FULL NAME › Luz Fuentes DeDios
AGE › thirty
GENDER › Cis female (She/Her/Hers)
FROM › Yakima, Washington
RESIDENCE › Laguna Street (Midtown)
OCCUPATION › Acting Owner of Los Gatos Taqueria
NOW PLAYING › Moment Of Truth by Gang Starr
trigger warnings: cancer, death of a parent, divorce
AEGEAN BRONZE AGE ( 3,000-2,000 BCE )
when luz is small, she hears the story of her birth a thousand times. she can recite it by heart. it is a perfect day in may and her mother dolores has been walking for days, tired of carrying around a belly so swollen with life that she is certain she could fit her own body inside of it. it has been five months since dolores has seen her husband and she does not think he’ll ever come home from some godforsaken war across the sea. the truth is that he never does–not even for his only daughter. donald cameron dies alone on the same day his daughter luz takes her first breath after an arduous labor in the back of an ambulance on the way from pioneer park to saint mary medical center.
dolores tells the story as if she was in both places at once. at her husband’s side as a fatal bullet cut him down like a blade of grass and holding her own hand as she pushed and screamed on the rigid gurney. luz thinks that her mother must see everything. it is that childhood belief that protects her from the troubles that follow her cousins like black cats and shadows. it’s different as an only child, she knows that her mother has only one person in the whole wide world and she must live up to her mother’s need to be whole.
next door, the abandoned house sits behind a chain link fence. dozens of stone animals litter the yard and porch and it becomes young luz’s playground. she digs in the dirt, unburying hidden treasures and her cousins laugh and call her indiana jones. the book of greek myths her father left behind is never far from her mind and even as a small girl, sole knows she will walk in the colosseum and excavate along the mediterranean. the excavations are fun and so is time spent with her cousins, but she can’t help being envious of her cousins’ closeness with one another. without a father, she wonders how she can ever have a sibling when her father is nothing but a cold, marble headstone.
grief waxes and wanes for dolores, who knows as much about suffering as her name might suggest. linda is a salve for old pains as they ease. the two meet when linda begins waitressing at the restaurant dolores cooks at. the love is slow at first–neither woman sure what the other wants–but it is built on a solid foundation. linda has a son, francisco, and soon the fuentes pair become of family of four. francisco and luz are close enough in age that the pair become fast friends–basketball in the driveway, late night action movie binges–they’re inseparable.
school is easy for luz, who is an avid reader and an energetic learner with a solid family to support her. she quickly earns playful jeering from her cousins for being a pocha as she works hard to fit in. despite focusing on student government and basketball, she is well regarded among her peers. she is the kind of girl that makes it hard not to like–an easy going, laid back girl with a jock’s ponytail and a sharp wit. the girl is made for something great and her mother works tirelessly to afford uniforms and ap textbooks. luz fuentes is going somewhere.
MINOAN PALATIAL PERIOD ( 2,600-1,400 BCE )
it’s not the dream she had far away in the esteemed halls of colleges like cambridge, oxford, or harvard. no, whitman college–so named for the whitman incident in which a missionary is forced to pay for his crimes and yet is remembered as the white hero–is just down the street from her modest childhood home. it’s strange, then, how different of a world it seems to her. the liberal arts college is not the place she belongs as she did in high school. it’s an entirely different world. she works in the cafeteria to offset the costs her scholarships don’t cover, plays basketball for the team, and has dinner with her mother every sunday if not more. it’s not a bad life.
the classroom and court are the places where luz feels like she can really be herself. pieces of her are lost in conversations among classmates that she does not relate to and she plunges herself head first into work and family, which is the most she’s ever known. when she finds her true calling, she’s paralyzed–they don’t offer a major in bioarchaeology. with the help of a couple of advisors, she makes her own–blending anthropology, biology, geology, and chemistry together in a blissful salve that mends even the deepest wounds gained in the thirst to prove that she can be everything her mother needs. her sacrifices will not be for nothing.
when she graduates, she feels a whirlwind sense of accomplishment. she is accepted to field school in crete where she can study the minoan and mycenaean cultures to her heart’s content. it is there she develops her fascination with bones and death and focuses her interest on funerary archaeology–a subject she will study at length at the university of tennessee’s bioarchaeology doctoral program. she can sometimes hear her father calling her and she knows that she must reunite the dead with their loved ones.
THE HEROIC AGE ( 1,600-1,100 BCE )
on a quiet, hot summer night she falls in love with another doctoral student a few years her senior. they drink raki and let the waves and sand massage their weary feet. they return to tennessee and luz feels her stomach swelling with the prospect of life. rodrigo is a warm heart and though he is not prepared for fatherhood he takes to it, like he does with most things, with gusto. if there is apprehension in luz’s heart it is quelled by the worry in her mother’s voice through the telephone lines–please tell me you are going to marry him, mija. luz fuentes dedios has never broken her mother’s heart.
nayeli guadalupe esparza is born, much like her mother, on a summer’s day and is named for rodrigo and luz’s grandmothers. she holds her so tight that rodrigo is afraid she might break her. the young parents find that they love nayeli enough that it doesn’t matter if they love each other half as much. it won’t be long before they find out that they don’t love one another at all anymore.
weddings and motherhood do not stop a determined woman. luz knows that women have always persevered more obstacles than their male peers and she is determined to not let her dreams fall by the wayside. their lives are not easy–both spend long hours teaching and learning while preparing their own research. dolores and linda move from walla walla, selling their home by the house with the stone animal statues, the train tracks and the cornfield–which is now a burger king and a dollar tree. she does sewing and odd jobs while she cares for her granddaughter nayeli with her chubby cheeks and bright brown eyes.
in their final years, the couple move to crete to finish their research in the field. both grow tired of working, living, and raising a daughter together and the break-up is messy. nayeli is five years old when they realize they can no longer make their relationship work and when the grant money runs out, luz is forced to return to the united states to finish her doctoral thesis with no funding and no job prospects. rodrigo stays on at the research center and there is no arguing that nayeli is better off living with a parent who can provide for her. luz is crestfallen.
it’s hard to come back home, especially when there is no home to come back to. while things fall apart in crete, mothers dolores and linda have moved to a place called boot hill, arizona to fulfill their dream of opening their first restaurant together. across the ocean and the earth, somehow they’ve all lost touch and even cisco doesn’t hear from them except an ominous, staticky voicemail telling him that linda has gotten sick. there’s nowhere else to go to start over except to search for a new home and pray that her mothers are okay.
THE MYCENAEAN PERIOD ( 1,300-1,000 BCE )
boot hill, arizona isn’t on luz’s gps, but she knows there are small ghost towns scattered throughout the desert and wonders if maybe her mothers found some hole in the wall place in the process of a revitalization movement. the closer she gets to arizona, the clearer it seems in her mind–the more she senses that she must get to her mothers. she drives on instinct. she drives on faith. she drives all night until the rising sun illuminates the sign to boot hill. it seems like the strangest thing in the world to have found a place without a map–to have found the place without a map–but the further she gets into the charming arizona town it seems like fate.
it’s been too long, luz thinks, because her mothers barely recognize her at first and, with linda’s deteriorating condition, the feeling is mutual. there are a lot of tears in the living room of the house on laguna street, but there is even more hope. linda’s fight with breast cancer is not over, but treatment is going well. the difficulty lies in how sick it makes her and how much time has been spent away from their taqueria. happy to reunite with her mothers and help, luz agrees to take over the running of the restaurant and thinks that, maybe, it will help her in the international custody battle with rodrigo. she takes over the day-to-day operations and management of los gatos locos, but continues to work on her thesis in her spare time. slowly, but she remembers how to breathe again it’s hard to wake up everyday without braiding her daughter’s soft curls and listening to a giggling tale of the girl’s dreams from the night before. she misses greece and, on her worst days, she thinks she might even miss rodrigo.
❝ i am still in the labyrinth, and i must be willing to get lost before i am saved. it is only when i abandon myself that i am saved. ❞
FACECLAIM › Lindsey Morgan
AUTHOR › Lucia
