Author uses N.M. roots in tale about class struggles
Reading from ‘Faith and Fat Chances’ is Thursday in Española
Author Carla Trujillo grew up playing in the aisles of her grandmother’s grocery store in Las Vegas, N.M. She remembers the smell of the wooden floors, sacks of flour so big you could sit on them, the basement where they dried jerky and a “great, old-fashioned Coke machine” with ice-cold cans.
Trujillo’s grandmother extended credit to the people in the neighborhood who could only afford to pay her once a month when their checks came, Trujillo said. She was sad for them — and for her family — when the store was leveled through eminent domain to make way for a highway overpass.
“She must have been sadder,” Trujillo said. “That store was how she took care of seven kids.”
The experience of Trujillo’s grandmother was part of the inspiration for the author’s latest novel, Faith and Fat Chances. The book, set in the fictional neighborhood of Dogtown, details the rebellion of a motley crew of working-class Santa Feans who fight back when a developer threatens to wipe out their neighborhood to make way for a fancy winery.
Trujillo was born in New Mexico but moved to Northern California when she was young. She studied human development as an undergraduate student at the University of California-Davis and started writing as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
She’s been inspired by Chicana authors like Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga and studied writing with Sandra Cisneros, the author of The House on Mango Street. Trujillo’s novel What Night Brings won the Miguel Mármol Prize for best first fiction book published by a Latino or Latina author.
Trujillo lives in Berkeley, Calif., but visits family in New Mexico nearly every year.
“I feel very connected to the land, to the people and the spirit of the country,” Trujillo said. “It’s
always been a part of my life.”
Both the characters and the plot of Faith and Fat Chances draw upon Trujillo’s experiences in New Mexico. The unofficial mayor of Dogtown, for example, is a curandera named Pepa Romero. She embodies Trujillo’s memories of her grandmother and her friends smoking incessantly while playing bingo in the basement of a Las Vegas church.
The deeper themes of gentrification and the juxtaposition of tourism and working life are based on Trujillo’s conversations with hotel maids, waiters and one particular Mexican man who told her he couldn’t afford Santa Fe’s rent prices. He lived in Española instead. “I love the town, but I’m not afraid to talk about things that are difficult to address,” Trujillo said. “Gentrification of the land, that happened a long time ago in Santa Fe.”
Dogtown is fictional, but it mirrors the communities in every city with “folks who are underpaid and overlooked and mostly people of color,” Trujillo said.
The book also touches on the environmental side effects of the nuclear age — an issue Trujillo says has affected her family. Her grandfather died at the age of 39 from leukemia, and her mother developed thyroid cancer before age 20. In doing research, Trujillo thinks the early onset cancer was likely caused by dirty winds from Los Alamos.
Despite the serious themes behind the book, Trujillo wants readers to have fun while they imagine life from a perspective they may not have considered.
“I had a great time creating these characters,” Trujillo said. “Each day I’d come out of the writer’s studio and say, ‘Gosh, I had fun.’ I’m hoping the readers will, too.”