64 pages • 2 hours read
Kirstin Valdez QuadeThe Five Wounds
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Kirstin Valdez Quade
Kirstin Valdez Quade is a New Mexican author of mixed white and Hispanic ethnicity. She grew up in Albuquerque and now teaches creative writing at Stanford University in California. The Five Wounds is an expansion of a short story published in her 2015 collection Night at the Fiestas, and the two books share many common themes. Valdez Quade is interested in representing everyday life in northern New Mexico, a region known equally for the beauty of its landscape and the poverty of many of its communities. It is the ancestral homeland of several groups of Indigenous peoples and a region where the presence of Spanish settlers long pre-dates the formation of the United States as a country. Valdez Quade is interested in this history. She has spoken about the role that the Catholic Church played in the conquest of the Indigenous populations in what would become the state of New Mexico, and although she herself grew up Catholic, she finds the role of Catholicism in the violence of colonization troubling. The title of her collection, Night at the Fiestas, refers to the Fiestas in Santa Fe, an annual festival that takes place in September commemorating the “bloodless” re-conquest of Santa Fe by Spaniard Diego de Vargas. For Hispanic New Mexicans, this festival has great cultural significance, but for many Indigenous inhabitants of the state, it glorifies genocide. Because so many New Mexicans are of multi-ethnic origins and claim both Spanish and Indigenous heritage, the politics of the Fiestas are complex.
In addition to her interest in the historical interconnection of race, ethnicity, and religion, Valdez Quade is deeply committed to depicting everyday life in contemporary New Mexico. It is a region greatly afflicted by generational trauma, which Valdez Quade and her characters trace back to the conquest itself. This trauma manifests in myriad ways, but within the narrative of The Five Wounds, Valdez Quade focuses on addiction, teen pregnancy, and violence within both communities and families. She humanizes these issues. Her characters do not support problematic stereotypes or flatten the complexities of such interwoven difficulties. Her commitment to portraying these characters respectfully is self-conscious on her part; her writing also engages with how outsiders, even well-intentioned ones, can themselves reproduce problematic stereotypes and view northern New Mexican communities through a racist lens.
Valdez Quade is as interested in resilience as she is in struggle, and her writings parse the myriad, multi-layered familial bonds that tie her characters to one another and to their communities. Her stories are populated by complex people who are a very believable mixture of faults and strengths. She depicts personal growth, redemption, and the way that individuals come into being over time. Identity is not static within her narratives, and she illustrates the convoluted twists and turns of identity development through the way that characters such as Amadeo, Marissa, and Angel grow and change with time.
Las Penas, where The Five Wounds is set, is a fictional settlement, although many of the characters live in nearby Española, where Angel’s GED program is also housed. Valdez Quade has noted in interviews that writing about a fictional place has allowed her more freedom to shape her characters and their experiences. It also allows her to speak more broadly to communities in northern New Mexico as a whole: Since Las Penas is no place, it can be any place. Residents of all of the settlements, towns, and cities in northern New Mexico can see their experiences reflected in the fictional setting of Las Penas. In addition, since Las Penas translates roughly as “the miseries,” Valdez Quade is also speaking to the socioeconomic issues of the region, writ large.
Religious Context: Catholicism in Northern New Mexico
The fictional hamlet of Las Penas is adjacent to the real-life town of Española, New Mexico, which sits in the Rio Grande Valley, an area that is the ancestral home of the Pueblo people. Prior to colonization, they built various towns in the area, called Pueblos, four of which still remain: Ohkay Owingeh, Santa Clara, Pojoaque, and San Ildefonso. The Spanish began to explore this region in the 16th century, founding the town of Española officially in 1598. Within a few decades, the Spanish had established multiple settlements in the Rio Grande Valley, and the Catholic Church began to build missions—not only to serve Spanish settlers, but also to convert the Indigenous population. These missions became a vital part of conquest, and the “soft power” that they exerted over the Pueblo and other Indigenous groups in the area (New Mexico is also home to Apache, Navajo, and various other tribes) became key to Spain’s assimilationist project in the region.
Yolanda and Valerie recognize the role that the Catholic Church played in the conquest, and although their family is religious, they are troubled by the Church’s overt interest in suppressing Indigenous culture, language, and spiritual beliefs. Although northern New Mexico is a multiethnic region and still home to many Indigenous inhabitants, Hispanic culture remains dominant, and there is still a strong Catholic influence within northern New Mexican society.
The brotherhood in which Tío Tíve is active is another remnant of colonialization. Los Hermanos de la Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno, more commonly known as Los Penitentes, Los Hermanos, or the Brotherhood, is a group of non-ordained men who hold religious meetings, maintain religious buildings called Moradas, and attend to the religious needs of their communities. Their roots date back to the 19th century, when Mexico achieved independence from Spain, and Spain withdrew much of its clergy from the region. Small communities like the fictional town of Las Penas were in many cases left without a priest, and the Hermanos formed to fill those spiritual gaps. Moradas, although sacred, are not officially churches and thus do not require an ordained priest in order to function. The Hermanos worked to provide charity, mutual aid, religious education, and organized religious observations like the procession in which Amadeo walks during Semana Santa, the Catholic Holy Week.
The tradition of reenacting the Passion of the Christ, often called a “Passion Play,” is a theatrical reenactment of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion. Although certainly not exclusive to northern New Mexico, these reenactments have a long history in the region. In part because of the role that lay (non-clergy) spiritual leaders like the Hermanos have played in organizing them, such reenactments have not always been sanctioned by the Catholic Church. Passion Plays and the work of the Hermanos were seen by various Catholic leaders as vestiges of pre-colonization socioreligious activity. Accordingly, there have been multiple attempts during the history of the Catholic Church in the region to suppress the Hermanos and put a stop to reenactments of the Passion.
For participants and witnesses of the procession, the reenactments are a way to get closer to God by feeling (or observing) Christ’s pain on the cross. Many believe that in order to fully appreciate his sacrifice, they must literally experience some portion of it, in the form of physical discomfort or pain, along with him. The novel’s title, The Five Wounds, refers to the five wounds said to have been inflicted on Jesus Christ—nails were pounded through each of his hands and feet, representing four wounds, and a spear pierced his side. Although Passion Plays use rope instead of nails, Amadeo asks for nails in order to make the experience more authentic. It is this kind of extreme, performative religiosity that would have been frowned upon by the Catholic Church. Although the use of actual nails is not a common component of most of these reenactments, it is still a kind of “fringe” practice within much of mainstream Catholicism.
Cultural Context: Opioid Epidemic in New Mexico
Although opioid addiction has risen across the United States since the late 1990s, the opioid epidemic has hit New Mexico particularly hard. Since 2008, the state has had one of the highest rates of drug overdose deaths in the nation. Almost every county in New Mexico has maintained a higher overdose death rate than that of the United States as a whole, and some counties have even higher rates. Rio Arriba County, where most of Española is located and The Five Wounds is set, has the highest rate of overdose deaths in the entire state as of 2023, making it the epicenter of the opioid epidemic in New Mexico. Additionally, Rio Arriba County has been designated as part of a “High Density Drug Trafficking Area” by the US Department of Justice, meaning that the sale and trafficking of narcotics is as widespread as the abuse and misuse of opioids in the county. Because opium poppies are not grown in New Mexico, nor is heroin produced and processed there, the opioids in the region are mostly trafficked in from Mexico and distributed by various gangs and cartels. The violence typically associated with such distribution networks is more prevalent in Albuquerque, Socorro, and Las Cruces further to the south. Nonetheless, the human cost of opioid sale and use within northern New Mexico has been, and continues to be, devastating.
Heroin is a recurring motif within this text, and many of its users are adolescents. This aspect, too, is an accurate representation of the opioid epidemic in New Mexico, where high school students have alarmingly high rates of drug use and misuse. Many of the characters in The Five Wounds refer to heroin by its local slang term “chiva,” and Angel and other young people of her generation grow up surrounded by it. Opioid misuse and abuse are also part of the Padilla family’s source of generational trauma. Because their father and uncle both die as a result of addiction, Amadeo and Valerie spend the bulk of their childhoods in a one-parent household. The opioid epidemic in northern New Mexico has been so quick to take root in part because of this very cycle of generational trauma and addiction. Opioid abuse and misuse often benefits from the generational trauma born of violence and addiction within families. Opioid use, in turn, causes further trauma, which increases the likelihood of continued drug abuse and misuse within subsequent generations.
Although many programs are technically available to address opioid dependence in northern New Mexico, these treatment centers (particularly those in Española) are often overrun and of questionable quality. In Española, a set of abandoned buildings was recently converted into a shelter and transitional housing for people in recovery; however, Pathways Village, as it is known now, is not large enough to meet the needs of everyone in the area seeking its services. Too few outpatient programs are available. Even referrals to nearby programs are often unhelpful, given how many patients have limited means of transportation. As a result, success rates languish, and relapse is rampant even among those who seek treatment. The state is one of the poorest in the nation. It does not have enough money for all of its infrastructural needs, let alone to create the kind of systemic treatment options needed to fight an epidemic of this magnitude.
Historically, treatment programs have failed to address the root causes of addiction, especially within multiethnic communities such as those in northern New Mexico. Cultural factors play an important role in the complex process of treating addiction; the development and implementation of treatment plans must take these factors into account. The failure to do so has adversely affected the rates of those seeking treatment in the region. Additionally, many families in northern New Mexico fear the stigma attached to drug abuse and misuse and attempt to help their parents, children, and other family members “at home.”
Recently, however, an increasing number of people in the region, many of them recovering users of opioids themselves, are working to reverse the stigma attached to drug use. Their aim is to provide culturally sensitive treatment options and to ensure that programs are staffed with professionals who have relevant cultural knowledge. Although a teacher and not a drug treatment counselor, Brianna’s character embodies the risks of programmatic staff who lack basic cultural knowledge: She expels both Lizette and Angel for reasons that, if she were properly educated or had closer ties to the region, would not have seemed grounds for expulsion. That Lizette ultimately succumbs to opioid addiction is sadly reflective of how many such young people, those deemed “at risk” by programs such as Smart Starts!, fall through the cracks of a system meant to protect them.
