Debra Castaneda's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-monsters-of-chavez-ravine"
A Map for The Monsters of Chavez Ravine
My daughter asked if I planned to include a map for my urban fantasy novella, The Monsters of Chavez Ravine.
The answer was no. But as soon as she said it, I thought it would be a good idea. While the characters and plot are fiction, the setting is real. Or it was before the bulldozers arrived and knocked everything down. And it would be nice to show readers how the three old neighborhoods of Palo Verde, Bishop and La Loma stood in relation to each other, as the characters often walk, and sometimes run, between the hilly villages.
I had a general idea of how the neighborhoods were situated in Chavez Ravine, but most of the maps I came across all lacked something that made them a bit difficult to understand at a casual glance.
What the book needed was a simple, yet stylish map, like those often seen in fantasy and science fiction novels.
This artistic endeavor was way beyond my skills, so I turned to someone I discovered in the writing community on Twitter, a talented young British fantasy writer and illustrator by the name of Dewi Hargreaves.
This map needed a few anchor points, so Elysian Park and the neighborhood of Solano are included. Both exist today in Los Angeles. Solano once bordered the old Chavez Ravine neighborhoods. Also included are the Arroyo Seco Parkway, now called the Pasadena Freeway, and North Broadway.
We added a few features, too. One existed: the shacks belonging to Los Viejitos. Old gringo bachelors once occupied the tiny, rustic rental cabins. A couple of key scenes play out there, one involving a favorite minor character, the impetuous Pete Chevira, so on the map it went.
While there were wells around Chavez Ravine (in fact, I have a picture of my mother and uncle posing next to one), the well shown in La Loma was placed there at my direction. It’s also there for a reason, but that would involve a spoiler, so I’ll move on to the next feature: Duran Market & Liquor in Palo Verde. This is a fictional store owned by our heroine’s father, Salvio Duran. The store that twenty-two-year-old Trini takes over after her father is attacked under mysterious circumstances.
Several stores existed in Chavez Ravine, like the Ayala store pictured in chavezravine.org. Both markets, Duran Market & Liquor, and the one belonging to the character Henry Loya in Boyle Heights are fictitious.
This leads me to the last bit about the map.
Images get scraped and end up on the internet, often without context. The last thing I wanted was for this map—a mixture of fact and fiction—to end up online for people to discover and use, believing it was an actual representation of Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop. So, at the bottom, you will see, “The Monsters of Chavez Ravine.”
Hopefully, the mention of monsters will throw up some red flags!
The answer was no. But as soon as she said it, I thought it would be a good idea. While the characters and plot are fiction, the setting is real. Or it was before the bulldozers arrived and knocked everything down. And it would be nice to show readers how the three old neighborhoods of Palo Verde, Bishop and La Loma stood in relation to each other, as the characters often walk, and sometimes run, between the hilly villages.
I had a general idea of how the neighborhoods were situated in Chavez Ravine, but most of the maps I came across all lacked something that made them a bit difficult to understand at a casual glance.
What the book needed was a simple, yet stylish map, like those often seen in fantasy and science fiction novels.
This artistic endeavor was way beyond my skills, so I turned to someone I discovered in the writing community on Twitter, a talented young British fantasy writer and illustrator by the name of Dewi Hargreaves.
This map needed a few anchor points, so Elysian Park and the neighborhood of Solano are included. Both exist today in Los Angeles. Solano once bordered the old Chavez Ravine neighborhoods. Also included are the Arroyo Seco Parkway, now called the Pasadena Freeway, and North Broadway.
We added a few features, too. One existed: the shacks belonging to Los Viejitos. Old gringo bachelors once occupied the tiny, rustic rental cabins. A couple of key scenes play out there, one involving a favorite minor character, the impetuous Pete Chevira, so on the map it went.
While there were wells around Chavez Ravine (in fact, I have a picture of my mother and uncle posing next to one), the well shown in La Loma was placed there at my direction. It’s also there for a reason, but that would involve a spoiler, so I’ll move on to the next feature: Duran Market & Liquor in Palo Verde. This is a fictional store owned by our heroine’s father, Salvio Duran. The store that twenty-two-year-old Trini takes over after her father is attacked under mysterious circumstances.
Several stores existed in Chavez Ravine, like the Ayala store pictured in chavezravine.org. Both markets, Duran Market & Liquor, and the one belonging to the character Henry Loya in Boyle Heights are fictitious.
This leads me to the last bit about the map.
Images get scraped and end up on the internet, often without context. The last thing I wanted was for this map—a mixture of fact and fiction—to end up online for people to discover and use, believing it was an actual representation of Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop. So, at the bottom, you will see, “The Monsters of Chavez Ravine.”
Hopefully, the mention of monsters will throw up some red flags!
Family Secrets and The Monsters of Chavez Ravine
There is a character in my urban fantasy novella, The Monsters of Chavez Ravine, nicknamed Ripper.
The residents of the old neighborhoods of Palo Verde, Bishop, and La Loma were big on nicknames. In photographer Don Normark’s stunning book, Chávez Ravine: 1949: A Los Angeles Story, he includes two pages of nicknames.
There is one nickname that makes my heart race.
Ripper.
Growing up, I’d never heard his name mentioned. Not once. But then my mother came to visit when my second daughter was born. She went from being lucid to seeing things that were not there. I called 911. While I waited for the ambulance to arrive, she kept mentioning the name Ripper. After we’d processed the diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s, I asked my father about this mysterious person.
Ripper was my mother’s first husband.
My father did not want to talk about Ripper. He’d only say my mother had married him when she was very young, and the relationship didn’t last long.
I didn’t have to ask why mother had kept this a secret from me. She had old-fashioned, old-school Catholic feelings on divorce and no doubt didn’t want me to think any less of her because she was a divorced woman.
This former marriage also explained my mother’s outsized dramatic reaction to a certain boyfriend of mine. She probably thought I’d make the same mistake. Of course, an honest conversation about the perils of forming too-early attachments might have been useful, but she portrayed herself as an obedient young woman who did not climb out the window to steal away with her young man.
When my mother died, her childhood friend attended her funeral. Mary had also lived in the Palo Verde neighborhood of Chavez Ravine, so I asked her about him.
If only I had a camera to capture her expression. Her eyebrows shot up. Her jaw dropped. One hand fluttered to her heart. “She didn’t tell you she’d been married before!” she said.
No. No. And definitely not.
Mary told me what she could remember about the relationship, which lasted several years. She called him the love of my mother’s life, which was a rather shocking thing to say with my father standing not far away.
I got the gist of things, even though Mary was short on specifics. Ripper lived a few doors down from my mother. My grandmother wasn’t a big fan and disapproved of him, but then, my grandmother was a proud woman who thought her family was better than some others around Palo Verde, according to some stories I heard. Mary said my mother married him against her mother’s wishes. This probably doomed things from the start. Grandma Kika was a tough lady with strong opinions, accustomed to getting her way. My mother and my aunts revered her and usually did what she asked. My grandmother approved and loved her two other sons-in-law, both from Chavez Ravine.
Ripper no doubt found himself the odd man out. I can’t imagine my mother holding out against that kind of maternal pressure. Or maybe the relationship between my mother and Ripper didn’t work out for all the usual reasons a marriage can fail. Or a combination of things.
I had many years to fill in the blanks about Ripper.
With a nickname like that, I can be excused for thinking he’d been pretty good with a knife. And that he’d been one of those good-looking bad boys in his youth. I don't know if the Ripper named in Normark's book is the same man my mother married, but how many Rippers could there be?
Later, I was to learn his actual name and that he died within three months of my mother. Coincidence, but somehow, it felt strangely significant. I know it would have upset my father if he’d lived long enough to find that out. Not that I would have told him. I never mentioned Ripper again.
Ripper, my imagined version of him, first appeared in my short story set in Chavez Ravine called The Emissary.
You can read it for free on my website. He makes another appearance in The Monsters of Chavez Ravine, and I must admit, next to the protagonist Trini Duran, he’s one of my favorite characters.
There’s a lesson somewhere in all of this about family secrets.
They don’t stay secret forever. And if there’s a writer in the family, that secret is going to end up in a book.
The residents of the old neighborhoods of Palo Verde, Bishop, and La Loma were big on nicknames. In photographer Don Normark’s stunning book, Chávez Ravine: 1949: A Los Angeles Story, he includes two pages of nicknames.
There is one nickname that makes my heart race.
Ripper.
Growing up, I’d never heard his name mentioned. Not once. But then my mother came to visit when my second daughter was born. She went from being lucid to seeing things that were not there. I called 911. While I waited for the ambulance to arrive, she kept mentioning the name Ripper. After we’d processed the diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s, I asked my father about this mysterious person.
Ripper was my mother’s first husband.
My father did not want to talk about Ripper. He’d only say my mother had married him when she was very young, and the relationship didn’t last long.
I didn’t have to ask why mother had kept this a secret from me. She had old-fashioned, old-school Catholic feelings on divorce and no doubt didn’t want me to think any less of her because she was a divorced woman.
This former marriage also explained my mother’s outsized dramatic reaction to a certain boyfriend of mine. She probably thought I’d make the same mistake. Of course, an honest conversation about the perils of forming too-early attachments might have been useful, but she portrayed herself as an obedient young woman who did not climb out the window to steal away with her young man.
When my mother died, her childhood friend attended her funeral. Mary had also lived in the Palo Verde neighborhood of Chavez Ravine, so I asked her about him.
If only I had a camera to capture her expression. Her eyebrows shot up. Her jaw dropped. One hand fluttered to her heart. “She didn’t tell you she’d been married before!” she said.
No. No. And definitely not.
Mary told me what she could remember about the relationship, which lasted several years. She called him the love of my mother’s life, which was a rather shocking thing to say with my father standing not far away.
I got the gist of things, even though Mary was short on specifics. Ripper lived a few doors down from my mother. My grandmother wasn’t a big fan and disapproved of him, but then, my grandmother was a proud woman who thought her family was better than some others around Palo Verde, according to some stories I heard. Mary said my mother married him against her mother’s wishes. This probably doomed things from the start. Grandma Kika was a tough lady with strong opinions, accustomed to getting her way. My mother and my aunts revered her and usually did what she asked. My grandmother approved and loved her two other sons-in-law, both from Chavez Ravine.
Ripper no doubt found himself the odd man out. I can’t imagine my mother holding out against that kind of maternal pressure. Or maybe the relationship between my mother and Ripper didn’t work out for all the usual reasons a marriage can fail. Or a combination of things.
I had many years to fill in the blanks about Ripper.
With a nickname like that, I can be excused for thinking he’d been pretty good with a knife. And that he’d been one of those good-looking bad boys in his youth. I don't know if the Ripper named in Normark's book is the same man my mother married, but how many Rippers could there be?
Later, I was to learn his actual name and that he died within three months of my mother. Coincidence, but somehow, it felt strangely significant. I know it would have upset my father if he’d lived long enough to find that out. Not that I would have told him. I never mentioned Ripper again.
Ripper, my imagined version of him, first appeared in my short story set in Chavez Ravine called The Emissary.
You can read it for free on my website. He makes another appearance in The Monsters of Chavez Ravine, and I must admit, next to the protagonist Trini Duran, he’s one of my favorite characters.
There’s a lesson somewhere in all of this about family secrets.
They don’t stay secret forever. And if there’s a writer in the family, that secret is going to end up in a book.
Why I Chose Not to Italicize Spanish Words in The Monsters of Chavez Ravine
One day, I was scrolling on Twitter and came across a tweet I found fascinating.
A young traditionally published author announced in very bold terms she does not italicize Korean words in her novels. In fact, she said she REFUSED.
Another author chimed in. This woman is Latina, like me. She also said she does not italicize Spanish words in her stories. Then I recalled reading a book by a Latino author who did the same. At the time, I didn't give it any thought. It just seemed natural.
While editing my urban fantasy novella, The Monsters of Chavez Ravine, I was dealing with several dozen Spanish words. Every time I had to stop and italicize, I became more annoyed. Not because it was such a burdensome task, but because it didn't accomplish much besides announcing to the reader, “Hey! Foreign word alert!”
So I got to thinking about these other authors. There were probably many more of them out there. And they were onto something. Something I wanted to try.
The reader recognizes a foreign word when they see one.
I am not advocating every author defy convention and throw out italics. Some editors and publishers would not allow it, anyway.
However, since I publish my own books, I am free to make my own choices.
I chose NOT to italicize. Here’s why:
~ I set my novella in a Mexican American neighborhood with Mexican American characters who speak English, but sometimes throw in a Spanish word. Italicizing a common speech pattern among this group of people seemed, well, odd. After all, the reader is (hopefully) immersed in the characters’ world, words and all.
~Italics are also used to emphasize certain words, as in, “Are you really going to wear that?” This is a convention I sometimes use. With the number of Spanish words used in the novella, I preferred to rely on italics for emphasis.
~While italics serve to highlight foreign words, they do nothing to solve the fundamental challenge of using a foreign word in the first place. It remains an unfamiliar word.
~Whenever I used a Spanish word, I placed it in context to help the reader figure it out, even if it meant a slight repetition in the sentence or paragraph. Like, an old lady calling the main character Trini a “mentirosa,” with Trini’s internal reaction, “Great. Now they were calling her a liar.”
I included a short glossary at the back of the book.
~Which might be handy in some of the science fiction books I’ve read with the amount of unfamiliar (to me) science terms, plus all the words the writer has made up. And don’t get me started about the crazy words and name places in fantasy novels that we all roll with just fine.
Ursula Le Guin invented the useful device name of “ansible” that allows for instant communication, and readers didn’t throw their books across the room and shout, “But where are the italics!”
~Which is my way of saying, I think people can handle a sprinkling of Spanish words in a book about Latinos without it impacting the reading experience.
To this author at least, those italics do something I don’t like: throw off the flow of a sentence.
That said, the experience belongs to the reader, so if a bunch of reviews rolled in complaining, “Where the hell were the italics when I needed them most,” then I would, of course, reconsider. But only after considering the true nature of the complaint. Because maybe they were uncomfortable with the Spanish words themselves, and the use of italics would do nothing to change that.
Thoughts? I’d like to love to hear them.
A young traditionally published author announced in very bold terms she does not italicize Korean words in her novels. In fact, she said she REFUSED.
Another author chimed in. This woman is Latina, like me. She also said she does not italicize Spanish words in her stories. Then I recalled reading a book by a Latino author who did the same. At the time, I didn't give it any thought. It just seemed natural.
While editing my urban fantasy novella, The Monsters of Chavez Ravine, I was dealing with several dozen Spanish words. Every time I had to stop and italicize, I became more annoyed. Not because it was such a burdensome task, but because it didn't accomplish much besides announcing to the reader, “Hey! Foreign word alert!”
So I got to thinking about these other authors. There were probably many more of them out there. And they were onto something. Something I wanted to try.
The reader recognizes a foreign word when they see one.
I am not advocating every author defy convention and throw out italics. Some editors and publishers would not allow it, anyway.
However, since I publish my own books, I am free to make my own choices.
I chose NOT to italicize. Here’s why:
~ I set my novella in a Mexican American neighborhood with Mexican American characters who speak English, but sometimes throw in a Spanish word. Italicizing a common speech pattern among this group of people seemed, well, odd. After all, the reader is (hopefully) immersed in the characters’ world, words and all.
~Italics are also used to emphasize certain words, as in, “Are you really going to wear that?” This is a convention I sometimes use. With the number of Spanish words used in the novella, I preferred to rely on italics for emphasis.
~While italics serve to highlight foreign words, they do nothing to solve the fundamental challenge of using a foreign word in the first place. It remains an unfamiliar word.
~Whenever I used a Spanish word, I placed it in context to help the reader figure it out, even if it meant a slight repetition in the sentence or paragraph. Like, an old lady calling the main character Trini a “mentirosa,” with Trini’s internal reaction, “Great. Now they were calling her a liar.”
I included a short glossary at the back of the book.
~Which might be handy in some of the science fiction books I’ve read with the amount of unfamiliar (to me) science terms, plus all the words the writer has made up. And don’t get me started about the crazy words and name places in fantasy novels that we all roll with just fine.
Ursula Le Guin invented the useful device name of “ansible” that allows for instant communication, and readers didn’t throw their books across the room and shout, “But where are the italics!”
~Which is my way of saying, I think people can handle a sprinkling of Spanish words in a book about Latinos without it impacting the reading experience.
To this author at least, those italics do something I don’t like: throw off the flow of a sentence.
That said, the experience belongs to the reader, so if a bunch of reviews rolled in complaining, “Where the hell were the italics when I needed them most,” then I would, of course, reconsider. But only after considering the true nature of the complaint. Because maybe they were uncomfortable with the Spanish words themselves, and the use of italics would do nothing to change that.
Thoughts? I’d like to love to hear them.
Meet Dog Face Bride from The Monsters of Chavez Ravine
[Note: Since I'm unable to post pictures here, just a warning that if you want to see the illustration & animated version of the monster, you'll need to click the link to my blog post to seem them.]
The monsters in my urban fantasy novella, The Monsters of Chavez Ravine, are many and come in different shapes and sizes, but the one that first popped into my head was Dog Face Bride.
I’ve been thinking about it since I was a kid.
Thank you, Grandma Chata. Whenever I asked my grandmother for a story, she told the same one every time. Now that I think back on it, it was a strange tale for such a sweet, kindhearted woman to tell a young child. I spent most weekends with my grandmother, a seamstress, at her house in Boyle Heights.
Continue reading HERE
The monsters in my urban fantasy novella, The Monsters of Chavez Ravine, are many and come in different shapes and sizes, but the one that first popped into my head was Dog Face Bride.
I’ve been thinking about it since I was a kid.
Thank you, Grandma Chata. Whenever I asked my grandmother for a story, she told the same one every time. Now that I think back on it, it was a strange tale for such a sweet, kindhearted woman to tell a young child. I spent most weekends with my grandmother, a seamstress, at her house in Boyle Heights.
Continue reading HERE
