Debra Castaneda's Blog

They say, “write what you know.” But when I decided to set several of my stories in Chavez Ravine, I didn’t know the area in Los Angeles first-hand. The city had evicted the residents long before I was born. But my mother and her family talked about what it was like living in the hilltop neighborhoods of Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop before the evictions.

My family described the rolling hills, the open spaces, a tight-knit community of Mexican Americans where everyone knew everyone (and their b...

Machaca (Shredded Beef)When it’s on the menu in a restaurant, I order it. There are different ways to prepare it. I’ve had it in a sauce and mixed with scrambled eggs.My favorite is how my Aunt Lily fixed it: dry, with the shredded beef a bit crispy from a fast fry on the stove. This easy Machaca recipe is simplified by using pre-prepared salsa. (I love Herdez Salsa Casera and Trader Joe’s red Salsa Autentica.) Buy the amount of beef you need and add accordingly.

 

Prep Time: 1 hour

Cooking Time: 15 minutes

Ingredients: 

Flank steak (no other cut of beef will do!)

2-4 Garlic cloves, peeled

Bay leaf (1 or 2)

Red salsa, 2-5 Tbs

Salt

Pepper

Olive oil

Directions: 

~Add bay leaf and garlic to enough water to cover the flank steak

~Boil flank steak until it’s cooked through

~Remove flank steak from water and let it cool

~When you can touch it without burning your fingers, shred the meat

~This part can be done right away, or you can stick the meat in the fridge and finish it off before serving: add olive oil to a pan and sauté the shredded beef until the ends are lightly browned and a bit crispy

~Add enough salsa to lightly coat the beef and mix. Don’t add too much because that will make it soupy

~Add salt and pepper to taste

I love eating machaca by scooping it up with corn tortillas. You can also use it as a filling for tacos or burritos. Or scramble some eggs and mix it with the machaca. It makes an excellent breakfast dish!

The post Castaneda’s Easy Machaca Recipe appeared first on Debra Castaneda.

There are many ways to make Mexican rice, but this is how I learned to make it. It’s savory and delicious. I usually make a double batch so I have leftovers for quick and easy burritos.

Prep time: 10 minutes

Cooking time: 30ish minutes

Serving size: 4

Ingredients: (If you want to make a bigger batch, double the amounts)

1/8 cup olive oil

1 cup long grain white rice

1 onion (I prefer white, but yellow is fine), finely diced

1 clove garlic, minced

1/2 green pepper, finely diced

12 cilantro sprigs

2 Tbsp tomato paste

1 cup chicken broth (you can also use vegetable broth)

1 cup water

Salt to taste

Optional: a couple tablespoons of chopped tomato for color and/or 1/4 cup thawed frozen peas

Directions: 

~Rinse and drain rice

~Heat olive oil in lidded sauce pan, add onions and green peppers (plus optional chopped tomato) and sauté until softened. Remove mixture from pan (you’ll add them back in)

~Add rice to sauce pan and lightly and evenly toast it. This takes about 5 minutes. About ten minutes if you’ve doubled the recipe. Add more olive oil if needed.

~Add the onion and green pepper mixture, garlic and cilantro if you’re using it. Stir and sauté about 5 minutes.

~Add the broth, water and tomato paste and give it a good stir until the paste is thoroughly mixed in.

~Add about 1/2 teaspoon of salt, or to taste

~Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to a simmer, cover the saucepan and cook for about 20 minutes. Occasionally check to make sure the rice isn’t burning at the bottom. Stir and add a bit of water if necessary.

~Remove pan from burner and let it sit for about 10 minutes.

~Remove cilantro sprigs and discard. Add the peas if you’re using them and gently stir them in.

~Use a fork to fluff the rice and serve

The post Castaneda’s Classic Mexican Rice appeared first on Debra Castaneda.

(originally published May 2021)

May 8, 1959 is a day that Rachel Cantu will never forget.

It’s the day Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies forcibly evicted her family from their grandparents’ home in the Palo Verde neighborhood of Chavez Ravine.

The media had turned out in force, so there are lots of photos from that day. A film clip that aired on a TV station still shows up in documentaries showing deputies carrying her mother out of the house.

All of this happened sixty-two years ago. While many Los Angelenos know about the mostly Mexican American neighborhoods of Bishop, La Loma and Palo Verde that existed before Dodger Stadium was built, not all do. And for some, the details and the timeline are fuzzy.

The short version: on July 24, 1950, the city of Los Angeles sent eviction letters to the families of Palo Verde and Chavez Ravine areas notifying them of a plan to build a housing project “for people of low income.” That plan fell through and never happened.

Most of the families took payouts and left, like my mother and her family. They were long gone by 1959, when only a few households remained, holdouts determined to hang on to their property.

While researching the evictions for my fiction book, The Monsters of Chavez Ravine, I once again came across the photo of a young woman, Aurora Vargas, struggling against sheriff’s deputies, bent over, hands behind her back.

An officer in the picture looks down at a little girl. She’s crying. Her face is a mixture of fear and disbelief. She has one hand on her mother’s back as she gazes up at the man. Did she say anything to the officers? What was going through her mind?

By pure chance, I connected with that little girl, Rachel Cantu, when someone she knew brought my book to her attention. I asked if we could talk, and she graciously agreed. She answered my many questions about her grandparents, Abrana and Manuel Arechiga and what she remembered from that day in 1959 when she was ten years old.

Rachel grew up on Malvina Street, surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. And while each of them experienced and processed that event in their own way, this is Rachel Cantu’s story.

Q&A

Q: In the photo you were seen crying with one hand on your mom’s back. Did you say anything to the deputies arresting your mother? What happened after the photo was taken?

A: I told him to let my mom go. My mother was put in the car and so was another lady. Her name was Glenn Walters. She lived on the hill. After that, they separated them and I was still screaming, and they let me go in the car because they were going to take my mom. Where I have no idea. Once I got into the car, they took us up to the top of the hill. It was called Mustard Hill, I believe. Once they let me out of the car, I went and I looked down and eventually I could see they were bulldozing everything. Then they took me back down to my grandma’s [house] and then they took my mom to jail.

Q: After your grandparents’ home was bulldozed, what happened?

A: Well, we were just there, and it was loaded with newspaper people, all our family and neighbors. Eventually, in the evening, they put up a large tent and we put up a campfire and we slept there overnight. The next day they sent people over.  They said the children couldn’t stay there and they couldn’t camp there either, and then somebody volunteered a trailer and we stayed in the trailer for a few days. Eventually they came back again, and they made my grandparents leave.

Q: You’re describing such a traumatic incident. What do you think were the long-term effects of that eviction on your mother in your grandparents, and on you?

A: Well, my grandmother never forgot it. With the money they got, they purchased a property in City Terrace, and they just started living there.  But they never forgot it, of course, and I moved with my mom to Pico Rivera at the age of ten.

Q: That transition from such a close-knit community to the big sprawl of Los Angeles must have been a big adjustment.

A: It was very much so, but we made it through. My sister and I didn’t talk Spanish in Pico Rivera because of the prejudice.  People would call you names in school and stuff. And when we went to the market and my mom would talk to us in Spanish, people would turn around. By the time we were in our early teens, [my mom would say)] talk to me in Spanish, it doesn’t matter.

Q: Do you remember any conversations about why your family made the decision to hold out for so long, so many years after most residents sold up to the city and left?

A: Because my grandparents owned the property and the reason they had originally been told, eminent domain, that they were going to be given an apartment of their choice and they were going to be the first ones to pick and stuff. But they already had a house, and we had a yard and we had everything, and they were going take it away. [My grandpa, along with my uncles, built those houses].

Q: Do you remember them talking about other people leaving and them staying behind?  That must have been a little unsettling.

A: Oh yeah.  One time, I remember we saw people moving down the street. Like, maybe ten houses they were moving out and I remember sitting on the porch just looking at them and my sister waving at them. I would remember that when my parents and my grandma would be talking about how the city of Los Angeles wanted to take our house. That’s basically the politics I knew about at the time.

Q: What was it like living in Palo Verde at the end there, when it was mostly a ghost town?

A: To me, it was paradise. Those back hills had a lot of weeds and palm trees up there and we would get cardboard boxes and all the cousins would go there and slide down. My cousin Chuy and I would be playing war. We’d be knocking down weeds, taking [or stripping off?] the eucalyptus tree leaves and playing war and cowboys, playing in the street of Melvina. The Police Academy was right there, and they never told us anything. They were our friends. Sometimes, they’d stop and give us tennis balls. The Police Academy was our playground and because they knew us, they let us play around.

Q: Many people, including Latinos, blame the Dodgers for displacing the people of Chavez Ravine but as you mentioned, it all started long before the arrival of the team from Brooklyn. What’s your view on that?

A: It was politics, trying to make Frank Wilkinson a red/communist. It was stupid. They were just trying to pick everything out of it and instead of trying to pay the people, they should have paid fairly, and that includes my grandparents.

Q: To those people who say, “I hate the Dodgers, it’s their fault,” what would you say?

A: It’s not the Dodgers fault. Even my mom would say that. She never went to Dodger Stadium but she had a Dodger cap. She knew it wasn’t the Dodgers or anything, but they were there, and we weren’t.  To this day, I’ve never gone back.

Q: If there’s one thing you’d like people to know who don’t know much about the old neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine, what would it be?

A: Well, one of the things that really hurts us is when they say it was a slum. The way I see it now, the houses weren’t a slum. We didn’t have rats or anything inside. We had running water. We had all the utilities that we needed. We had food. Everybody was always hustling to work to keep food on the table.

Q: Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you would like to add?

A: I really would love the story of my grandparents to be told. They were amazing people All they do is show my grandmother being a mean old lady, and she wasn’t. She was just trying to protect her property.

The post Remembering Eviction Day with Rachel Cantu appeared first on Debra Castaneda.

(originally published May 2021) My mother always wore her hair short. Really short. It looked fantastic on her with her high cheekbones and high-bridged nose.

Then I was scrolling online and saw one of those clickbait galleries that show you what a famous person would look like today. Love those!

My big takeaway is how much a hairstyle can change a person’s appearance.

And then I became obsessed. What would my mother look like with long hair? What if my mother wore her hair in braids, like the main character in my urban fantasy novella, The Monsters of Chavez Ravine, set in 1952.

Twenty-two-year-old Trini Duran usually wears her wavy dark hair loose, but when it’s clear she’ll need to devote a lot of time to chasing monsters, she opts for a style that will survive a night of creature stalking.

I sent one of my favorite pictures of my mother taken when she was about the same age as Trini to an illustrator and made two requests: thicken my mom’s eyebrows because she overplucked them and add some lovely, loose braids.

Here’s the photo. It was taken at a nightclub in Los Angeles. My mother, Dora, is on the far right. My aunt Lily sits next to her.

When the illustration came back, it took my breath away.

I didn’t have my mother in mind when I dreamed up Trini Duran. She’s about as far from the slightly cranky, independent gunslinger that is Trini. They share only two things in common:  both grew up in the Palo Verde neighborhood of Chavez Ravine and both are tall.

But damn if my mother, in braids, makes a pretty good Trini.

I’m on the fence about sharing illustrations of characters. I hate the idea of ruining it for a reader if they imagined something entirely different. But in this case, I’ll take the chance because while she’s not what I had in mind for Trini, she just might be yours.

The post My Mother as the Main Character in The Monsters of Chavez Ravine appeared first on Debra Castaneda.

The Monsters of Chavez Ravine will always be my favorite “book child,” so I was thrilled when it won the International Latino Book Awards Gold Award for Best Novel Fantasy/Sci-Fi English.

Here’s why it’s such a big deal to me:

I’m an independently published author who began writing full-time later in life, after a career in news. Why did I go this route? Because I don’t have a long ramp of time to write, query, and wait for responses from the traditional publishing establishment. The time to publish a book with a social injustice theme was now. Not years from now. Besides, I love the control that comes with self-publishing. That said, most of your validation comes from within. An award like this acts as confirmation that you haven’t lost your mind, that you are, in fact, an author, and one worthy of consideration for such an amazing distinction.It’s a LATINO book award! Not bad for a gal who got called a Pocha all her life. Meaning a Mexican American who isn’t one thing nor the other. Now I own the whole Pocha thing because as the nice man from behind the meat counter at Hernandez Market assured me, I get to enjoy the best of both worlds.The award isn’t just for me. Hopefully, it will shine a brighter light on this novella that is about the social injustice suffered by the thousands of Mexican Americans evicted from their homes in the old neighborhoods of Palo Verde, Bishop and La Loma in Los Angeles.As a kid, I loved to write stories, but it never occurred to me it was something I could do when I grew up. My family had blue-collar jobs, and my going away to college was a big enough leap into the unknown. College meant taking classes that could get me a more interesting job. That meant courses in journalism and TV news, not creative writing classes.How did I learn how to write books? By being a lifelong reader, reading about the craft of writing, and endless hours of writing. And I will never stop learning and, hopefully, improving. Monsters might not be a perfect book, but it was written with all my heart and soul.

The post The Monsters of Chavez Ravine: An International Latino Book Awards Winner appeared first on Debra Castaneda.

(originally published April 2021)

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.

She swore the story was true. It went like this:

It happened in the old mining town of Bisbee, Arizona, my grandmother’s hometown. A friend of the family, a young and beautiful young woman, fell in love with a handsome man. She did not know he had a wife over the border. The young woman believed they were engaged, so she had a wedding dress made. Then she discovered her lover was a liar. She became crazed with grief, then rage. He fled back to Mexico.

Still, this miserable young woman could not get over him. I don’t recall the name my grandmother used, so for this story, let’s call her Anna.

The family called the local curandera, who tried one concoction after another, with no effect. The healer said the man had sinister powers and had bewitched her.

The experience left the jilted young woman deranged. Anna wandered around wearing her wedding dress (shades of Dickens’ Miss Havisham), talking to herself and making aggressive gestures at anyone who tried to console her.

For her safety and for those around her, the family locked her up in a shed made comfortable for her stay. She endured her confinement without protest, but everyone could hear her wailing and cursing her ex-lover. Her sisters took turns taking her food and visiting her.

My grandmother said she was a young teenager at the time and avoided visiting her friend at home because she found the ruckus strange and terrifying.

Then, one day, the noise from the shed stopped.

One of Anna’s sisters went to investigate. The sister stood outside the shed door and called Anna’s name. Nothing. No response. Then a low growl.

The sister unlocked the door and opened it. A large black dog emerged from the gloom of the shed, let loose with a piercing long howl, then ran off. Anna had disappeared, never to be seen again.

Well, you can see how a person told such a bizarre story could mash up the two: Anna and the dog.

Which is how I came up with Dog Face Bride.

When I commissioned an illustration, the artist asked the million-dollar question: “What kind of dog?”

Hell if I knew. Was there was a dog breed out there that matched the picture I’d formed in my head? This led to furious searching on the web.

And then there it was! The Xoloitzcuintli or Mexican Hairless, except not the toy version, but the standard size. It’s beautiful and scary. The AKC describes the Xolo as loyal and calm. A very nice dog to own, so I felt guilty using the breed as the basis for the monster. My youngest daughter, a huge Disney fan, pointed out that the dog in the animated movie Coco is a Xolo, so that made me feel somewhat better.

So, a final thanks to Grandma Chata for the inspiration for Dog Face Bride. Not so much for the nightmares.

And I have a few more notes of appreciation.

To Natalia, the freelance digital artist from Poland, who interpreted the monster. She NAILED it. You can find her on FIVERR.

And as for bringing Dog Face Bride to life with movement, I have Suzanne at Motion Kitty to thank. I think you’ll agree she did a fantastic job! And not only that, Suzanne works fast and is delightful to work with.

The post Meet Dog Face Bride from The Monsters of Chavez Ravine appeared first on Debra Castaneda.

(originally published April 2021)

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.

The post Choosing Not to Italicize Spanish Words in The Monsters of Chavez Ravine appeared first on Debra Castaneda.

(originally published March 2021)

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, Chavez 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, here. 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 post Family Secrets and The Monsters of Chavez Ravine appeared first on Debra Castaneda.

[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