When Luis Jaramillo set out to write his new book, “The Witches of El Paso,” he started with his dad’s side of the family.
“My dad’s family has lived in El Paso for many generations, hundreds of years. I was really looking at stories, especially about my grandmother and her sisters,” Jaramillo said. “They were a very colorful bunch.
My grandmother was the studious one, and she was very neat and very kind, whereas her younger sister was very… She wanted to be a gangster’s moll when she was in high school. So I was thinking about these very colorful women and trying to write a story about them.”
The story didn’t come together, however, until a new character entered the picture. Jaramillo said the protagonist Nena really helped him crystalize what the book would be about.
“Nena was somebody who could see, let’s say, people who have passed on and who had this ability and which was a gift and a curse at the same time,” he said. “There’s (also) a character named Marta in my book, and she’s a legal aid lawyer and she’s somebody who’s skeptical. And I wanted to pair her with Nena, this character, who is able to see, as I call it, ‘the other side,’ and who later in life charges people to be a medium and talk to people who have passed on. But Marta is a skeptic, and I wanted those two sides.”
Jaramillo said he picked the title to be purposefully evocative.
“I called the book ‘The Witches of El Paso’ for a couple of reasons. And one reason was because they’re both really strong terms, ‘El Paso’ and ‘witch,’” he said. “And ‘El Paso’ means something to people when you say it to them. In the news, El Paso’s a place often referenced in terms of immigration, and so people have very strong feelings about that. And the same thing is true for the word ‘witch.’
When I was writing the book, a lot of people asked me, ‘You’re not writing about witches in Salem?’ And I wanted to use the word ‘witch’ because of that kind of reaction, which is that we all have some image with the term ‘witch.’ I wanted to have a title where these two things are pushing up against each other.”
Jaramillo said one theme throughout the book is the idea of borders and what it takes to get across them.
“This is a book about borders. It’s a book about physical borders, and it’s also a book about metaphysical borders,” Jaramillo said. “So the border between life and death, especially at the borders between one stage of life and another stage of life.
I think there are, in some ways, three different coming-of-age stories in the book. And one element of a coming-of-age story is that someone has to pay to obtain the wisdom that they get from passing from one stage to another. And so I was really thinking about what does it mean to cross the border and what kind of things do you have to pay to move from one side to another?”
The “Witches of El Paso” will be featured at the Texas Book Festival in Austin during the weekend of Nov. 16 and 17.
