But every night, she and Néstor laid salt at the threshold. They had protected their home once, and would do so again.
Beyond the corral, beyond her house, the world slumbered. In time, winter would lessen its grip. Ice would melt from the springs that gave Los Ojuelos its name. Néstor would carve stones from the quarry for their casa de sillar; Nena would sink her hands into new soil behind the kitchen, planting seeds from Abuela’s herb garden.
And when the earth thawed, they would stand with shovels in hand on the land that he had bought. Together, they would break ground on the foundation of what would become their own house.
Perhaps, if they dug deep enough, they might find Spanish silver.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Flocks of vampires, in the guise of men, came and scattered themselves in the settlements . . . Many of you have been robbed of your property, incarcerated, chased, murdered, and hunted like wild beasts, because your labor was fruitful, and because your industry excited the wild avarice which led them.
—Juan Nepomuceno “Cheno” Cortina (1824–1894)
In the summer of 2021, I sat at my mother’s dining room table, leafing through the books she had used to write her master’s thesis. I had been fiddling with a novel idea involving vampires in nineteenth-century México, but I was dissatisfied. I fretted that the supernatural element felt shoehorned in. Then I came across this November 1859 proclamation by Juan Nepomuceno Cortina to the Mexican inhabitants of the state of Texas.
It reached up from the page and seized me by the throat.
Vampires. I was dumbstruck. 1859 was decades before the publications of Carmilla and Dracula took Europe by storm. Decades before Friedrich Engels wrote of the “vampire property-holding class” or Karl Marx’s repeated images of capital as a vampire. Decades and thousands of miles away.
And yet.
Vampires.
It burrowed under my skin. Vampires was what Cortina had chosen to call the Anglo settlers who stole the land, cattle, and even the lives of Mexicans living in what is now South Texas.
Why vampires?
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
VAMPIRES OF EL NORTE used to be a very different book. I was initially inspired by tales of tlahuelpuchis, or bloodsucking witches, but I began to wander toward an incarnation of the vampire that was more monstrous. More beastly. At the encouragement of my editor, the idea wound its way to South Texas, where my mother’s family has had roots for generations.
There, it bolted away from me.
Second books notoriously resist domestication. Editing Vampires of El Norte took its tithe of blood, sweat, and tears. Brainstorming and first drafting, however, was a wholly different experience: it felt like being swept away by a galloping horse. The characters chattered loudly in my head, their voices crisp and bright and effortless to pin to paper. The setting unfolded beneath my fingertips, settling into shape like a well-worn map. There were times I reflected that it felt like writing fan fiction. Times where I felt as if I were channeling a force beyond myself as I chased the colors of a Texas sunset or the smell of my grandparents’ backyard in the spring.
I think this is because I wrote this book for my family. For every time one of us has been asked variations of the question when did your family come to this country?
As a young person, I struggled to answer. My grandfather came to Texas in the 1940s, and my grandmother’s mother during the Mexican Revolution, but the rest of my grandmother’s family? The Rio Grande Valley is a pocket of the world where the border has moved more often than the people living there.
I have realized that the answer is, in fact, a question itself. A question that became the heart of this book.
When did this country come to us?
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
IN THE MIDDLE of revising Vampires of El Norte, I successfully defended my PhD dissertation. Seven years spent in the ivory tower means that I will always write with an historian’s eye, but I happily acknowledge that I now use history as the servant of story. I admit that elements of South Texas’s tumultuous 1830s and 1840s have had their edges buffed or reflections altered to best support a tale of romance and monsters that lurk in the dark.
That said, half the fun of historical fiction is weaving in the true details that make a place feel lived in. My mother and aunt helped plant the trees around Rancho Los Ojuelos. They darkened the skies with storms and filled the air with the sounds of cicadas and chachalacas and javelinas in the bush. But what about the clothes that people wore in the 1840s? What kind of food did they eat?
Texts that aided me greatly in this undertaking include “A Trip to Texas in 1828” by José María Sánchez, translated by Carlos E. Casta?eda; Tejano Empire: Life on the South Texas Ranchos by Andrés Tijerina, Their Lives, Their Wills: Women in the Borderlands, 1750–1846 by Amy M. Porter; and De León, a Tejano Family History by Ana Carolina Castillo Crimm. I often referred to discussions of susto and recovering from traumatic events in Woman Who Glows in the Dark: A Curandera Reveals Traditional Aztec Secrets of Physical and Spiritual Health by Elena Avila and Curanderismo Soul Retrieval: Ancient Shamanic Wisdom to Restore the Sacred Energy of the Soul by Erika Buenaflor. I encourage readers to seek out these and other texts written by Chicano and Tejano historians, curanderos, and folklorists.
I owe an incredible debt to the work of Jovita González, the oft overlooked Tejana folklorist. She is the author of Dew on the Thorn, Life Along the Border: A Landmark Tejana Thesis and the posthumously published Caballero, a monumental work of historical fiction that was deeply influential on early drafts of Vampires of El Norte. González’s The Woman Who Lost Her Soul and Other Stories is also where I first encountered tales of buried Spanish treasure and the trickster hero Pedro de Urdema?as.
Folklore and oral history played an important role in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century vaquero culture, and thus in Vampires of El Norte, but also in my own family. I will forever cherish the hours I have spent at my grandparents’ kitchen table, listening to them share stories of their childhoods and relatives. Because of them, my work is full of family legends and ghosts, the cadences of their jokes, and their musings on the past.
Their voices breathe between every sentence of this book. There will come a time when I no longer get to hear those voices, but it is my hope that they will echo forever in the imaginations and hearts of my readers.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wrote this book in New York City; Victoria, B.C.; Austin; Chicago; Paris; London; and while tucked away in the peaceful woods of Seabeck, Washington. I wrote it on planes and trains and ferries. I wrote it in between chapters of my PhD dissertation. I wrote it exhausted. I wrote it while sick. I wrote it while crying with frustration. On my aunt’s couch. On my mom’s couch. At my grandparents’ kitchen table. In my in-laws’ dining room. This book carried me from one chapter of my life into another, both of us kicking and screaming the whole way. I extend my most sincere and tearful thanks to the village who believed in this book long before I ever did.