Blurb:
| Alejandra no longer knows who she is. To her husband, she is a wife, and to her children, a mother. To her own adoptive mother, she is a daughter. But they cannot see who Alejandra has become: a woman struggling with a darkness that threatens to consume her. When Alejandra visits a therapist, she begins exploring her family’s history, starting with the biological mother she never knew. As she goes deeper into the lives of the women in her family, she learns that heartbreak and tragedy are not the only things she has in common with her ancestors. Because the crying woman was with them, too. She is La Llorona, the vengeful and murderous mother of Mexican legend. And she will not leave until Alejandra follows her mother, her grandmother, and all the women who came before her into the darkness. But Alejandra has inherited more than just pain. She has inherited the strength and the courage of her foremothers—and she will have to summon everything they have given her to banish La Llorona forever. |
The Haunting of Alejandra is about the horrors of
being a mother, wife, and woman, and the sacrifices that come with it.
We first meet Alejandra when she’s hiding from her family in
the shower, crying and feeling overwhelmed by their many demands. Her husband
Matthew is unsupportive and as needy and demanding as her three children. On
the rare occasions when Alejandra asks him to help her with the housework,
Matthew uses a combination of weaponized
incompetence and guilt-tripping to get out of it. He’s made Alejandra move
away from her support network in Texas, and the birth mother she’d just
reconnected with. He’s also convinced her to quit her job and raise their
children full time, meaning she no longer has money of her own. Matthew owns
everything, Alejandra’s name isn’t even on the bills. He makes all the
decisions for the family; where they live, what they buy, and even where they
travel on vacation. If Alejandra’s needs don’t align with what he wants in the
moment Matthew will make his displeasure known. She feels like a shadow, barely
existing.
Alejandra’s situation will be familiar to many married women. Like most heterosexual couples she takes on the majority of the housework and mental load. Matthew provides little to no help with chores, child raising, or managing the household. This is, sadly, not uncommon as according to the BBC "When it comes to household responsibilities, women perform far more cognitive and emotional labour than men." Alejandra has been trapped in this pattern since childhood, when, as the eldest daughter, her religious, adoptive parents forced her to do the bulk of the household chores and take care of her younger siblings. They also cut her off from her history and culture, refusing to let her read anything about Mexico that went against their fundamentalist Christian beliefs. Alejandra is surrounded by White people who don’t understand her. When she tries to tell her eldest daughter the story of La Llorona, something to connect her to her heritage, she’s scolded by her daughter’s teacher for telling her child scary stories.
When Alejandra expresses dissatisfaction with her situation, her concerns aren’t taken seriously. Even when she admits to feeling suicidal she’s met with shame and “I’m sorry you feel that way” from her husband who frequently points out she has everything material she could ever want, so why should she be unhappy? Worse still, something that resembles la Llorona, the ghostly woman from Mexican folklore who drowned her two children, is haunting Alejandra, telling her she’s a terrible mother. Throughout the course of the story we learn that Alejandra is not the only mother the creature has haunted. Each of the women in Alejandra’s matrilineal line had their own struggles with motherhood and a lack of autonomy. Miscarriage, feeling unworthy of love, carrying an unwanted child, forced marriage, teenage pregnancy, the list goes on. And each woman was haunted by the specter of la Llorona who fed off their pain and sorrow, resulting in generational trauma that goes back centuries.
Eventually Alejandra decides to take back the power her husband, parents, and the monster took from her by getting help. I really appreciated that unlike most fictional characters Alejandra actually has the self-awareness to go to therapy when she realizes how bad things have gotten. Even better, her therapist, Melanie, is competent, and culturally informed. She is a Chicana woman, like Alejandra, who practices both modern psychotherapy as a doctor and traditional medicine as a curandera. She believes Alejandra when the stressed mom tells her that she’s being stalked by some kind of monster and is able to advise her on how to protect herself from the evil sprit and cleanse her home. Melanie helps Alejandra reconnect to the cultural roots her adoptive parents sought to destroy, encouraging her to read up on this history of Chicana women and advising her to build an altar to her ancestors in her home. While we’ve all heard horror stories of bad therapists, I found it refreshing to see a therapist in fiction who’s actually good at her job and not a White man. Having had some incredibly helpful queer therapists myself I know the importance of having culturally competent care, and what a difference it makes when your provider isn’t basing their care on a White, heteronormative, Capitalist model. I loved Melanie, and I wish there were more doctors like her in the world.
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| Photo of Felicia Cocotzin Ruiz, a modern curandera. Photography by Laura Segall. |
Alejandra also reaches out to her birth mother, who may not have been meant to raise a child but is more than ready to provide emotional support to her adult daughter. Melanie teaches her how to call upon the strength of her female ancestors who appear to her in her dreams. With all these strong women standing behind her Alejandra is able to find her own inner strength to stand up to both Matthew and her monster, as she fights to keep the generational curse from passing down to her own daughter. I really loved the theme of women supporting and healing other women. When Alejandra is finally able to ask for help without feeling guilty or like a burden the women in her life are there the minute she needs them. They believe her stories of a monster and are ready to offer their help in whatever for Alejandra needs it.
Overall The Haunting of Alejandra is an emotional and painful, but ultimately rewarding read about women, Mexican culture, and generational trauma. It’s a slow burn horror, and while I usually don’t have the patience for those I was so enraptured with the story that it felt like it flew by. While not a parent myself, I know women who are, and the book rang true of their more difficult experiences with motherhood like feeling overwhelmed and isolated. I’ve been following V. Castro’s books for a while now and I have to say, she just gets better and better with each piece she rights. It’s truly impressive and I can’t wait to read what she writes next.
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