Night at the Fiestas

Kirstin Valdez Quade is a New Mexican author of mixed Hispanic and white heritage. The daughter of a desert geologist, she grew up partially in Albuquerque and partially in other areas of the Southwest where her father conducted geological research. Now a professor of Creative Writing at Stanford, Valdez Quade divides her time between writing and teaching. Night at the Fiestas (2015) was her first book, and she later published The Five Wounds (2021), a revision and expansion of the story of the same name that is featured in Night at the Fiestas. Valdez Quade’s work is deeply connected to the American Southwest, and she is interested in depicting different aspects of everyday life in this region.

Her writing is also powerfully tied to the cultural history of New Mexico in particular, and her work examines the people and spaces with which she first became familiar as a child in Albuquerque. New Mexico, is the ancestral homeland of several Indigenous nations, and it is a region in which the presence of Spanish settlers long predates the formation of the US as a country. Valdez Quade seeks to explore this history through her writing, and she has also spoken about the role of the Catholic Church in the brutal colonization of the Indigenous populations in what would become the state of New Mexico. Although she grew up Catholic, she is troubled by the connection between organized religion and the violence of colonization. The title of this collection refers to the yearly Fiestas in Santa Fe, an annual festival that takes place in September and commemorates the “bloodless” re-conquest of the region by Spaniard Diego de Vargas. For Hispanic New Mexicans, the festival has important cultural significance, but for many Indigenous inhabitants of the state, the event glorifies genocide. Because so many New Mexicans are of multiethnic origins and claim both Spanish and Indigenous heritage, the politics of the Fiestas are complex. Various other stories within this collection explore the fraught politics of religion in the American Southwest, and the theme also runs through Valdez Quade’s other works of fiction.

In addition to her interest in the historical interconnection of race, ethnicity, and religion, Valdez Quade is deeply committed to depicting everyday life in New Mexico and in the Southwest as a region. Valdez Quade has expressed a keen interest in producing detailed character studies, and both Night at the Fiestas and The Five Wounds feature complex, multifaceted characters whom Valdez Quade uses to explore themes related to place, identity, and family. She unflinchingly depicts abusive relationships, addiction, teen pregnancy, and violence within communities and families, humanizing these issues in order to suggest that the reasons for people’s behavior are always complex. By demonstrating that “bad behavior” is often rooted in complex trauma and tracing that trauma through multiple generations of a family, she creates well-rounded characters that resist stereotyping. Because Valdez Quade is just as interested in portraying resilience as she is in analyzing strife, her writing parses apart the multilayered familial bonds that tie her characters to one another and to their communities. The stories in this collection in particular are populated by multifaceted people who contain strengths and faults in equal measure. Her stories depict personal growth, redemption, reconciliation, and evolution of personal identity over time. Characters like Monica, Nemecia, Maria, Andrea, Frances, and Crystal wrestle with identity development and emerge at the end of their stories as complex works-in-progress.