Malas

Set in the fictional border town of La Cienega, Texas, the novel alternates between two narrators across two timelines: Pilar Aguirre, a young Mexican bride in the early 1950s, and Lulu Muñoz, a rebellious 14-year-old in 1994. Their lives are bound by a devastating family secret. The novel opens with Pilar recalling how she fell in love at 15 with José Alfredo, a daring young charro, a Mexican horseman, at a rodeo. An illegitimate daughter whose father acknowledged her only in private, Pilar was sent away to marry José Alfredo.

In 1951, Pilar is eight months pregnant and living in a house José Alfredo purchased on Loma Negra, a remote hilltop lacking running water that isolates her from her closest friend and former landlady, Romi Muñoz. One afternoon, an old woman wearing a mantilla, a black lace head covering, claims to be José Alfredo's wife and throws dirt in Pilar's face before Romi chases her away. José Alfredo denies knowing the woman. Later, at a neighborhood girl's quinceañera, a traditional coming-of-age celebration, Pilar's water breaks while dancing with José Alfredo, and they rush to the hospital.

The birth is traumatic. Nurses at the only hospital serving Mexicans drug Pilar against her will and strap her to the bed. She wakes to learn her daughter, Alondra, was stillborn. José Alfredo reveals he paid the hospital to cremate the infant because he could not afford the funeral home fees after spending his savings on the house. Pilar is shattered. A dull, abiding anger takes root in her.

Over the following months, with Romi's help, Pilar learns to drive and follows José Alfredo from work. She discovers him teaching charro skills to Doctor Allen, the Anglo physician who delivered Alondra, to pay off the remaining hospital debt. Pilar is furious, but Romi counsels her to let it go.

The couple tentatively reconcile. José Alfredo invites Pilar and their five-year-old son, Joselito, to see horses he is training at a rodeo ground across the border. During the visit, Joselito disturbs a wasp swarm, the horses bolt, and the boy's neck is broken. Pilar blames José Alfredo and the old woman's curse for both children's deaths. Their marriage disintegrates into silence. Pilar hides the fact that she is pregnant again. José Alfredo finishes the house, then vanishes one morning, leaving money and the deed on the kitchen table. Pilar cuts off contact with everyone, including Romi.

What follows is revealed later in the novel: Pilar, consumed by grief, carries her newborn son to the Rio Grande one night, intending to drown him. She wades into the river but cannot do it and leaves the baby in the bulrushes on the bank. Romi, who has secretly followed her, finds the child and raises him as her own son, Julio Muñoz. Romi never speaks to Pilar again.

The narrative shifts to 1994. Lulu Muñoz is a sharp, defiant girl approaching her 15th birthday. Her father, Jules (the same Julio that Pilar abandoned), is a controlling, hard-drinking single parent who insists on throwing Lulu a quinceañera. Lulu's mother, Nayeli, was killed in a motorcycle accident eight years earlier, and Jules has never recovered. He carries on an affair with a married woman named Margarita, whose husband Lulu believes killed her beloved dog in retaliation. Lulu's grandmother, Romi, now in her late 80s, is the family's anchor.

When Romi dies, Lulu is not home. She has sneaked out with Ernie Vega, a musician friend. At a lake, Lulu swims dangerously far in the cold water, and Ernie rescues her. The next morning, Lulu finds Romi dead and is consumed by guilt, convinced her grandmother traded her life for Lulu's.

At the funeral, a woman in a yellow silk scarf approaches Romi's coffin and declares Romi was her best friend. Lulu's father is visibly afraid. Tía Yoli, Jules's older sister, orders the woman out. Lulu resolves to find the stranger and learn Romi's secrets.

Lulu visits Pilar on Loma Negra. Pilar, now in her late 60s, is renovating the old house. She is guarded but drawn to Lulu. Lulu proposes renting Pilar's garage as rehearsal space for her band in exchange for cleaning it out. Pilar agrees, deciding to stay in La Cienega longer than planned. A bond grows between them. Pilar secretly takes charge of quinceañera planning, commissioning a silver dress from a seamstress across the border.

Meanwhile, Lulu's band, eventually named Gato Negro, prepares for a gig at a nightclub across the border. The bassist finds an old red sneaker in Pilar's garage with a hand-drawn black cat on it and adopts the image as the band's logo, not knowing it belonged to Jules during the 1968 Chicano movement. The band's first show, mixing punk covers with conjunto norteño, northern Mexican accordion-driven dance music, is a success. Pilar attends and is startled to realize the nightclub sits on the former grounds of the ranch where Joselito died.

The revelation comes when Pilar shows Lulu her photo album. Lulu sees the unmistakable resemblance between José Alfredo and her own father. Pilar is her biological grandmother; Jules is the baby abandoned by the river, raised by Romi. Lulu screams at Pilar and flees. Pilar breaks down, insisting she tried to reclaim him but Romi refused.

When Jules discovers Lulu's Gato Negro T-shirt, the Black Cat imagery triggers his buried trauma from 1968, when Felix "El Gato" Gutierrez, a young Chicano activist, was killed during unrest at a local shoe factory. Jules slaps Lulu for the first time and confiscates her belongings. Tía Yoli arranges for Lulu to move to Houston. On the night of her quinceañera, Lulu makes her choice: She puts on her Selena T-shirt, pulls on her father's leather jacket, pushes his Harley out of the workshop, and rides with her best friend, Marina, to a Selena concert instead. At the abandoned quinceañera, Pilar appears in a red velvet gown and plumed mask. Jules confronts her; she removes her mask and says his name. He collapses from a heart attack.

Jules survives. From his hospital bed, he tells Lulu he is sending her to Houston because he is the problem, not her. He confesses his involvement with the Black Cats, a Chicano activist group that supported El Gato, the night El Gato died and acknowledges that Pilar saved him for Romi's sake. Lulu overhears Yoli tell a friend the truth about the old woman who confronted Pilar decades ago: Yoli later saw the same woman at a bakery, accusing a teenage boy of being her husband. The woman had a mental health condition and was known in the community. The curse Pilar believed destroyed her family was never real.

Lulu returns to Loma Negra one final time. The house is for sale. Pilar tells Lulu that Jules is her penance, that she could not make peace with him as Romi asked, but she could help Lulu. Lulu gives Pilar her quinceañera portrait and retrieves her guitar. Pilar clutches the portrait, weeping, and calls Lulu mija, my daughter. Walking home with Marina, Lulu throws a grito, a piercing cry of triumph, into the evening air. A startled man yells from his yard. The two girls run, laughing, toward home.