A literary heroine

Published 1:00 pm Wednesday, August 13, 2003

Island author Kathleen Alcalá literally backed into “Treasures in Heaven.”

The Latino writer’s third book – from which she reads Aug. 14 – took shape when she turned around to find herself face to face with the perfect material to shape her story.

“I was in the University of Washington library,” Alcalá said, “and I was wandering through the stacks. I turned around and there were all these books about women’s history behind me.”

Alcalá selected a book by Anna Macias about the Mexican women who had pioneered various fields in the late 1800s.

For Alcalá, who had a heroine in mind, but not necessarily a plot, the find was close to a roadmap.

“It was this amazing book about the first women who got into medical school, the first women lawyers,” Alcalá said. “I had known Estela would go to Mexico City, and then when I found the book, I knew what she would do there.”

Alcalá’s heroine sets out from her home in the north to find her lover, but finds her own life instead.

Escaping the oppressive social structures of 19th century Mexico – the Civil Code passed in 1884, during the regime of Porfirio Diaz, hardened into law the second-class status of Mexican women already consigned to live in the dual shadow of husband and church – Estela heads free-spirited La Senorita’s school for street children and their mothers.

“Treasures in Heaven” recounts one woman’s political awakening in 19th century Mexico, but the personal story presages that country’s 1910 revolution, and the novel’s political setting is never far from mind.

Under Diaz, the gulf between rich and poor widened as Diaz displaced poor Mexicans from their land and handed it off to increasingly wealthy “hacenados.”

As the Mexican populace migrated to the city, many poor women had to make an unpalatable choice – servant or prostitute.

In 1895, with a population of 12.7 million, Mexico had 275,000 domestic servants. By 1907, with a population one-fifth that of England, Mexico had twice as many servants.

“You could hire a woman for half of what you’d pay a man, and you could hire a child for one-third,” Alcalá said.

Out of such dire circumstances, alliances were forged between women of all classes, the writer learned.

“What got me interested was that it was these upper class women who formed an alliance with working class women to agitate,” Alcalá said.

“Treasures in Heaven” rounds out the award-winning trilogy she began with “Spirits of the Ordinary” (Chronicle Books, 1997), an exploration of Alcalá’s Jewish roots based on the story of her great-grandparents Pablo Narro Narro and Eleuteria Valdes Rodriguez; and “The Flower in the Skull” (Chronicle Books, 1999), a fictionalized account of her grandmother Rosa’s family, indigenous people living in Sonora and Arizona.

The paperback edition of “Treasures in Heaven” was published as part of a new Northwestern University Press series, Latino Voices, to showcase fiction and literary nonfiction about the hispanic experience in the United States.

More than 35 million Latinos have come here from Mexico and Central America, as well as Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and South American countries that include Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, and Peru.

Such a welter of diverse cultures may be difficult to take in, while their histories have been enmeshed with the United States in ways that do not make for easy reading – or a sound night’s sleep. Works like Alcalá’s fine fiction may also serve as remedial reading for Anglo America.

“I began writing as a way to explain the world to myself,” Alcalá said. “So much family history did not match the ‘official’ history of the Southwest that I had to become an explorer, an adventurer, an ethnographer and a writer in order to discover who we were and who we are today.”

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Bainbridge author Kathleen Alcalá, Field’s End instructor and advisory board member, celebrates the paperback release of her third novel, “Treasures in Heaven,” with a reading at 7:30 p.m. Aug. 14 at Eagle Harbor Book Company. The event is free to the public. For information, call 842-5332.