Enjoy spooky season with Milagro Street series

With its talk of witches, a wailing ghost by the river, and a snarling phantom dog in the shadows, my latest book, Full Moon Over Freedom, is a perfect read for spooky season. The first book in the Milagro Street series, After Hours on Milagro Street, also had things that went bump in the night.

When I proposed the Milagro Street series in 2020, I didn’t know how popular spooky contemporary books were going to be. I didn’t make these books witchy for witchy’s sake. The supernatural element in the Milagro Street series is there for an important reason.

A reflection of my culture and family

I developed the Milagro Street series in the shadows of the 2020 election, when we’d elected a man who made brown people feel unwelcome and unsafe in this country and who had enough voter support that they might elect him again. I felt my family’s story, about Mexican-Americans who’ve lived and contributed to a small town in the Midwest for several generations, was an important story to make known. We’ve been here in the heart of the country, I wanted people to know. We’ll continue to be here and this country is better for it.

If I was going to tell this story about Mexican-Americans in the heartland, then I had to figure out what defined us. What defined my family, my culture, and my hometown, and what aspects of that would be interesting to share in a fiction novel?

My list of important and interesting details included the fact that so many of my family have committed to the same area for so long, the big family gatherings on Sunday after mass, THE FOOD (my grandmother was the best cook and I still dream of her tortillas, sopa, and frijoles), the dynamics of a large family firmly planted in the U.S. but with a reverence for their Latinidad, the interesting small-town folks with long memories, and the fascinating history of my hometown (contributed the first monkey sent into space from its zoo, retained many crumbling mansions from its oil-wealth days).

I also highlighted my family’s beliefs in the supernatural.

I wrote:

• We all know the cement plant is haunted.

• Multiple people in my family have heard and seen La Llorona along the banks of the Verdigris River. It’s not even questioned.

• The upper floor of my aunt and uncle’s house is haunted and the whole family has seen the ghost.

• My grandmother would cross herself as we passed certain places in town but then wouldn’t tell me why.

• The ghost cars out on the highway. Those ghost cars were why we never, ever, ever even thought about hitchhiking.

• Lover’s Leap out by the dam.

• Both my dad and great-aunt and uncle contributed stories to a ghost book about Kansas

• The “ordinariness” of all the superstition and supernatural. It just is. It’s barely even interesting, except if you want to tell stories to terrify the little cousins or your white friends.

It just is

When I sent the proposal for the series to my editor, her first, gentle red flag was, “Is this going to be a paranormal book? Are they going to be talking to ghosts?”

I realized then there was a cultural divide between how my people perceived entities on the other side of the veil and how my editor perceived them. To my family, that veil is very thin. We believe we’re eating the body of Christ at Mass. We believe those we lost walk with us. I grew up believing that God was a force for good who could be called upon when in need. He was a daily presence, thought about as a friend and mentioned often and readily. My feelings about God and the Catholic Church have changed as I’ve gotten older, angrier, and more frustrated, but it doesn’t erase the understanding of how many in my family think of him and the world of saints, good and ill-intentioned entities, and lost loved ones.

That they surround us and affect us is just understood.

When I talk about brujas and ghosts and cadejos in the Milagro Street series, I’m not just talking about witches and spooks. I’m underlining an important part of my family’s culture, a culture that is recognized in many communities of color. It’s a perspective that only someone who’s part of that community, who’s had the lived experience, can give.

“Just trust me,” I wrote back to my editor. Thankfully, she did.

Readers who get it

What’s been truly rewarding in writing about the supernatural in this specific, personal way is the readers who’ve seen themselves, their families, their culture, and their beliefs reflected in it. Booktoker Mayte Lisbeth, with 133k followers on her @mayte.lisbeth Tik Tik account, said in her video review about Full Moon Over Freedom:

“My main favorite thing about this book…is the way Angelina uses magic. It’s not the sci-fi fantasy magic that we think of. It feels like a magic that I recognize. Like the healing hands of an elder, the candle that people light on an altar. It is the magic of childhood monsters in stories and, like, the belief of that being real. For me, it felt so familiar and I love that the magic is how we explore this woman getting back to her sense of self.”

You can watch the entire review here.

I write pretend people and make-believe scenarios, but in the Milagro Street street series, I molded these people and scenarios out of a Mexican-American reality that we haven’t gotten to see reflected often in books or film. That readers can say “it feels like a magic I recognize” is one of my proudest writing accomplishments.

The best part of the Barbie movie

I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about the Barbie movie. As a young girl, I didn’t see myself reflected in the Barbie world and my family couldn’t afford the Dream Houses and Cars and Campers I circled in the JCPenney catalogue.

Still, I loved Barbie. I had two Barbies, a Ken, and a bed made out of a showbox and a tissue paper, and that was all I really needed for the first romance stories I made up, where a naked, amnesiac Ken showed up in a middle of a storm, “good” Barbie placed him in her bed to recover, and her bad evil twin Barbie (you could tell she was evil because of her cut hair and marker makeup) seduced him. I didn’t know what seduction involved. I just knew it was the basis of many of the TV shows we watched.

Seeing the spirit of how young girls interacted with Barbie on the big screen was a delight. But even more thrilling, from a personal standpoint, was watching Latina move star America Ferrera talk about the impossible standards set for today’s women.

America Ferrera is the physical model for Gillian Armstead-Bancroft, my once-perfect but now struggling wife, mom, financial planner, and bruja from Full Moon Over Freedom, and that she was the one outlining how woman are made to feel that they are never enough was an absolute triumph.

You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other people. You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of complaining. You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood. But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged….I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. (You can read the full monologue here.)

My entire writing career has been about creating heroines who show up on the page not caring about being “liked,” who worry more about achieving something meaningful to themselves than appeasing the whims of others. They have a journey, they have things they need to figure out, but fundamentally believing in their worthiness is not one of them.

These heroines have repeatedly been called “unlikeable.” Predominantly by women.

So while I enjoyed the movie and leaned into the fantasy of Barbie defeating the patriarchy, more enjoyable for me was watching a Latina heroine outlining the way it is and calling it bullshit.

My first Mexican-American romance hero

Justin-Johnson Cortez, my movie-star casting for my hero Nicky Mendoza in Full Moon Over Freedom

When I sat down to write my second book in the Milagro Street series, a series about multi-generational Mexican-Americans in small-town Kansas, I did it with the intention of making my hero Mexican-American.
 
This was no small thing. As of yet, I hadn’t written a Mexican-American hero. Outside of the books of my hard-working Latinx romance author friends, Latino heroes are missing. In the media we engage with, only seven percent of the workers (actors, writers, editors, producers) are Latinx although we make up 19 percent of the American population. 
 
We need brown heroes shown in our media. I’m thrilled that in Full Moon Over Freedom, I finally get to correct my omission.

Nicky Mendoza, my first Mexican-American hero

Nicky Mendoza, my hero in Full Moon Over Freedom, is the bad-boy-turned-successful-artist who’s returned home to Freedom, Kansas for the summer with a secret: He’d been in love with our heroine, divorced mom Gillian Armstead-Bancroft, since the moment he saw her across the lunchroom in the fifth grade. He never told the girl who was his best friend how he felt, not even when she asked him to free her of the burden of her virginity. Now adults, they meet up again in Freedom, both only intending to be there for a summer, and he is determined to help her without ever revealing how he feels about her. 

Nicky is a good, good man. I am lucky to know so many good, good brown men to base him off of.

My inspiration

I was the first grandchild of a huge multi-generational Mexican-American family all living in a small town in southeast Kansas, so I was instantly adored, not only by my tías, but by my tíos. They all called me Angie. I moved away young, so when I came back to visit, my Granpo Frank would take me out for waffles, my tíos Daniel and Jesse and Pepe would ask me how I was doing and genuinely listen, and my closest tío, Adam, would always make me feel so seen and interesting. My dad’s cousins, Danny, Robert, and Bobby were fun, sweet guys closer to my age who I always had a crush on. Younger than me, my cousins Casey, Ryan and Ross, and Michael have all turned into amazing men with amazing families. 

My dad passed away in 2015 and one thing my brother Roman said at the funeral was my dad’s smile was one you could see across the room. That was true. I loved my dad. Everyone loved my dad.

My cousin Favian Hernandez is an incredible artist living in Laramie, Wyoming. His astonishing paper mache animal sculptures, inspired by the piñatas he would make with his mom, are displayed in art galleries. I interviewed Favian about being a Mexican-American artist and, more than anyone else, he inspired the creative ethic of my artist, Nicky Mendoza.

Inspiration from Hollywood

Once I decided on the heart of my Mexican-American hero, I needed a real-world, heartbreaker face to attach to him. My family comes from the indigenous people of Guanajuato, Mexico, and that darker skin, dark hair, and shorter height can still be seen in us. I wanted that for my hero. But searching for a young brown Latino leading man made me realize the lack of them. 

Fortunately, I discovered Justin Johnson-Cortez.

Justin is an actor, director, and writer who starred in the groundbreaking western TV show, “Walker: Independence.” When I included him in a social media post, it turned into one of the loveliest moments of my publishing career.

Soon after posting, I got a message from his wife. He’d sent her my post because she’d been, in that moment, reading After Hours on Milagro Street!!!! It was as surprising and satisfying as being recognized in the airport.

Since that moment, Justin, his wife, and I have all become friendly on social media and I’m so grateful to them both for their enthusiasm about using Justin as a positive representation of proud, brown heroes.