Vampires of El Norte

Content Warning: This book contains depictions of sexism and graphic descriptions of war.

On their journey from Matamoros back to Los Ojuelos, Nena repeatedly says that she needs to get home. She refers to a location: the family ranch that she grew up on and feels a deep attachment to. Yet over the course of the novel, as Nena rekindles her relationship with Néstor and confronts the conflict with her family, Nena forges a new definition of home. She learns that a home is created through loving relationships.

At the beginning of the novel, Nena and Néstor’s definitions of home conflict. For Nena, home is Los Ojuelas: “every tree that grew between la casa mayor and the spring” (56). When Anglos try to buy it, Nena thinks they “could no more take [her home] than they could take the bones from her body” (55), showing how viscerally intertwined Nena’s sense of identity is with the land. To lose the land would be to lose her home. In contrast, Néstor sees Nena as his home, and he is intimately familiar with how easy it is to lose a home, having lost his parents before coming to Los Ojuelas. When Nena is attacked, he considers that “he had always known how fragile a home she was” (20).