When Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez saw coverage of the film Oppenheimer last summer, a reference to the test site of the first nuclear bomb as an “near-desolote stretch” of land particularly bothered her.
Valdes-Rodriguez knew her family history disproved that particular assertion. Her mother was 18 months old when the United States government dropped the bomb 60 miles away. Out of 21 people in her mother’s graduating class, 17 developed leukemia from the radioactive rain that fell on her town afterward.
“(My great-grandfather) came home and said the sun came up twice that day,” she told Latina Media Co, “and he didn’t understand it.”
Where Rabbits Gathered is Valdes-Rodriguez’s contribution to a more accurate history of her hometown of Los Alamos, New Mexico. This novel, told through the first-born daughters of a family, is the first in a four-novel saga based on her ancestral lineage.
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez said a historical novel is the only way to accurately tell the story of where she grew up, as fiction can convey emotional and psychological truths left out of non-fiction narratives.
“You look at the news from the Charles Dickens era, you’ll see newspapers and magazines presenting child labor as perfectly normal and acceptable,” the author of The Dirty Girls Social Club said, “But you have to go to Charles Dickens novels to experience what child labor and debtor’s prisons were like.”
Where Rabbits Gathered is the first novel for Valdes-Rodriguez’s new publishing company, Tomé Hill Press. She named after a sacred hill in New Mexico and will release its second book, by author Katherine Ortega Courtney, later this year.
Each book in the saga will tell one century of the history of Los Alamos. Where Rabbits Gathered starts ten years before Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate’s (“the Elon Musk of his time,” according to Valdes-Rodriguez) expedition terrorizes and displaces the Tewa. The story ends with the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, in which Puebloan people drove out the Spanish.
Valdes-Rodriguez tells the story from diverse perspectives such as North Star, a mother who goes to great lengths to protect her children from the colonizers, to Mountain Coyote, who was abandoned by his mother for being born with a club foot. On the side of the conquistadores, there is Isabél de Olvera, a Black woman who travels surreptitiously with her lesbian partner, and Oñate himself, who Valdes-Rodriguez said she had a great time mocking through her prose.
All of these characters are based on ancestors in the family tree of Valdes-Rodriguez. She is the direct descendant of de Oñate’s sisters and members of the Tewa and Cicuye people of modern-day New Mexico.
Before writing, Valdes-Rodriguez visited the Puye Cliffs, one of her novel’s main settings – and immediately felt a connection to her ancestors, that made her hair stand on end. While there, the characters came to her almost as an “automatic download.”
The idea of writing about a place, not individuals, was new to Valdes-Rodriguez. She devoured Tewa mythology in preparation and particularly found help in the writing of Puebloan authors Leslie Marmon Silko and Paula Allen.
While Where Rabbits Gathered might not be what established fans might expect, bringing out the complexity of the Latino experience has long been the goal of her work – something that Dirty Girls also accomplished.
Part of this complexity can involve having both conqueror and conquered in your family tree. “It does feel like I’m carrying both sides of this encounter in my own skin, reconciling the horrific things that my ancestors did to my other ancestors,” Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez said. “Spain has still not apologized for what they did to the Indigenous people of New Mexico, but I feel I can.”
