Merced is as strong and determined as the huizache tree her father tried to chop down, but that kept growing back every year, even after he burned its roots. Her aunt marries her off to the most eligible man in their small Mexican town to protect her from her own father, who believes the girl’s developing body is his to use.
In chapters spanning early twentieth century El Sauz, Mexico, mid-century El Paso and contemporary Los Angeles, this engrossing novel chronicles the harrowing yet darkly funny trials of three generations of resilient women. Merced is a young wife and mother in a loveless marriage when she meets the handsome but faithless Leandro in Ciudad Juárez. Her first taste of passion drives Merced to uproot her three daughters and embark on a daunting journey to the United States to reunite with her lover. Can her daughters and granddaughter break Leandro’s hold on Merced so they can finally put down their own roots? Or will they also have to break away and run?
The women struggle with love, loss and survival against the expectations of patriarchal, misogynist societies on both sides of the border. This saga offers a spellbinding look at love conquered and lost, love freely given and purchased, working-class Mexican and Chicano communities and their love-hate relationship with American assimilation—all set to the popular music of both countries.
Click here to watch Estella Gonzalez in the APP Authors Speak series talking about her creative process.
Finalist, 2024 Texas Institute of Letters’ Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Book of Fiction
“The result is an absorbing, often funny, heartbreaking story that neither sugarcoats nor romanticizes the lives of these women.”—Los Angeles Times
“With this sweeping intergenerational tale, Huizache Women joins important works of literature penned by Chicana authors that decry violence against women, standing alongside texts such as Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Woman Hollering Creek,’ Erika Sánchez’s I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, and Josie Méndez-Negrete’s Las hijas de Juan: Daughters Betrayed. In its stark, no-frills treatment of Merced’s hardened life of tequila, sex, and violence, Huizache Women pays abiding respect to women’s stories of endurance and survival.”—Latinx Pop Magazine
Praise for the work of Estella Gonzalez:
“González’s debut collection delivers a layered portrait of Mexican American life rooted in 1980s East Los Angeles. An inviting tapestry.”—Publishers Weekly on Chola Salvation
“In her first collection of stories set mostly in her hometown of East Los Angeles, González unfurls the preoccupations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans and conveys an array of emotions they feel stemming from their blue-collar jobs, cultural heritage, faith, and poverty. Her use of Mexican slang adds a distinctive flavor that enhances the atmospheric setting. Beneath the machismo and the matriarchal dominance that reverberate in González’s stories is a thriving Chicano/a pride that unites and rewards these flawed but resilient characters as they achieve bittersweet triumph over steep odds.”—Booklist on Chola Salvation
“Smoldering stories that center the lives of Mexican Americans by complicating common tropes and conceptions. This debut collection of interlocking short stories turns an unflinching eye on the small tragedies, gut-wrenching betrayals, and enduring courage of working-class Latinx folks in East Los Angeles and the borderlands. Imagine Winesburg, Ohio featuring Chicanx of East Los Angeles with a touch of mystical realism.”—Kirkus Reviews on Chola Salvation
“The candid storytelling brings the vibrancy, beauty, flaws, and hope within a thriving culture to unforgettable life. Chola Salvation is a choice pick for public library Literary Fiction collections, highly recommended.”—Midwest Book Reviews on Chola Salvation
“What is most astonishing about Chola Salvation is Estella González’s skill in dropping the reader right into the action. Each story’s razor-sharp characterizations allow us to recognize the bravada these mujers live by, for better or for worse, or to root for queer love sought by hombres. With its bars, churches, hair salons, and its neighbors, this collection is East Los Angeles in its beautiful, aggrieved, celebratory finest.” —Helena María Viramontes, author of Their Dogs Came with Them and The Moths and Other Stories, on Chola Salvation
“The author tells these stories without essentializing or victimizing working-class people full of contradictions, dreams and sometimes violence.”—Isabel Ibáñez de la Calle for Ethnic and Third World Literatures on Chola Salvation
ESTELLA GONZALEZ is the author of an acclaimed story collection, Chola Salvation (Arte Público Press, 2021). Her work has been widely anthologized, including in A Night of Screams: Latino Horror Stories (Arte Público Press, 2023) and Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature (Bilingual Press, 2014). She received Cornell University’s Philip Freund Prize in Creative Writing, a Pushcart Prize “Special Mention” and a “Reading Notable” for The Best American Non-Required Reading. Her story, “Chola Salvation,” won first-place in the Pima Community College Martindale Literary Prize and her work has been named a finalist in the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, the James D. Houston Award for Western Literature and the Louise Meriwether Book Prize for a collection of short fiction. She received her BA in English from Northwestern University and her MFA in fiction from Cornell University. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.
