Jennifer Givhan sculpts vivid, inventive scenes, characters in 'Salt Bones'

The prologue of Jennifer Givhan’s “Salt Bones” prepares the reader for a mélange of related topics packed inside the Albuquerque author’s new novel.

It opens with this sentence: “Thick, noxious air burns her throat as she flees through the fields, mud clotting to her soles like leeches, one untied shoe after the other over the rutted vegetables.”

The person whose throat is burning isn’t immediately identified. But the prologue directs the reader to a percolating ecological catastrophe that pollutes the air, the rich farmland of El Valle (the Imperial Valley), the nearby Salton Sea, a large saltwater lake on California’s border with Mexico, and, of course, El Valle’s residents.

In a phone interview Givhan likens the book’s structure to a burrito.

The worsening environmental pollution — pesticides released into the air, toxic chemicals in the soil — are “the core, the ecological swan song. This is our outcry for help because of climate change,” she said.

Givhan links the environmental pollution of the land to the declining health of the residents.

Wrapped like a tortilla around the book’s core is a series of mysteries that’s been tearing the community apart — the disappearances of young Mexican American women.

Two of the missing — Elena, the sister of the book’s strong-willed protagonist, Malamar “Mal” Veracruz, and Noemi, Mal’s niece — enter the novel as part of the backstory.

Soon two more Mexican American girls go missing — Renata, a cashier at the shop where Mal works as a butcher, and Amaranta, Mal’s teenage daughter.

The focus of a community’s widening search for Amaranta and Renata dominates the hard-driving second half of the book. Readers will feel the tension that members of the Veracruz family experience.

On facing pages at the front of the book is a wide-spreading, three-generational tree of the Veracruz family.

Next to the Veracruz family tree is a smaller tree, that of an Anglo family, the Callahans. They’re one of the wealthiest, most politically powerful families in El Valle.

The Veracruz and the Callahan families have an unlikely personal connection through the Callahan grandson, Harlan, and Mal’s older daughter, Griselda. The couple have a sexual romance and are political activists through most of the book.

However, near the conclusion their relationship takes a deeper, disturbing turn.

Monster legends that are part of Latin culture also play roles, but of different degrees, throughout the novel.

La Siguanaba possesses the most significant role. Mal has visions of La Siguanaba, a horse-headed woman and shape-shifting figure in Mexican and Central American folklore.

The monster usually lures men into danger before revealing her face.

Here’s one example how Givhan injects La Siguanaba in the narrative: “(Mal’s) scream echoed like laughter. At the edges of her vision, the horse-headed woman glimmered like a mirage, stomping her hooves. She brayed as Mal pulled herself up and ran Benny all the way home.”

The other monsters that come into play in the book are La Chupacabra, a mythological figure that attacks goats and drinks their blood; and El Cucuy, a bogeyman that encourages children to behave. Cucuy, also spelled Kookooee, is burned in effigy at annual celebrations in Albuquerque’s South Valley.

The decades-ago disappearance of Elena remains a shadow that darkens the thoughts of the Veracruz family.

In this passage, Griselda is ruminating about the possible fate of Elena, her long-disappeared aunt: “… perhaps she’d been kidnapped, her body dumped, buried or chopped up and discarded.”

Griselda considers these other possibilities: “Tía could’ve been dead for 25 years — either by natural causes, an accident, an overdose, or murder. Alternatively, the land itself might’ve swallowed her, a coyote den or the swampy sea her final resting place.”

She comes up with another, hopeful though unlikely, option. Elena is living the good life somewhere on the globe.

Inside the home of the Veracruz grandparents — Abuelo Beto and Abuela Vero — there’s an insistent reminder of this long-missing daughter — an ofrenda, which is a religious offering, to Elena.

Givhan sculpts vivid, inventive descriptions of scenes and the characters who populate them.

Seeping into the book is some of the history of El Valle that provides readers with background. Givhan said that though the book is fiction, it is based on facts.

In one particular scene, Griselda is chatting with Abuelo while driving together.

Abuelo tells Griselda about the community’s transformation more than a century ago. In the late 1800s, an Anglo man with piles of railroad money, Abuelo said, declared the soil in El Valle was the most fertile he had ever seen. The missing ingredient was water.

Then in 1901, Abuelo explained, trenches were dug to move water from the Colorado River to Lake Cahuilla, later renamed the Salton Sea.

Farmers from the United States and Mexico cultivated small plots, some next to irrigated fields there, he said.

In 1905 heavy rains caused the Colorado River to swell, causing the Alamo Canal between the river and the lake to break. If the Anglos had bothered to talk to old-timers, they would have learned that the water in the basin had ebbed-and-flowed for millennia, Abuelo said.

Givhan said she grew up in the town of Brawley, California, in the Imperial Valley. Givhan identifies as Mexican American and Indigenous.

Jennifer Givhan sculpts vivid, inventive scenes, characters in 'Salt Bones'