Kathleen Alcala – författare

As friends began “going back to the land” at the same time that a health issue emerged, Kathleen Alcalá set out to reexamine her relationship with food at the most local level. Remembering her parents, Mexican immigrants who grew up during the Depression, and the memory of planting, growing, and harvesting fresh food with them as a child, she decided to explore the history of the Pacific Northwest island she calls home. In The Deepest Roots, Alcalá walks, wades, picks, pokes, digs, cooks, and cans, getting to know her neighbors on a much deeper level. Wanting to better understand how we once fed ourselves, and acknowledging that there may be a future in which we could need to do so again, she meets those who experienced the Japanese American internment during World War II, and learns the unique histories of the blended Filipino and Native American community, the fishing practices of the descendants of Croatian immigrants, and the Suquamish elder who shares with her the food legacy of the island itself.Combining memoir, historical records, and a blueprint for sustainability, The Deepest Roots shows us how an island population can mature into responsible food stewards and reminds us that innovation, adaptation, diversity, and common sense will help us make wise decisions about our future. And along the way, we learn how food is intertwined with our present but offers a path to a better understanding of the future.Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFG8MpTo_ZU&feature=youtu.be

Set in northern Mexico in the 1870s, Spirits of the Ordinary tells interweaving stories centered on Zacarías Carabajal, who leaves his comfortable city home to prospect for gold in the wilderness while his abandoned wife, Estela, struggles to build a new life. 

Visions, dreams, and portents are part of the everyday world of Spirits of the Ordinary. Estela''s siblings, the enigmatic and supernaturally beautiful twins Manzana and Membrillo, discover their gift for water divining. Zacarías''s mother, Mariana, has been silent all her adult life after experiencing an apocalyptic vision of angels in her teens. His father, Julio, is an apothecary devoted to Torah study and Jewish mysticism, practicing his religion in secret as generations before him have done. Meanwhile, Zacarías''s wanderings turn into a spiritual quest that takes him to the ancient cliff dwellings known as Casas Grandes.

Presenting a tapestry of fascinating lives as well as the story of a reluctant mystic in a spectacular desert landscape, Spirits of the Ordinary demonstrates that, as Alcalá writes in her introduction, "magic and holiness are all around us."

A riveting novel from acclaimed author Kathleen Alcalá, this second edition of The Flower in the Skull, from Raven Chronicles Press, begins in the Sonoran Desert in the late 19th century, where an Ópata village is attacked by Mexican soldiers. Her family scattered, Concha makes her way to Tucson, where the stories she tells her daughter lead to Shelly-a troubled Latina in modern-day Los Angeles, increasingly fascinated by her ancestry. A powerful tale of heritage, loss, and acculturation, Alcalá spins her most lyrical and moving work yet. 

The Flower in the Skull stands perfectly apart even as it continues the epic begun with Spirits of the Ordinary. 

The second part of a planned trilogy that began with Spirits of the Ordinary (1997), The Flower in the Skull spans more than a century in offering a view of three women linked by Indian blood and their dreams, and seared by the violent transgressions of men. Childhood comforts in her Ópata village in Sonoran Mexico cease for Concha when her father is seized by Mexican soldiers and never seen again. First abandoning home with the remainder of her family, then herself abandoned by her mother, Concha walks in a daze across the desert to Tucson, where she''s taken in as a nanny by a prospering Mexican family. A measure of peace returns to her. But when she''s raped by an Anglo and bears his child, nothing can ever be the same. A brief marriage to the family doctor fails to produce more children, so her husband abandons her for someone else, leaving Concha and daughter Rosa to fend for themselves. 

Over the years, Rosa picks up the burden when her mother grows too weak to continue the dawn-to-dusk housecleaning work that has sustained them, but then Rosa catches the eye of a young minister and receives Concha''s blessing to marry him just before Concha dies. 

Busy starting her own family and keeping her own house, Rosa still wonders about her mother''s past-Ópata and the father she never knew. Two generations forward, Shelly, an editorial assistant for an L.A. publisher, jumps at the chance to escape her stalking, harassing boss by going on a research trip to Tucson, where she finds not only a mystery involving her mother''s family and her people in a broader sense, but also the will to survive the horror waiting for her when she returns to Los Angeles.

Like her previous novel Spirits of the Ordinary, The Flower in the Skull is set along the Mexican/U.S. border and deals with three generations of Ópata Indian women--ranging from the turn of the century to the present day. All are based on members of Kathleen''s family, the book recreating both the magic and hard work of survival. The story is heartbreaking in places, but the prose is even more gorgeous, and there is a richness to Alcalá''s characterization and settings that invite re-reading passages, simply to re-experience their resonance.

This book is not to be missed, especially by students of Native American Studies, border studies, and American history.