Malas

by Marcela Fuentes

Interview by Diane Slocum

After a strange, old woman appears, tragedies mar Pilar’s life. She is alone and scorned by her community on the Texas-Mexican border. Decades later, teenage Lulu is living in a strained relationship with her widowed father. Her grandmother is her refuge. One night Grandma dies suddenly and days later a mysterious woman appears at her funeral. Lulu is fascinated by her and is determined to learn more.

AUTHORLINK: What was your first idea for this story?

FUENTES: Malas began as my attempt to write a fairytale for a fairytales course during my MFA. The first thing that came to me was a young and very pregnant Pilar being confronted by an elderly woman claiming to be Jose Alfredo’s “real wife.” I was at Iowa at the time, buried in snow, which made me vividly recall the other extreme—the merciless heat of a south Texas summer, and the dreamlike quality of those still, hot afternoon, perfect for the apparition of this old woman in the street. But though I set out to write a villain, I ended up digging into a lot of vulnerability. I wrote about 40 pages, the opening to the novel, and didn’t turn in my fairytale after all because the story would not end. It went from a supernatural tale to being about the paranoia and insecurities of a woman about to give birth. Probably six months later, another big chunk came to me, in the form of Gen X teen Lulu running around at night, full of hurt and rage at her father. It wasn’t until I began writing an entirely new perspective, Lulu, that I realized the story was a lot bigger. I needed to figure out how these two characters were connected to each
other. Looking back, I think my inspiration came from the style of storytelling I’d heard all my life, a family or local history that might pass for folklore.

AUTHORLINK: Did you always plan to include chapters in Pilar’s point of view in the 1940s -50s and 1968, and Lulu’s in 1994-95? Also, by differentiating them by writing Pilar’s in third person and Lulu’s in first person?

FUENTES: The time period that came to me, as I wrote my first moment with Pilar, was definitely in the 1950s. I am very interested in the period before the civil rights movement in Texas, the history for Mexican and Tejanos, the strictures they dealt with, but also the strength and creativity of this community. Lulu came to me as a completely Gen X kid, and so I knew I had to connect the two somehow—luckily, I thought of music. Malas is a music novel too, and the 1950s is when
Tejano, like many genres of music, began to be influenced by rock n’ roll, which very much started the trajectory that led to the “Tejano Boom” of the 1990s, and Selena’s unique sound. The history of Tejano music is the history of this place. Lulu, as a teen, felt much more “first person” to me. I heard her outrage and bravado in her specific voice. Pilar felt a little more formal, a little more decorous, and so third person felt right for her.

AUTHORLINK: Your title Malas refers to “bad women.” How does that apply to your characters?

FUENTES: Anytime a woman is bold, combative, or living her truth outside of whatever social expectations we have on them, they will be criticized for not being good women. There’s always that idea of women being bad if they aren’t conforming. Even the idea of “a good woman” is invariably someone who complies with putting her needs last and serving others (probably her husband). And that’s fine, if that’s what she wants to do. Lulu and Pili are messy, uncompromising characters, and terrible as they are, they are living their own truths. I think we could all be a bit bad in our own lives. We’d get what we want more often.

AUTHORLINK: The style of Lulu’s narration is often as if she is talking to us about whatever is on her mind. Just one example is when she explains One day Marina and I will be comadres. Your comadre is your ride or die. Can you tell about using that technique?

FUENTES: It is a very first-person style of talking to the reader. There are certainly first-person narrators who don’t “talk” to the reader, but Lulu does. It’s very much a teenage trope. Teens are always letting you know they know way more than anyone else. I also decided to use this technique to have her give the reader the lowdown on the social norms and hierarchies of the place, and even the cultural context (such as comadres), to provide cultural legibility without getting too bogged
down in historical or anthropological lessons.

AUTHORLINK: Music is an important part of your story. What did you do to incorporate it there? How does it resonate with you?

FUENTES: I love music and its ability to unify different people and generations. It’s also such a great artifact of time and place, a wonderful thing for memory and precise moments in history. As well, music is the voice of the people and social activism, a call to rebel, especially for both Lulu and her father. I wanted to showcase the music of the region and of the times as part of the richness of the culture.

AUTHORLINK: How was the setting along the Texas- Mexico border and the people who live .there something you wanted to explore in the story and let people learn about?

FUENTES: I wanted to give representation to a region that is highly politicized, and yet, often is represented without much nuance and complexity. This is rich cultural community, both sides of the border, which exists in a both and neither space. There are so many economic, colonial, and racialized hierarchies within this community, historical policies that continue to impact the region. Lulu articulates her limited awareness of these distinctions. It started back in 1848, with the Treaty of Hidalgo, when Texas became part of the United States and all the Mexicans living within Texas suddenly became U.S. citizens and began existing in the liminal space of being counted as “white” (all US citizens at the time were classified as white) on paper, but in practice, in daily life, were often racialized as mestizos and treated accordingly, unless they had money and/or fair skin—another intersectional situation. One more layer is the distinction between Mexican nationals and Tejanos and the complex relationship between the two, in terms of ethnic and nationalistic feeling. For Lulu,and for many living in these communities, it’s a sense of belonging to all and none, a third space which is uniquely of the region.

AUTHORLINK: What are some of the important messages in your story?

FUENTES: I want readers to enjoy a good story, and I hope mine is that. But I also want them to think a about how often women who live their truth are vilified, and maybe reconsider the word “malas”. I also wanted to write about themes of grief, and how generational trauma can be a curse— but that curse can be broken.

AUTHORLINK: Was anyone involved with your book concerned about people not understanding some of the Spanish phrases that were not interpreted?

FUENTES: No, they weren’t, which was lovely.

AUTHORLINK: What are you working on next?

FUENTES: I’m finishing a linked story collection called My Heart Has More Rooms Than a Whorehouse. It follows the members of an extended Latinx family and explores the pressure points of familial obligations and the complexities of love. A young boy from the barrio settles a wager his dead father made with a rich man. A sister tries to make sense of her brother’s career as a bull rider. A group of kids search for the bogeyman haunting their grandmother’s house. A suburban wife
aches to understand her volatile husband. The people in these stories navigate the web of family allegiances while trying to find breathing space for themselves.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Marcela Fuentes was born and raised in Del Rio, Texas. She graduated from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She was the 2016-17 James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She received a Pushcart prize for fiction writing and essays. Malas was a Good Morning America Book Club Pick. Her work has been published in Indiana Review, Kenyon Review, The Rumpas and others. She lives in Fort Worth.