ABSTRACT
When Mexican American novelist Kathleen Alcalá realized that her parents’ families remained silent about their cultural roots, she discovered faint and fragmentary connections to Indigenous Opatans and Crypto-Jewish traditions. According to recent anthropological studies, the Opatans of northwest Mexico and their once powerful culture have vanished, and the underground rituals of persecuted Jews who ostensibly converted to Catholicism are largely forgotten. In her interrelated trilogy of novels, Spirits of the Ordinary: A Tale of Casas Grandes (1998), The Flower in the Skull (1999), and Treasures in Heaven (2000), Kathleen Alcalá responds decisively to these findings by granting her Opatan and Mexican Jewish ancestors imagined presence through techniques of narratorial resonance. Employing chronotopical and metafictional narrative strategies, particularly in connection with scraps of writing “blowing […] like tumbleweeds” through the desert (Spirits of the Ordinary 235) and with photographic methods, she gives her seeking narrators the tools to respond to each other transgenerationally, thus enabling them to position themselves in their Sonoran ancestry and their own current contexts. Köhler’s chapter focuses on The Flower in the Skull in which three Ópata women, representing more than 150 years of tribal history, recount their encounters with the religious, ethnic, and economic repression of the Mexican state and the discriminations and violence directed against Indian women in the US-American Southwest. The novel reconstructs the cultural wealth and religious pluralism of the past, the interacting traditions of which still resonate with the narratives of the borderlands.
