The Rag Doll Plagues

The novel is divided into three interconnected books, each set in a different era and narrated by a different member of the Revueltas family. Across all three sections, the characters confront devastating plagues, wrestle with questions of Mexican identity and colonial exploitation, and are visited by ancestral guides: the supernatural figures of Papá Damián and a younger Gregorio, who appear at moments of crisis.

Book One, "Mexico City," is set in 1788 and narrated by Don Gregorio Revueltas, a physician to the King of Spain. Gregorio arrives in New Spain, or Spanish colonial Mexico, as director of the Royal Protomedicato, the colonial body regulating medical practice. His mission is to professionalize medicine by suppressing the curanderos (folk healers) and to quell revolutionary sentiment through improved public health. Traveling from Veracruz to Mexico City, he observes corpses and heaps of skulls along a riverbank, hinting at a mysterious disease.

In the capital, Gregorio finds grand architecture fallen into disrepair and streets teeming with illness. Father Jude, a disfigured monk whose nose and upper lip were sliced away by pirates, is assigned as his assistant and reveals that a devastating plague is advancing toward the capital. Unlike earlier diseases that killed only Indians, this plague strikes indiscriminately across race, age, and rank. At the Hospital de los Santos Mártires, Gregorio confronts it firsthand. The people call it La Mona because it leaves corpses soft like rag dolls. The disease dissolves bones and flesh, consumes entire limbs, and in its most advanced stages eats away victims' faces. No treatment cures it. Bodies burn in chimney stacks, casting black smoke over the city.

Father Jude's own history reveals the depth of colonial violence: He was raised by Jesuits, survived the suppression of pro-Jesuit rebellions, lost his face to pirates, and spent five years learning indigenous medicine from Mayan healers. He is the only person willing to treat the city's most marginalized people.

Three years pass. Gregorio improves the city's sanitation and expands medical training. La Mona subsides and moves northward. At the Jesuit seminary of Tepotzotlan, the exhausted Viceroy orders Gregorio to save Laurinda, his seven-year-old illegitimate daughter, who has contracted La Mona. Gregorio also meets Marisela, the Viceroy's mistress and Laurinda's mother. Treatments fail. Gregorio amputates Laurinda's hand, but La Mona spreads above the cut, and Laurinda dies. Marisela then reveals that she too is infected and that she is pregnant. As La Mona destroys her limbs, Gregorio and Father Jude amputate repeatedly to protect the child within. Reduced to a limbless torso, Marisela urges them to take the baby. Gregorio performs a cesarean, extracting a healthy girl baptized Mónica Marisela. Marisela smiles and dies.

Gregorio remains at Tepotzotlan, raising the child. By April 1792, La Mona's attacks dwindle and no new cases are reported. When ordered to accompany the disgraced Viceroy back to Spain, Gregorio's fiancée Renata arrives to bring him home, but he cannot leave. Returning to Tepotzotlan, he learns Father Jude has died in his sleep, the street covered with flowers in his honor. Kissing Mónica Marisela, Gregorio embraces Mexico as his new country.

Book Two, "Delhi," shifts to contemporary Southern California. Gregory Revueltas, a Chicano doctor and descendant of the colonial Gregorio, works at a medical clinic in Delhi, a working-class barrio (neighborhood) in Santa Ana, under Dr. Milton Flink, a Holocaust survivor. Gregory falls in love with Sandra Spear, an actress he meets at the Orange County Theater. Sandra's father, Bill, resents Gregory's Mexican heritage.

Sandra has hemophilia, a condition causing uncontrolled bleeding; blood transfusions save her during severe episodes. She and Gregory conceive, but she miscarries after months of bedrest. Their community rallies around them, including Doña Rosina, an elderly folk artist who creates quilted jackets bearing the Virgen de Guadalupe, a revered Mexican image of the Virgin Mary, and who serves as a mother figure to the local homeboys (young gang members). Sandra's career peaks when she performs the bride in Federico García Lorca's Blood Wedding at the Orange County Theater, but anti-Latino political pressure closes the play after six nights.

Sandra's health collapses. Flink diagnoses her with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), likely contracted through contaminated blood transfusions. People physically recoil from her, and even Flink grows afraid to treat her. Gregory and Sandra travel to Mexico. At the Jesuit seminary of Tepotzotlan, Gregory discovers journals written by his colonial namesake. A curandera in the town identifies Sandra's illness as La Mona, the same ancient plague, and instructs her to learn to laugh again. At a sacred ceremony, Sandra's pain temporarily disappears. Back in Delhi, Sandra's body deteriorates. Her parents visit secretly while she sleeps under morphine, bathing and holding her. She finally signals for everyone to come in. Her parents hold her hands. Sandra dies quietly.

Book Three, "Lamex," is set in the late 21st century and narrated by a third Gregory Revueltas, grandson of the second Gregory and a medical-biological environmental geneticist. He serves as Medical Director of the Lamex Health Corridor, the regional medical system of the Triple Alliance, a political union of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Society is stratified into Higher Life Existence (the elite tier), Middle Life Existence, and Lower Life Existence concentrations. The former US-Mexico border has been abolished, and Mexicans constitute ninety percent of the military. Gregory's assistant, Gabi Chung, has replaced her right arm with a computerized knowledge bank equipped with laser surgical fingertips. Digital presences of Papá Damián and Grandfather Gregory, whose personalities persist through self-descriptions entered into computers, accompany him during crises.

At Camp Pendleton Marine Base, Gregory discovers that Mexican soldiers from Mexico City have severely leukemic blood counts but no symptoms. When transfused blood from these soldiers heals a gravely injured girl at a disaster site, Gregory investigates further. In Mexico City, home to one hundred million people under a permanently contaminated sky, he discovers that the residents have undergone a genetic transformation: Their blood, adapted to extreme pollution, can cure lung diseases. The healing agent requires cross-gender transfusions, from male to female or vice versa.

Inspired by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Gregory conducts clandestine experiments. He enters El Mar de Villas, a Lower Life Existence concentration led by Don Antonio Pérez, a master curandero who serves as its Man-god, or sacred political leader. Gregory saves a dying boy with Mexico City blood. When a wealthy family publicizes the discovery, the Triple Alliance Directorate suppresses the information. But when the Blue Buster plague strikes Los Angeles, a lethal sea-borne disease that ruptures victims' lungs, the Directorate summons Gregory. He supervises a thousand cross-gender transfusions. Patients improve, but desperate crowds storm the treatment centers and soldiers fire on them.

Gregory is brought to Elena Tarn, the ruling head of the Triple Alliance, to treat her dying daughter. The transfusion succeeds, but Gregory discovers that Elena Tarn keeps Mexican donors as captives, intending them to reproduce for an indefinite blood supply. Mexican blood becomes a massive industry: Families hire Mexico City Mexicans to live with them, and pharmaceutical companies establish breeder communities. Gregory reflects on centuries of Mexican blood sacrifice, from Aztec rituals through colonial conquest to cheap labor, and concludes that Mexican blood will eventually flow through the entire population.

Gabi's body rejects her computerized arm, and a malignant infection at her elbow signals the end of her career. She plugs the arm into a power circuit and dies. Gregory enters El Mar de Villas as first advisor to the child Man-god, Don Antonio's son, who is appointed to the Directorate to replace the deposed Elena Tarn. He declares that he is no longer himself alone but transfigured into all who came before him. An ancient tear, echoing the tears of his predecessors across the centuries, rushes to the surface of his eyes.