Ana asked Sofía Segovia:

Hi Sofía, there was a lot I liked about El Murmullo de las Abejas, but I had a lot of trouble with the racist and classist portrayals of some of the characters. Can you explain why you made the choice to have the "good guys" be fair-skinned wealthy landowners, where as the "bad guys" are Indigenous landless peasants? (Was this a critique that I missed? Or was it unintentional? Do you regret the choice?) Thanks!

This answer contains spoilers… (view spoiler)[Thank you for your question. I cannot call myself a novelist, write historical fiction and ignore crucial historical facts such as Mexico's deep social and racial diversity. I even wanted to underscore them because they marked us and still do. In other words: I cannot write Espiricueta as a white agrarist southern campesino with a perfect life with no scars, no pain, no hate. I cannot write the Morales' as the evil oppressors of the campesino. Why? Because they are northeasteners, as simple as that. It just didn't exist. Breaking with traditional, official Mexican history, I invite the reader to look at the landowners' viewpoint (very risky in this manichaean country of mine). It's a story that is never included in Mexico's official history, which is always told with such partiality (rich=evil / poor=good) that it never includes the reality (social, ideological, political or racial) of the northeast. FACT: here, there were no indigenous people at the time: the landowners and their workers, the rich and the poor were white but most especially, did not have the same history of oppression as the south. FACT: since the 16th century, life was ever hard and dangerous in the northeast, so the locals learned to survive through solidarity, taking care of each other, having each other's backs. FACT: by 1910 (Mex Revolution) there was advanced social and labour justice here that definitely didn't exist in the rest of Mexico or even in the US (your robber barons were still abusing all the Europeans coming in to work in industry). FACT: contrary to the south, the rich and the poor in the northeast were free to come and go, buy land or start their own business, and the land and business owners would be obliged to pay fairly, educate and take care of their employees and their families; such was the culture. That spirit is what I wanted the Morales' to symbolize. Not that they were perfect, just that they did what they traditionally and historically knew to do. It was not the same in the south (and still isn't), and that is a painful and ancestral truth Espiricueta symbolizes. What I did in the novel was confront and contrast two truths that coexisted then and now. And also tell the story of the real losers in that war (also ever ignored). FACT: Much like Francisco, many landowners in Linares and the region died at the hands of the agraristas such as fictional Espiricueta. Their families ended up having to leave their ancestral lands and cede them to the agraristas. So it is fact, even in this fiction, that someone like Espiricueta would represent the natural but dangerous antagonist for these northeasteners who, for the first time in 100 years (now 110), got their story told.
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