of these things for the book and for myself, so the ladybugs went in the book. A few years ago, I started asking other writers the same question you’ve asked me, but in a more pointed way—I wanted to know if any other writers identified as witches. It turned out that quite a few of us take magic very seriously. One poet I know has a Santeria chapel in his basement. A memoirist told me the story of performing a spell that involved freezing a cow tongue. I wanted to write an essay about writers and witchcraft, but I ran into a roadblock: all of the writers who told me their stories said that I couldn’t use their names. The practice of magic is, it turns out, a private thing, and it’s this protective quality around magic that I wanted to write about in the novel. To admit to believing in and performing magic not only opens you up to ridicule or worse, it also interferes with the mystery. As writers, we don’t want to mess with the muses.
CHK: Going into the plot of the book a bit, you weave between present-day Marta, who is juggling a high-stress court case while beginning to experience visions for the first time, with Nena as she is time-travels from 1943 to 1742, where she learns to harness her powers in a convent and eventually, courts dangers and love. There’s a lot going on! I loved the way the ending ties these two narratives together—the final chapters made me cry. How did you work through the structure of this novel?
LJ: In the drafting, I usually worked on each timeline separately, making sure that the stories made sense without each other, so that when they were woven back together again, they vibrated next to each other, like they were in harmony. Like with any other thing I’ve ever written, I was trying to get to a central image, I don’t mean something visual exactly, but a feeling, a fundamentally indefinable state of being. As I revised, I alternately got farther away from and closer to the image that I wanted to share with the reader. Writing is always an act of translation, turning the language of the heart into English. The translation is never exactly right, which is frustrating, but also the reason I think I write, hunting for the words, sentences, and structures that communicate this image best.
CHK: You explore borders in many forms, from the tenuous edges of space and time to the man-made border between the United States and Mexico. Altogether, you examine the way we create boundaries in order to tell the stories of ourselves. Do you think about these lines—real and unreal—between us often?
LJ: I think all the time about how we can’t really know anyone else. When we’re reading a book, we feel very close to the characters, and it seems like we can see into their heads. A character has consistently clear motivations and desires. Humans are way messier. That said, even if we can’t know exactly what someone else is thinking, we know that we share the same basic emotions. It’s paradoxical that this similarity is what can also be frightening about other people—it’s hard for us to see everyone else as fully human as we are. You can see how this plays out with something like immigration. People who are afraid of immigrants have to dehumanize them. How bad would it have to be in your life to make you uproot yourself and take a dangerous journey with no guaranteed outcome? To identify with someone else is to admit the possibility that what has happened to them might happen to you. Reading can give us insights into lives we haven’t lived, but I don’t think that reading teaches us empathy, at least not on its own. I’ve known enough avid readers and gifted writers who are bad people.
CHK: Speaking of bad people, power, too, is a theme you seem very interested in. I’m thinking of this line: “Magic, or the idea of it, is a way for the powerless to imagine they can become powerful,” which is immediately contrasted with: “Marta knows where real power lives in this world, in money and blood.” How did you decide to root these questions of power in the characters of Nena and Marta?
LJ: I was thinking about big forces in this book, patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. Marta, because she’s born two generations after Nena has completely different opportunities open to her. It’s unfair how Nena’s circumstances, and the circumstances of her sisters, limit what they could do with their lives. Marta, because she has more power—she’s a lawyer, she grew up in a different era, she’s studied inequality and injustice—can see these forces in an abstract way. But Nena’s experience is much more visceral. She doesn’t have the language to talk about them, she just knows that there are forces even stronger than the structures created by humans. Nobody escapes death.
CHK: As a mother of two young children, I was drawn to your depictions of motherhood, especially the way you contrast the mundanity of parenting with the fear and love and incomprehensibility of legacy. Tell me about what family means to you.
LJ: I don’t have kids of my own, but I have nieces and nephews and godchildren, and I love being around kids. I remember being little, and being condescended to by adults, asked how old I was, what grade I was in, those dumb questions. Too often, in books and movies, children are depicted as cuteness-robots or monsters, with not much in between. But kids are just people, and, as you put it, there’s a lot of mundanity in parenting, just like there is at the office, or at school, or any other place where you have to be with other people for extended periods of time. But yes, I was thinking a lot about legacy and inheritance, where things come from and where they go. I’ve been lucky to have met a handful of babies the day they were born, and it’s incredible how there’s something there right away that is already them, and that as they grow up, that thing persists. What is that thing? What happens to it when we die? To get back to your question, one thing that I think about with family is that they are the people who have been the eyewitnesses to our lives, with all that implies. We know eyewitnesses are notoriously inaccurate in their recollections. But our families are the best we have. I always have an ear out for family stories.
CHK: El Paso is itself a character in the novel. From El Paso’s proximity to Juarez right across the border, to the history of colonialization and conquest of the land, to current-day deportations, I felt the ways in which these characters were made by this rich, complicated history. What drew you to set your novel in El Paso, Texas?
LJ: My dad grew up in El Paso. I lived there when I was in first grade, and every year growing up, we visited in the summer and during holidays from California. In El Paso, everyone seemed to be some sort of a cousin, related through blood, marriage, or friendship. It was exciting to be in a place surrounded by extended family, and I always wondered what it would have been like if we had stayed there. I have such strong memories of the place, of playing in the sand dunes, of the food, of the incredible heat of the summer, of the luminarias set on the granite walls at Christmastime. I remember the market in Juarez, and the huge tower of the ASARCO smelter. When I was a kid, the newspaper ran a daily graphic on the front page that showed how many days had passed without rain, sometimes many months. When I was visiting El Paso on research trips, I was shocked by how much I’d retained from my childhood. I also learned so much about the place that I never knew, way too much to include in the novel. One detail that I just had to squeeze in is that Fort Bliss, the big Army base in El Paso, is about the size of Rhode Island. The base extends from the outskirts of town to the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. White Sands is three times bigger than Rhode Island. There was something about this vastness that I wanted to capture in the novel.
CHK: Who were your literary inspirations for this novel?
LJ: I was for sure thinking about all of the YA fantasy and speculative fiction books I’ve read. I loved how Madeleine L’Engle had such strong characters, how she wrote about morality on a cosmic scale. In college, I took a class on Middle English that really affected my idea of storytelling. Sir Orfeo is a poem, a Breton lai to be exact, that retells the story of Orfeo and Eurydice, setting the events in England, where Orfeo is the king. His wife is abducted by a fairy king—the fairies are terrifying creatures—and after many trials, Orfeo is able to rescue her. Nena’s story is that of someone being taken away from home, returning with something fundamental changed about them. For Marta’s story, I was thinking about middle age and motherhood, and wishing I could be half the writer that Deborah Levy is. I was very far along in my process when I got to Lauren Groff’s Matrix about nuns in a medieval abbey, but boy do I love that book. I also read Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds after I turned in the book, but I saw in it so many of the Latin American authors who made me who I am as a writer, like Roberto Bolaño, Isabel Allende, and Jorge Luis Borges.