Summer of the Mariposas
Summer of the Mariposas
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Guadalupe Garcia McCall on Summer of the Mariposas
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The stories already living in herThe supernatural material in the book did not come from a library. It came from her kitchen table in Piedras Negras, from campfire circles in San Vicente, and from a specific maternal strategy at bedtime in Eagle Pass.
My mother always put us to bed by telling us about the horrible wailing woman, La Llorona, who would come get us if we didn’t go to sleep.
Growing up saturated in those stories left a mark she considers inseparable from her craft. When she explains why horror threads through her fiction, she is not describing a genre preference but a fact about where she came from.
There was no way I was ever going to write without blending horror into my stories. It’s part of my identity, part of what makes my writing authentic.
The other pressure shaping the book was a gap in what already existed. Speaking at the 2023 AWP conference, she named the specific community she was writing toward and what recognition was supposed to feel like for them.
I think it’s reaching young people like myself who did not see themselves in the literature and I’m writing stories for them about them and I’m speaking mostly to the Hispanic community, the marginalized groups that have not necessarily seen their story, their juanitas, their mamas, their cousins, and the way we live on the border. So I’m trying to show them that these are their stories and they matter.
That phrase, “their juanitas,” is doing specific work: not “young readers” in the abstract, but the particular women and girls of a particular borderlands life.
Horror and hope were not opposites for her. She understood that for readers whose daily lives included real difficulty, a story had to carry both weight and a way through.
As a Mexican American writer, I want to write stories that not only illustrate our lives but stories that give us hope because, no matter how much horror we see or experience in the world, hope is always a guiding light. Hope will see us through.
How she wrote it
A narrator who refused to be containedHer debut, “Under the Mesquite,” was written in verse, and she initially tried to hold “Summer of the Mariposas” to the same form. The book resisted, and the form broke before the story did.
The story was too long to be told in verse. I tried giving it structure, but it just wouldn’t be reined in. The narrator wanted to wonder, reflect, explain, and I understood. My narrator needed the time and space to tell her story, so I relented. And I’m glad I did, because by allowing it to flow in that way the story became a pleasure to write. It came quickly and effortlessly, and that’s always a blessing.
The drafting happened in stolen hours. She was a working mother teaching secondary English in San Antonio, and the only time the house was quiet was after her children went to sleep.
When I was writing Summer of the Mariposas, I wrote at a hulking metal desk I bought at the thrift store for 15 dollars. It was old but sturdy, massive but also accommodating, and I lay on it and took micro-naps between scenes because I was writing mostly in the middle of the night when my children were asleep.
When the Spanish-language edition arrived in 2018, she treated the translation as a craft problem with a precise standard. A proposed word for “refrigerator” that she had never encountered in her life told her the translation had missed the target entirely.
I live on the border, I wrote this book for students in South Texas and on the borderlands all the way to California. And I wanted the Spanish to sound true to them.
The test she applied was whether a reader in Eagle Pass would feel fully recognized, not merely addressed.
What she wants us to sit with
An invitation across time and culturesThe book is structured as a retelling of Homer’s “Odyssey,” with five sisters navigating Mexican and Aztec mythology on a journey home across the Rio Grande. She was clear that she did not intend the retelling to displace the original.
When I wrote Summer of the Mariposas, I didn’t want people to stop reading The Odyssey—completely the opposite. After, or perhaps as, they read Summer of the Mariposas, I want students to read The Odyssey. I want to invite young people to find the commonalities, to make connections from so long ago and across cultures and times to our world as it stands today.
She also had a specific classroom outcome in mind: a reversal in who holds authority. When Hispanic students encounter their own family stories and border traditions inside a school text, something shifts in the room.
Summer of the Mariposas makes Hispanic students experts in the curriculum when they see themselves in the pages of this book. ‘I know that; let me tell you about that,’ they say, and that’s beautiful. That’s a blessing.
Years after the book’s initial publication, she reflected on what it meant that the book kept reaching new readers. The worry was not whether the book was good enough but whether it would survive the economics of publishing.
It’s reaching the children. It’s just more and more children are getting to enjoy this book, this odyssey that I wrote for them, that if it had been another kind of publisher and they might not have that. It might have disappeared.