I felt invisible in my early life for many reasons including being brown and adopted. As an adoptee, I saw myself only in mirrors and photos. But being Chicana – born in the United States of Mexican Indigenous descent and with a life dedicated to social justice – I also didn’t see the people I knew, my friends and family members. We were all missing from books, movies and television shows. Our stories weren’t taught in classrooms and only rarely appeared in newspapers and then too often with a negative or stereotypical connotation. Even advertisements left us out. That absence inspired a desire in me to be present, to see not only the people I love honored and represented but all those peoples who have been marginalized and left out finally acknowledged with respect. That desire has become my passion.
We all know the Toni Morrison quote: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
My novel in progress, “500 Springs,” a history of the peoples of what has become the Southwestern United States told through a love story, is one of those books for me.
Summary
YALLI LOPEZ (36) was adopted at birth into a family on one side proud to claim lands granted by the king of Spain and probably stolen from Native ancestors and on the other so steeped in denial they eat tortillas but call themselves French. A single mom to two young boys, YALLI works in community affairs and just bought a dream home all on her own. She is convinced they need a man to make their family complete.
TACHO HUIZAR (33), an educated, professional Chicano who writes and reads literature in more than one language, keeps up with politics and listens to public radio, plus owns his own home and car and doesn’t have any baby mommas, finds YALLI online, two-hundred miles away. He is convinced he knows her, and not long after they meet in person, they admit to believing like so many other enamored couples that they have loved each other before, unaware of a promise that has linked them for some five-hundred springs.
Hints to their long history begin to appear when YALLI gets pregnant and gives up her house and career to move to the country. Their new old place sits on the Santa Fe Trail, just beyond the river that marked the northern border of Mexico only a couple of lifetimes ago, on land so close to the Sand Creek massacre site they find arrow heads on the property. She becomes for the first time a stay-at-home mom and he, for the first time, a father to two sons and then a daughter. On the lonesome prairie, demons emerge – as do the monsters of motherhood.
A new start proves challenging as soon as they drive off in the moving truck and find themselves homeless on the coast. Health insurance kicks in late, a business venture tears them apart and, finally, a farewell trip nearly costs them the one person holding them there.
Broke, jobless and fighting, they return to Denver, where a health crisis confirms what they’d been denying. They try every “cure” until a late-night reckoning leads YALLI to believe TACHO’S trauma lies deeper than they can reach – in a past that lives in his genes and not his memories. But how can that even be? And what would that mean to them in the present? As YALLI works to save him, she puts everything – including her career, their home and the children – on the line. She may lose it all – if the past determines their future.
500 Springs; A Novel. A history of the peoples of what has become the Southwestern United States told through a love story. Genre: Literary Fiction.