What does magic look like? Praying to God and getting a reply? A coyote’s tooth falling out of a woman’s mouth? Perhaps a time-traveling ancestor, or a formless “energy that enters you and uses you”? In Luis Jaramillo’s supernatural family saga, “The Witches of El Paso,” it is all of the above. But no matter what form it takes, “magic always complicates,” the novel’s heroine, Elena “Nena” Eduviges Montoya, says.
When the book opens, Nena is in her 90s, living in present-day El Paso and being cared for by her grandniece, Marta. Both are struggling. Marta is a lawyer toiling to keep her legal aid nonprofit afloat while looking after her family. Nena, meanwhile, seems to be floundering in her old age, causing Marta to debate whether to put her in a care facility.
Then Marta’s reality begins to shift, ladybugs start following her and she begins to hear a humming in her ear. Nena knows what this is: La Vista, a mystic presence that thrums around them, and she believes it’s a sign.
Chapters alternate between Marta’s present and Nena’s past, where we follow Nena as she first experiences La Vista in the early 20th century. Her magic initially comes in the form of dark premonitions that she hopes to use to help her financially distressed family, but she struggles to harness her power and accidentally causes a disaster instead. Then one fateful night in 1943, she prays in desperation and everything changes. “I called for help, and the witches came.”
The first witch, or bruja, she meets is Sister Benedicta, who appears in her backyard and transports her to an aquelarre, or coven, full of La Vista-channeling nuns in 1792 El Paso del Norte, then part of colonial Mexico. To return home, Nena must be trained to master her baffling gift.
We know that Nena somehow makes it back to 1943. But present-day Nena reveals that while on “the other side,” she gave birth to a baby, Rosa, and she needs Marta’s help to pull her from the past.
If this all sounds like a lot, it is.
Though the mystery of Rosa does eventually unfurl, it feels like a thin, ultimately unsatisfying device to connect timelines. A threat of sexual violence also lingers across time; a shadowy priest here, a predatory landlord there.
Much like La Vista, the overarching narrative is so unwieldy that few of its sky-high ideas manage to land. One encanto, as the spells of La Vista are called, shows Nena “the way that foxes see the world.” The next moment, she understands that light is “energy in the form of waves.” She becomes a bird, then a mouse, then a flea, then a germ. Marta is overcome with La Vista and hears “vibrations from the past” while eating a burrito.
These visions, though gorgeous, collide in fitful sentences and meandering motifs, as if Jaramillo has more sheer imagination than he knows what to do with. His writing is daring and cinematic, and Spanish language woven throughout emphasizes a rich backdrop of Mexican folklore, but various plot threads, like an outbreak of smallpox and Marta’s work on a sexual harassment case, struggle to have much impact as timelines and perspectives leap.
Chapters in the El Paso del Norte convent feel the most alive, reading like a soulful historical fantasy about a sisterhood in crisis. I wanted to linger in that world for as long as possible.
A befuddling last-minute twist breaks the novel’s spell for good. Ultimately, “The Witches of El Paso” wields the same blessing and curse as La Vista itself: “The energy goes where it wants,” Nena says. By the end, the magic dissipates back to a faint humming in the ear.
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