Try to imagine a world with no internet or computers, no telephones or paved roads or electricity. A remote valley in northern New Mexico where only one person owned an automobile. This was the world where Carmen Baca’s father was a teenager-almost-a-man in the 1920s. Her debut novel El Hermano fictionalizes her father’s initiation into the Cofridía, the brotherhood of los Hermanos Penitentes. The book has been selling well in local bookstores and on Amazon since it was published in 2017 by Western Edge Press. Part of that appeal is no doubt curiosity about the secret rituals of the Penitentes, which have been sensationalized over the decades.
What is often overlooked, though—perhaps because the mainstream culture no longer has the vocabulary for thinking about it—is the holism of the brotherhood. In that remote place and time, los Hermanos were all about community—initiating young men into their role as brothers supporting each other and ministering to the welfare of everyone in the village. Life was harsh there, and much was expected of them, but they were supported by the underlying values of mutual respect, piety, and honor.
El Hermano is narrated first-person by José, Baca’s father, at age 15. It opens on Ash Wednesday, when José’s older brother, Miguel, is being initiated as a novicio. Baca herself didn’t witness the secret rituals in the morada, but she grew up surrounded by the culture. Her scenes set in the morada, where young José is alternately spying through a window and participating in community services, are the most intense and evocative descriptions of religious experience I’ve ever encountered. The adolescent José is nearly consumed by his fervent desire to become a novicio himself, but is told he’s still too young.
Carmen Baca taught English and history in high school and college before retiring in 2014. El Hermano was a finalist in the NM-AZ Book Awards. After that, she took a new direction with the novel Las Mujeres Misteriosas (2018, Lulu Press), and Cuentos Del Cañón (2019, Clarendon House Publications), a story anthology.
“After writing El Hermano, my writing turned to more of a magical realism bent because I’m endeavoring to keep our dying traditions alive through literature,” Baca says. “A big part of that is our folk tales, legends, the supernatural, and the paranormal.” Baca also has published 21 short pieces in online literary magazines, women’s blogs, and anthologies. She and her husband live in the country near where she grew up.
Ramona: You wrote that El Hermano comes from your memories of growing up in Cañoncito after WWII, when your parents returned to their ancestral home after serving in other states in the war effort. Did they resume the activities of the Cofridía at that time?
Carmen: The memories I used come from my life during the 1960s through the mid-’80s, when the cofradía was active. I used records my parents left and details I remember they told me about to make it as authentic and true as I could. In addition to memories, I used photos, family documents, and research, of course, to portray 1928. The brotherhood’s records document the years the cofradía was active. It ran from 1850 through 1986 but without my parents when they were away working for the war effort.
Ramona: How do you think life in the community after WWII differed from 1928, the time El Hermano is set in?
Carmen: By the mid-’40s, most of los Hermanos left the rural community of Cañoncito de las Manuelitas in northern New Mexico to reside in Las Vegas, exactly how I depicted in the book. The men held down jobs like school custodians, maintenance workers, auto mechanics—their lives of labor and military service gave them the skills of the trades to support their families. The women found employment, too, like my mother who worked at the local parachute factory and at the state hospital before I was born.
Many of my aunts worked as cooks for one of the school districts in the town. They enjoyed middle- to lower-class status in the poor neighborhoods or those closest to the poor ones. They learned what prejudice was, in some instances. (I’ve written about that, too.) But they also enjoyed the comforts they could afford. They had electricity, and most had indoor plumbing; and they had at least one car or truck per family. The women exchanged ice boxes for refrigerators, wood stoves for gas. They had grocery stores, a public library, parks, and clothing shops within walking distance. It was a different life, but it was a welcome one.
The men still returned to check on their adobe homes in Cañoncito to feed the livestock after work. I remember doing that with my dad. The entire family spent the months of the growing season there every weekend and summers. My mother used to fashion these matching duck-billed bonnets for us as protection from the hot sun on the days we bent over our hoes, weeding the extensive jardín.
The crops from that garden and the meats from the home butchering filled the freezers for the winters. Those spring weekends spent at Cañoncito also included the most busy season for los Hermanos and las Verónicas: Lent. Living through that always took me back into the past, to a time before my life began. Those are the memories I used when I depicted my father at age 15.
So the location where we spent much of our lives changed, but the traditions of the past were continued. Until los Hermanos died out, and my generation and those after mine allowed them to be forgotten.
Ramona: Was there a priest for the community in 1928? How about after WWII?
Carmen: There was no priest here, which is why los Hermanos took care of the spiritual needs of the residents who lived in the valley. They also acted as leaders who performed many services for the community. (There are still communities here in northern New Mexico whose Hermanos do the same, even though some have monthly visiting priests.) There has never been a priest in Cañoncito de las Manuelitas. In the ’60s through the ’80s when I was around, I can recall the times priests were called upon to perform mass here in the little capilla down the road from my house. We had a few funeral and wedding masses here, one for the celebration of Santo Niño, for which the church is named, and an outdoor one at the repres to bless the newly constructed dam for the acequia. (Represa is the actual Spanish word for dam; repres is our regional dialect.)
Ramona: I want to make sure I get this correct: it was the village of Cañoncito?
Carmen: Cañoncito is a rural community with houses along a ten-mile dirt road running through the little canyon for which it’s named. It’s not a village or a town on a map. It’s a beautiful scattering of homes (some of the adobe homes from El Hermano still stand and a few are occupied) with acres of meadows in between and forests on either side. Livestock graze here and there, and wildlife visit as they pass in search of water or food, since we lie in the middle of the mountains they call home.
The school where my father received his education from grades one through eight still stands down the road between my house and the church. I live where the José of the book lived while growing up and after marrying my mother. The book details the two places of worship in Cañoncito at the time: the capilla, the church where we prayed the stations of the cross, and the morada, the prayer house used by los Hermanos. Both structures still stand.
Ramona: José’s experiences during those weeks of Lent seem to me like a formal initiation, in which a boy is schooled in the responsibilities of being an adult, a responsible member of the community. And there’s the spiritual aspect, too, with José undergoing a profound experience of what it means to be a follower of Christ. It’s meant to be challenging, testing him in every way. Do you think our modern society has lost something valuable by not giving young people real initiations?
Carmen: The initiation of brothers still exists today because some of the brotherhoods do. So it’s not completely lost, either here in the Southwest or in many Spanish-speaking countries. However, because so many communities here have no cofradías in their areas, I do think the younger members, male and female, have lost something valuable from their culture. Those who are Catholic have their own versions of this in the church—confirmation. But the communities which no longer have cofradías have allowed a piece of our past to die out, and that’s never a good thing.
Ramona: On p. 63, during the most dramatic moments of the Penitente ritual, the names of their ancestors are called out and prayers are said for their souls. With people moving around so much more nowadays, is this custom still practiced in your part of the world.
Carmen: I have experienced this only a few times at Catholic funeral masses when the priest calls out the names people have told him to remember and then allows people to call out the names of those deserving of a prayer and a moment of remembrance. That tradition seems to have passed on as well.
However, in many of our homes, we still put up our own altars like our parents and grandparents in a corner of the living room or bedroom. Our saints, both retablos and statues, rest between pictures of our loved ones. Because we see them every day, they remain in our minds and hearts. We still light our candles and recite our prayers daily for our loved ones wherever they are.
This is one tradition, at least, that many households still cling to. I can think of another that I don’t think is done anymore: priests coming to the house to pray masses with their parishioners. I can remember up until the ’80s my mother called upon her priest to give a mass in our living room for one occasion or another. Neighbors and relatives came from the same block as well as from the other side of the town to pray in my mom’s living room.
Ramona: Are the Penitente traditions still continuing in northern New Mexico?
Carmen: They are few and far between, not in every rural community and hamlet like in the past. I know of four which exist just twenty miles from where I live, so there are some still active. In fact, after writing El Hermano, I went to pray with the brothers of one of those cofradías on Good Friday of 2017. The initiates still undergo some sort of formal induction, I am told. Since I am female, I can only answer for the one I experienced as a Verónica.
Ramona: El Hermano is obviously a labor of love in the memory of your parents. Why did you feel so strongly moved to write this book?
Carmen: It was after the brotherhood, and by necessity the sisterhood, disbanded in the mid-1980s that the religious artifacts of the morada and the church were distributed among those of us still living.
We met and collected the saints and candleholders, the retablos and the manteles, everything in the church and the prayer house. We had heard that those which were no longer active and which had been abandoned were getting looted, and the religious artifacts were being sold by thieves.
I remember clearly one prima taking a santo, another taking a retablo—each surviving Hermano and Verónica taking a relic to care for in their homes. There were only two Hermanos left of the twelve of my youth which I depicted in El Hermano, five Verónicas and me, the youngest. There were many artifacts still unclaimed, so I was asked to offer them refuge. A wooden box which had been locked for all those years came home with my husband and me.
Discovering what was in that box led me to write El Hermano. There are many books about los Hermanos out there, though none written as a narrative in the first-person perspective of an Hermano, much less the highest ranking one, el Hermano Mayor. I set out to be the one to write it because I could convey the longing to join the brotherhood like no one else. I had experienced it firsthand. I begged my father for decades to allow me to be the first female to join, but he kept to the rules governing the brotherhood, and I was always denied.
The longing the main character feels, the devout desire to become one of the brothers, came from the depths of my emotions. So did the profound and poignant effect of praying with that group of men on my life. I wanted to convey what it was like to those who have never experienced praying with los Hermanos.
When the entire group of twelve knelt in unison on the hardwood floor of the capilla, and my father or his brother recited the Stations of the Cross, the chills rose on my back and stayed there the entire hour of the service. Something about the doleful tones of twelve devout men and the words of both the prayers and the hymns was hauntingly beautiful and touched the soul. I tried my best to convey how special and how awful it was. Deep, heartfelt agony arose in those men’s voices when they recounted such vivid details as the number of lashes on Christ’s back, or the punches to the face the solders gave him, the pricks of the crown of thorns, or the open wound in His side. Every detail of every atrocity Christ underwent comes to life in those prayers with los Hermanos. No religious ceremony does that as effectively to remind us just what He did on our behalf.
At two different book reading events, a couple of present-day brothers asked what right I had to write about them since I had never belonged. When I explained that I wanted to convey them in a different light, out of my utmost and deep respect for them, because of how I felt about their society due to my growing up as the daughter of el Hermano Mayor, they accepted my reasons. I’m pretty sure the tremor in my voice affected their opinions. I’m always close to tears when I speak of los Hermanos’ effect on me spiritually. There are far more Hermanos who read my book and who went out of their way to communicate to me their appreciation of my depiction of the brotherhood. That today’s Hermanos approve means the world to me.
As the last surviving member of my community’s Verónicas, I wanted to convey how important the female society was to the brotherhood. We were the ones who assured their places of worship were clean and ready for Lenten services. We were the ones who made and delivered their food. We accompanied them in every Friday night recitation of the Stations of the Cross, and we participated in their processions and the few rituals they allowed. I still take pride in the small part I played as one of them.
Ramona: In your novel Las Mujeres Misteriosas, I love your concept of having three supernatural beings scheming and manipulating the life of a sensitive young woman, Rosita. Two of the beings are major figures in Hispanic folklore, Santa Muerte and La Llorona, and the third is the ghost of a relative. Not all of them have Rosita’s best interests at heart! How did you come up with this plot idea?
Carmen: I have to chuckle at the question of how I came up with any plot idea after El Hermano. After that book published in 2017, I honestly thought it was going to be my one and only book. After I finished writing El Hermano, I experienced a profound sadness, as though I were saying goodbye to those people in the book, my parents especially. A few months later, I came up with ideas for short stories based off some of the secondary characters.When I discovered I could bring them back in subsequent stories, the inspiration turned into my third book, a short story collection called Cuentos del Cañón. I brought back el Serpiente, but most significantly, la Muerte, and la Lunática, Claudia Cardenas.
Before that book was finished, however, I found a novella contest, and I decided to bring in la Llorona, who I barely mentioned in El Hermano. I wanted to write a story that showed her as the character I had read about. But I took the liberty of giving her limited powers while depicting the “true story” behind her reasons for haunting the waterways of the Southwest. Then, of course, she needed a nemesis, and who better than the two powerful women from my first book. Rosita came into play because I needed la Llorona to have a human plaything. When the novella turned into a novel, it became my second book.
I had always enjoyed mysteries, the supernatural, the paranormal, and even horror, but never did I think I could write one. Truthfully, no one saw that book before it published. No proofreader, no editor, just me—for fun. I had joined so many writing groups where almost every author was self-published, and I wanted to see if I could do that. While I panicked it would be a failure, I was instead thrilled when a few readers said they couldn’t read it because of the nightmares. That’s when I knew I could write a mystery, and I’ve been experimenting ever since.
