Vampires of El Norte

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-6

Chapters 7-13

Chapters 14-20

Chapters 21-28

Chapters 29-34

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Definition of Home

Content Warning: This book contains depictions of sexism and graphic descriptions of war.

On their journey from Matamoros back to Los Ojuelos, Nena repeatedly says that she needs to get home. She refers to a location: the family ranch that she grew up on and feels a deep attachment to. Yet over the course of the novel, as Nena rekindles her relationship with Néstor and confronts the conflict with her family, Nena forges a new definition of home. She learns that a home is created through loving relationships.

At the beginning of the novel, Nena and Néstor’s definitions of home conflict. For Nena, home is Los Ojuelas: “every tree that grew between la casa mayor and the spring” (56). When Anglos try to buy it, Nena thinks they “could no more take [her home] than they could take the bones from her body” (55), showing how viscerally intertwined Nena’s sense of identity is with the land. To lose the land would be to lose her home. In contrast, Néstor sees Nena as his home, and he is intimately familiar with how easy it is to lose a home, having lost his parents before coming to Los Ojuelas. When Nena is attacked, he considers that “he had always known how fragile a home she was” (20). After this heartbreak, Néstor gives up on the idea of home. In life after Nena, he decides that “He had been foolish enough to make his home another person once before,” and he vows not to do it again (31). Meanwhile, Nena’s sense of home is being challenged from both without and within. When the Anglos approached her father looking to buy their land, Nena “hated the presumption that her home could be bought and paid for” (56). At the same time, Nena’s parents are pressuring her to leave Los Ojuelas to marry into a family that will bring them more wealth and security. Like her home, Nena is being traded like goods.

When Nena and Néstor reunite, they begin to redefine what home means through each other. They discuss Nena’s fears about what might happen with Los Ojuelos, and Néstor expands Nena’s view of home: “There is no home anymore, when the people you love are gone” (274). This forces her to think differently about what defines her home. If the land is her only home, then the people that inhabit it should not matter. However, she realizes that they do. Furthermore, after they return to Los Ojuelos, her parents’ attempts to force her to comply with their demands by threatening to deprive her of her home make Nena realize that tying her sense of home to a single place is constraining her freedom. Néstor is the source of her true sense of home, not this particular place. After the battle at Los Ojuelos at which they are ready to sacrifice their lives for the land, Nena realizes that “Los Ojuelos was the land that raised her,” but “she would give it up” because “home was this person behind her,” Néstor (356). With Néstor, she creates a new home on new land built upon their shared value for equality and freedom.

Connection Between All Living Things

Cañas emphasizes the interconnections among all living things through metaphors, characters, and supernatural phenomena. The novel demonstrates that harmony and peace come through embracing that interconnection, while pain and suffering come from exploiting it.

Cañas compares human emotions to natural phenomena throughout the novel. When Anglos first visit Don Feliciano asking to buy land or cattle, “apprehension circled over his shoulders like vultures” (5). His fear and concern are so palpable that it manifests as clearly as birds signaling death flying above his head. In trying to express the extent of Nena’s pain that Néstor left, Cañas writes that she “was a tree with its roots yanked violently from the soil. She was a bird without its flock, a colt cut off from the herd and lost to the chaparral” (94). By representing characters’ emotions through metaphors drawn from the natural world, Cañas both lets the reader understand the characters’ emotions and emphasizes their connection to the world around them. The characters’ thoughts and emotions are not separated from the natural world around them; rather, the metaphors Cañas employs suggest that their identities and interior experiences are an extension of it.

The character whose identity and emotions are most intertwined with the land is Nena. Nena feels deeply attached to Los Ojuelos and every living thing that exists on the land: “She knew every tree that grew between la casa mayor and the spring: […]. She knew which ones grew over her grandparents and infant siblings’ graves and which ones protected the carefully buried afterbirth of her siblings and cousins” (55-56). First establishing her knowledge of the trees themselves, she then deepens the connection by explaining that the trees literally grow with the nutrients from their bodies, intertwining the human and nonhuman denizens of Los Ojuelos. The interconnections among human and nonhuman lives form the core of Nena’s identity and sense of home, and that connection proves to be an important advantage when Nena uses her understanding and connection to make peace with the vampires.

Along with Nena, key representatives of this theme are the vampires. Vampires start as mysterious, evil creatures and slowly become just another animal connected to humans as all living things are. After watching the vampires be chained and hurt by Yanquis, Nena begins to wonder “if they are wild creatures, like wolves or vultures, creatures that cannot help but be what they are, and they are being used against us” (272). By comparing the vampires to animals, Nena can understand them. She thinks that the vampire would “feed as it had been born to feed,” but “that alone did not make it evil” (329). Because her scar tingles when vampires are near, she discovers that her scar connects her to them in a way that lets her communicate. Because Nena learns to see them as fellow living creatures whose natural drives have been exploited by the Anglos, Nena surrenders her fear of them and uses her ability to communicate to stop them from attacking her family. The supernatural communication Nena shares with the vampires symbolizes the respect and understanding she has for all living things.

Importance of Freedom

The importance of freedom is discovered and rediscovered throughout the novel. Néstor, who ran away from home to avoid facing Nena’s death, finds his freedom by refusing to be beholden to any patrón, overcoming the restrictions of class hierarchy. By standing up to her parents and rejecting their gendered expectations of her, Nena finds her own freedom. The vampires themselves, when given the choice between freedom and destruction, choose freedom. When Nena and Néstor begin their own ranchero, freedom is one of its fundamental truths. In each case, the characters must overcome both social restrictions and their own fears to seize their freedom.

Initially, Néstor finds freedom through emotional and financial independence. After running from Los Ojuelos because he believes Nena to be dead, Néstor finds comfort in the fact that he is financially free, not tied to any one ranchero or patrón. After the pain he suffers from losing Nena, he also rejects long-term emotional connections, maintaining his personal independence. For a time, Néstor believes that freedom requires loneliness, but he finds the trade-off worthwhile: “once he had tasted that freedom, hollow though it sometimes was, he chafed at the heavy yoke of the patrón and his son” (151). After he and Nena fall in love again, however, he learns that freedom from class oppression does not require self-isolation. He releases his fear of being punished for stepping out of his place in the social hierarchy and marries Nena. When he owns his own land, he promises vaqueros “good wages and never being beholden to unfair debts” (362). Having experienced the importance of freedom, he grants it to others when he has the means.

In contrast, when Nena’s class position allows her some freedom until she reaches sexual maturity: “Ever since she was old enough to bleed, she became something to be sent away […] like meat or salt in exchange for a powerful relationship, in exchange for more cattle or land or vaqueros” (50-51). Terrified of losing her parents’ love along with her home, she tries to be the perfect daughter at the expense of her own freedom. She makes deals with them in hopes of proving her worth, but she realizes that no one will give it to her if she does not take it for herself. She wonders, “Would she ever be the master of her own fate?” and decides that in the life her parents choose, she would not (317). When she finally decides to be with Néstor, she tells her father, “‘I’ve made my choice […] Now you make yours” (357). By deciding her fate for herself, regardless of how her parents may respond, giving up any leverage they may have over her, she tears through the impossible expectations they have of her as a woman and embodies the importance of freedom.

As she finds her own freedom, Nena begins to realize that the vampires are also being kept prisoner and deprived of their freedom. Nena begins to feel sympathy for them after witnessing their torture at the hands of the Anglos, suggesting that “they are wild creatures, like wolves or vultures, creatures that cannot help but be what they are” (272). Nena specifically has the capacity for empathy for the vampires because her parents took her own agency from her in the same way the Anglos take it from the vampires, and for similar ends: to accrue more wealth and power for themselves. In the decisive moment in which Nena releases them from their chains, the vampires leave. When given the freedom to choose, they choose not to cause harm.