Specters of colonialism haunt all of Europe's step-children, no matter how thoroughly they have mixed their blood or in which soil they have transplanted themselves. The US-Mexico borderlands that bisect Turtle Island experienced two waves of settler colonialism, with successive kingdoms, republics, and nations. Historical trauma can be transmitted epigenetically, and festers in the psyche and family as well as cryptically in social institutions rendered invisible by hegemonic processes, including formal education. Shantel Martinez and Kelly Medina-López invite the reader into our collective "shadow work," to stop silencing or burying trauma, to open its scabs and follow its scars, to begin restoring the equilibrium of "mind-body-spirit-land," of people in place.
This much-needed, multi-faceted survey illuminates the shadows surrounding our Querencias, our home-place finding in the borderlands. As much as we love our domestic geographies, unless the shadows are acknowledged, ancestors can turn from beneficent spirits to dangerous ghosts. The land acknowledgements that have become part of our practice of conscience are just a beginning. A phantom legion of displaced peoples cries out for more.
All the chapters except one reference the north, including Honduras, Mexico, and the Borderlands, both physical and personal, as one author speaks for all: "We are the border. It lies within us" (164). The outlying chapter locates another elusive mytho-physiographic line beyond Turtle Island, the Equator itself, charted by Ecuadorian-American Diana Isabel Martínez. The accepted Indigenous name for the other American continent from Panamá south is Abya Yala, which needs to be included in the greater LatIndigenous atlas.
The structuring of the book is deeply compelling:
Introduction. Rebuilding the Skeleton: Anticolonial Intersections with Memory-
Body-Land-Knowledge
Part I. Ghosts in the Real: Historiography in our Stories that Becomes Research
Part II. Hazme Caso: Memoir, Poetry, and Stories
Part III. Bringing the Borderlands Home: Public Discourses and Theories of the Flesh.
All anthologies are inherently defined by exclusion as well as inclusion. Monsters and Saints broadly includes ethnography, belief narrative, personal memoir, cultural analysis, and a range of genres of expressive culture including poetry, satire, fiction, photography, painting, installations, and even tile ceramics. The critical neologism, LatIndigenous, functions here, not as ethnonym, but to link geography to culture for the twenty-four authors. “Latina/o/x” identifies the authors with where they live and work north of the border. The term takes its place beside “Indo Hispano,” originally conceived by land-grant activist Reies López Tijerina, but distances itself from mestizaje, denouncing the homogenizing cultural programs of the post-revolutionary Mexican state. Personal and artistic testimonios from the southern side of the border recall and transform the traumas of emigration and assimilation.
In "Becoming Indigenous Again: Returning Home and Making the Ghosts Visible," Juan Pacheco Marcial recalls the painful institutional strategies of de-Indigenization deployed against his Zapotec and Mixtec people in Oaxaca, the most Indigenous state in Mexico. In the Salinas Valley of “OaxaCalifornia,” the price of adaptation is further erasure, until a family funeral calls him south. He realizes that the most important treasures of all are his cultural origins, and the gift of the Zapotec language that one of his grandmothers taught him. In "Iconografía Prohibida/Forbidden Iconography," Lizzeth Cecuatl Cuaxiloa, a ceramic artist of Nahua and Cholultecan origins, deploys the iconography of Nahua, Mayan, and Zapotec cultures through her striking painted tiles.
Two federally unrecognized US Indigenous groups in Nuevo México appear prominently in the anthology, the Piro-Manso-Tiwa tribe of Las Cruces/Tortugas/El Paso, and a widespread ethnic group of multi-tribal origins, the Genízaros. Editor Kelly Medina-López, a Piro-Manso-Tiwa, includes chapters that chart the demographic, cultural, and creative dimensions of her tribal community. Intrigued by his grandmother's designation of Mexicanos as cultural others, Eric Murillo “closes the circle” of his family's Indigenous identity, tracing his roots to colonial El Paso del Norte. In a hard-hitting poem “my baby wanted an el camino, that's real,” the tribe's Historic Preservation Officer Diego Medina satirizes the Chamber of Commerce marketing of the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the cultural corridor of the region. His jibe references the cool Chevy El Camino coupé pickup favored by lowriders. Other authors replace the well-worn camino with the more autochthonous "Turtle River," the Río Grande.
In “La Coyota Perejundia,” Moises Gonzales combines autoethnography, storytelling, and striking graphic art, to introduce the warrior-grandmother with her elk antler macana club that defends the people of La Merced del Cañón de Carnué (1763) from encroachment and exploitation. Land-grant-based Genízaro communities do not seek federal recognition because they have self-recognition, ritual, and self-government. Perejundia is a Tiwa Piro abuelo/a, an ancestral elder who oversees the Matachines dance-drama and teaches children to love their querencia. Gonzales is a danzante who has also played the role of Perejundia and speaks with the fullest authority of a creative participant/observer.
In "Legacies of Land, Cultural Clashes, and Spiritual Stirrings: A Testimonio of New Mexican Ghost Stories," Amanda R. Martínez confronts spectral monsters Coco Man, Cucui, and Llorona in her testimonios of growing up in northern New Mexico's Española Valley. Her account of Alcalde's Matachines tradition melds the ancient ritual dance with the eighteenth-century equestrian play "Los Comanches," enacted for many years on the same December 27th feast day. The defeat of the war chief Cuerno Verde in 1779 led to a peace treaty with the Comanche resolved by diplomacy rather than further warfare. Although her own mounted father participates in the play, Martínez erroneously identifies him as a "conquistador," a designation outlawed by the 1542 Nuevas Leyes de Indias. Autoethnography is subjective but more credible with a more verifiable evidentiary base.
Specters also lurk in family histories and become monstruous with the unspoken traumas of domestic abuse. In "And he Whispered 'Yolanda, Yolanda,'" Spencer Herrera valiantly recounts the tragedy of a desperate son shooting and disfiguring a father. He calls out his family ghost and puts him to rest for all. The cries of women in pain and in mourning are heard throughout the entire book. "Los Aullidos de las Madres" is a remarkable story Sarah Amira de la Garza recounts. The deep substrate of Llorona narratives in Turtle Island is explored from as many perspectives as there are reasons for her pain. As Brenda Selena Lara reports, she has many sisters like the dread Ciguanaba in Honduras who punish and haunt the perpetrators of violence against Indigenous and mestiza women.
Although La Virgen de Guadalupe and her pre-Hispanic sisters are invoked in many of the essays, the rich tradition of stories of the intervention and inspiration of saints is strangely absent. The anthology's title Monsters and Saints promises an exploration saints' legends and miracle narratives, but only Santísima Muerte is explored. The first element of her name translates "Most Holy," not "Saint." Any nuevomexicano or boricua santero can affirm that she is "santa" for her macabre egalitarianism, not because she has been canonized in any way. With her many nicknames, she is a classic memento mori, a reminder of what waits for us all. Ironically, like other folk "saints" such as Juan Soldado, Teresita de Urrea, and don Pedrito Jaramillo, popular devotions with all their appurtenances and vigils are lavished on her for her blessings or the hope for a "buena muerte," the most sublime way of dying, without violence or excessive pain, of old age and surrounded by family.
An epistemology of hauntings emerges from this mythical palimpsest. Cathryn Merla-Watson rereads Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek and reframes the stories and the La Llorona herself as part of a hitherto unnamed LatIndigenous Gothic tradition. In rascuache style theory-building, she merges Derrida's notion of "hauntology" with Chela Sandoval's "methodology of the oppressed" to render the neologisms, the "hauntology of the oppressed" and the "MeXicana Gothic." As a finale, Susana Loza applies the approach to the hit film/book series, Twilight, complete with white vampires and "vegetarian" vampires that help erase settler guilt with historical amnesia. In another keystone quote for the anthology, she concludes that “Consorting with ghosts, grappling with the settler colonial past reminds us that the past is never really past in a haunted nation” (262).
Monsters and Saints is a multi-faceted, breakthrough anthology with neologistic signage to mark its path, an invitation from Chicano/Latino/Hispano/Mexicano communities of scholars and cultural workers to explore the dark side of Querencia and acknowledge the spectral colonial ideologies that still vex us all.
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[Review length: 1376 words • Review posted on March 16, 2025]