Curva Peligrosa, who entered this world in September 2017, has just turned seven. Who, you may ask, is Curva, and why should I care about her? If you’re also a Regal House Publishing author, you’ll want to give tribute to Curva Peligrosa as one of the first novels released by Regal House, now a well-established and renowned press.
If you’re a fellow reader, you’ll want to celebrate Curva just for her lust for life. “Lust for life” sounds a bit trite, but it aptly describes this character that made her way from Southern Mexico to the Canadian province of Alberta mainly on horseback. And who accompanied her on this momentous journey? Two horses, a goat, a dog, and two parrots.
And why did I create this character? Read on!
When six-foot Curva Peligrosa rides her horse into Weed, Alberta, after a twenty-year trek up the Old North Trail from southern Mexico, she stops its residents in their tracks. A parrot perched on each shoulder, smiling and flashing her glittering gold tooth, wearing a serape and flat-brimmed black hat, she is unlike anything they have ever seen before. Curva is ready to settle down, but are the inhabitants of Weed ready for her? With an insatiable appetite for life and love, Curva’s infectious energy impacts the townspeople. She has the greenest of thumbs, creating a tropical habitat in an arctic clime, and she possesses a wicked trigger finger, her rifle and six guns never far away.
Then a tornado tears though Weed, leaving all of their lives in disarray and revealing dark remains that cause the Weedites to question their foundations. And that’s how the novel starts, with the cyclone hurtling Curva’s purple outhouse into the center of town, Curva inside, “peering through a slit in the door at the village dismantling around her.”
From then on, we follow Curva and the Weedites as they recover from the chaos that follows. As the above synopsis shows, a good portion of Curva Peligrosa’s narrative takes place in the fictional small town of Weed, Alberta, about 25 miles from what is now a major city, Calgary. When I left the city in 1963, the population was 250,000. Today, Calgary, and its environs, is well over a million people.
While Curva Peligrosa doesn’t have autobiographical roots (I’m not Mexican American or 6 foot tall. Nor do I have a gold tooth!), it does have some parallels to historical moments in the province. When I was growing up in that area, agriculture was the main source of income. But in 1947, significant oil reserves were discovered at Leduc, Alberta, ushering in the oil boom that continues today. It brought job seekers and others to the area, eager to exploit the province’s riches.
I must have registered these developments subliminally, even though it wasn’t something I was particularly conscious of at the time. And as a young woman, I did secretarial work for Sinclair Canada Oil and other American petroleum companies. Impressionable, I thought the Texas accents signified power and prosperity and wanted to emulate them, faking a drawl whenever I could. It took me awhile to realize that, in fact, Americans were taking over our land and much of its oil.
My association with these (mainly) southerners fueled my interest in moving to America in my early 20s. Eventually I became an American citizen so that, as a single parent, I could take advantage of California’s university system and earn degrees (BA and two masters’ degrees) from San Francisco State. You could say that the exploitation was then mutual. I didn’t discover oil, but I did find its intellectual equivalent: higher education that I couldn’t have afforded in Canada at that time. However, the earlier image of American oilmen making off with our prairie identity stayed with me, surfacing in Curva Peligrosa and in Curva’s concerns over what she was witnessing in Weed, a town she had recently settled in. But none of this was intentional when I began the narrative. I had no idea then where it would take me.
In the novel, Shirley, an americano who is buying up nearby land so he can own all of the oil rights, represents the kind of southerner from my earlier experience. In Curva Peligrosa, he ends up being a villain in the old sense of the word where many readers will end up booing him. In turn, Shirley seems to embrace that identity, enjoying the turmoil he is creating not only in Curva but also in the Weedites themselves (I had created a kind of Trumpian character long before Trump had created chaos in America).
Like Curva, while I’m not adverse to some kinds of development, I do recognize that the word can be misleading. In certain cases, it might represent growth and advancement for the people involved. For example, the Blackfoot tribe in Curva Peligrosa benefit from the oil wealth. It allows them to build a museum that highlights Native life and also to open their own university. Under the leadership of their chief Billie One Eye, the wealth gives them an identity they otherwise had lacked, even though they sold out to the americano in order to enrich themselves.
But in many other instances, such development can deplete the land of valuable resources and drastically disturb the environment, improving a few lives but enslaving many, not unlike what we are witnessing today in America. This becomes one of Curva’s concerns. She also hates how life’s pace has speeded up, not leaving time for the basics, such as enjoying leisurely meals with friends and loved ones, fiestas, and sex.
I hadn’t set out to write a novel that harbored a political slant, but once I became involved in Curva’s quest, I didn’t have any choice but to follow along and express her concerns. In the process, I learned how seeds planted in our unconscious early on do sprout and bloom in our writing.
One thought on “Who is Curva Peligrosa? Read on!”
Interesting all around – hope to someday read. I AM Mexican-American (I grew up in Mexico City from 7 to 19, and had a Mexican grandfather), and was 5’10” in my salad days, so I’ll have some background.
You write what appeals to you.