THE WITCHES OF EL PASO

A busy El Paso lawyer embarks on a supernatural journey when she uncovers a startling truth about her great-aunt.

In 1943, Elena Eduviges Montoya, called “Nena” by her family, resigns herself to serving her older sisters as a housemaid and nanny while World War II rages, “biding her time until the Germans attacked.” But one sweltering afternoon, Nena has a vision foretelling the death of their landlord, and that night she receives a midnight visit from black-clad Sister Benedicta de la Cruz, who transports her to 1792—when El Paso del Norte was still part of New Spain—and leads her to a strange convent, where the nuns are likewise afflicted by visions. Nena learns she must remain in this enchanted realm in order to undertake training to channel “La Vista,” that part of God that comprises nature and chaos, before she can return home. Fast forward to the present day, and Nena’s great-niece, Marta, juggles her roles as a lawyer at a struggling firm, a mother to two boys, and a wife stuck in a humdrum marriage. All this gets turned upside down when an alarming kitchen incident involving the elderly Nena, burned rice, and handsome firemen brings Nena to live with Marta’s family. After Marta has an unnerving experience with seemingly supernatural soot (“when she opens her eyes again, the wall continues to blink, soot there, soot gone”), Nena comes clean about a secret she’s kept for a lifetime: She gave birth to a baby, Rosa, during her time on “the other side.” The revelation sets the women on a path to recover Rosa from the shadowy realm of El Paso del Norte. Alternating chapters between Nena’s past and Marta’s present, Jaramillo braids the storylines together like a mal de ojo bracelet, seamlessly weaving in Spanish language terms and Mexican cultural touchstones such as pozole, rebozo, and el aquelarre. Jaramillo’s atmospheric prose conjures the dusty El Paso of the past, and depictions of La Vista vibrate with “colorful knots of waves,” glowing indigo, maroon, and bright pink, yielding “a wild spell, like yeast in the air.” This riveting page-turner affirms the adage, “Family stories teach us how to live. Family secrets teach us to kill parts of ourselves.”

Gripping and cinematic, the novel’s worlds of El Paso past and present will bewitch and enrapture.