Miracle Worker in Orange County

Review: Alejandro Morales. The Place of the White Heron. San Fernando, CA: Tia Chucha Press, 2023.

Michael Sedano

Alejandro Morales numbers among the most productive novelists in United States literature. Morales' historical novels set in Southern California have long captured readers’ imagination,  sharing details largely unknown to readers, such as the TB sanitarium in Sylmar and the brick factory in Simons (Montebello). With The Place of the White Heron, Morales weaves a compelling story set in Orange County, where conservative power pits itself against a majority minority population, mainly raza, and a central character who is santa malgré elle.

Political demographics and geography form a key element of the novel, along with numerous threads in Morales’ complex story that delves into small bookstores versus chain stores, mall culture, white flight and anglo resentment, academia, gun ownership, indigenous displacement and massacre, maquiladoras, femicide, ICE, and actual miracles. 

In this 300 page novel, Morales allows himself the luxury of letting  disparate threads take their own course before tying them together into a coherent whole that comes together at a conclusion that leaves readers hanging without a fairy tale ending.

It would be a disservice to readers to give them a neat package all wrapped up in shiny ribbons, not with so much conflict and ugliness, and the author’s understated delight at surprises, like killing off characters, or the implicit familial guilt of the central character ("Father, I thought, what have you created?" is the book's final sentence.)

The central figure, J.I. Cruz, takes her name from Juana Inés de la Cruz. J.I. has been run out of Mexico owing to visions and miracles that Morales only hints at. That she’s left her children behind suggests the severity of her flight to Aztlandia, Morales’ name for the cultural milieu Cruz  inserts herself into. 

Morales tempts readers without illustrating the events that caused J.I.’s exile to the land of her birth—she was conceived at San Diego’s Hotel Coronado and has degrees from Ivy League schools. Her father’s a Mexican capitalist so she’s not the stereotypical emigré. In Mexico she is known as la Santa Ilusa de las Grietas, an identity that J.I. wants to avoid, seeing visions but not doing miracles. In the third section of the novel, J.I. fully accepts her earthly sainthood, and Morales finally gives the readers the hinted miracles that make a reader go "wow!"

No reviewer should give away the novel’s surprises and plot twists and convolutions of how a person’s identity is forged by events and the people she surrounds herself with. The enjoyment for a reader comes from watching  how the author alludes to behaviors that become plot threads that take a few pages and chapters to appear, disappear, reappear and get developed.

The story unfolds in a complex of short chapters, some only two pages. Numerous epistolary chapters make for efficient linkages between J.I.’s past and her current setting, offering inklings of what might have been and could be again.

One of the more interesting stylistic features is a constant shift from first person to omniscient voice in consecutive paragraphs, sometimes in the same paragraph. Another engaging element is ample use of Spanish without any attempt to translate for monolingual readers.

This code switching may reflect the book’s publication by Tia Chucha instead of a big New York house. One character rants how big box booksellers stock a narrow list of titles, shutting out diverse ideas in favor of homogenized, acceptable intellectual outlooks. A small press like San Fernando’s Tia Chucha gives the novel free rein to be itself without having to fit into some hoity toity editor’s taste and narrow perspective.

There’s some outstanding writing in The Place of the White Heron. There are places where  the male author's feminine voice rings true. Several horror passages leave readers aghast at the carnage of massacres, murders, shootings, synesthesia of rotting flesh.  J.I.’s visions come at you with particular effectiveness. Sentences move subtlety and suddenly from geographical narrative to someplace in time-space continua.

In that moment, in the space the opening of the door offered, I perceived a perpetuity of images. I saw every face alive, every image possible, words thought and spoken I heard, an infinity of combinations of all possible signs that had existed, exists and will exist, held for an instant by my gaze.

If you, like I, dog-ear pages to revisit for expressiveness, your copy of The Place of the White Heron will bulge from so many bent corners. That’s to be expected from any Alejandro Morales novel—the author’s a master of expression, provocative ideas, historical research, and authenticity of place.

You can order from Tia Chucha directly, or order from an indie bookseller, like Santa Ana’s Libromobile. In fact, since a struggling Santa Ana indie bookseller plays a major role in Morales’ plot, buying through Santa Ana’s Libromobile is not only literary justice but a way to endorse the philosophy promulgated by that fictional Santa Ana indie bookseller!

https://tia-chuchas.myshopify.com/products/the-place-of-the-white-heron

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