Spoilers: With President-Elect Trump's mass deportation plans looming on the horizon after his Inauguration, concerns and issues involving immigrants are very timely.
Soon there will be mass deportations of undocumented immigrants which may cause economic and labor hardship to them and the country. The future Trump Administration is also considering deporting whole families regardless of citizenship, removing the status of DACA recipients and asylum seekers, sending the military and National Guard to enforce their laws, and sending immigrants to detention centers to be processed. If this sounds ominous and familiar that's because it is. Many dictatorships often used mass deportations as a means of control and dominance to remove the latest minority to be scapegoated and derided as “The Other”, an enemy.
These controversies are explored in S.Z. Estavillo’s mystery, The Serpent's Bridge, Book 1 of The Serpent Series. Besides being a tightly woven solid Murder Mystery, it personalizes the immigration debates by giving us three people who stand on opposite sides.
Defect Anaya Nazario just finished a case in which a long time family enemy is finally stopped. She won but is left physically wounded, emotionally battered, and longing for the alcohol that she is in the process of giving up.
A new case comes Nazario’s way when single mother, Esperanza Flores and her son, Alex witness the nighttime murder of a man by an unidentified assailant. Esperanza's employer, Millie Goodwin, a pastor’s wife, also becomes involved in the investigation when she starts to develop feelings for ICE Agent Eric Myers after his adopted son, Nicky is seriously injured by an unidentified party.
The three lead characters intersect with the investigation and the larger controversies surrounding it. They represent different facets of the immigration experience and pursuit of the American Dream. That makes the book surprisingly relevant for 2024 Readers.
Nazario represents the children of immigrants, those whose antecedents came from another country and made good and whose children are citizens. Nazario’s late father was the highest ranking Puerto narcotics officer and considered the best narc agent on the force. That's a lot to live up to and even though Nazario loved him, she still feels the pressure of filling that void to represent herself, her gender, and her ethnicity in a tough mostly white mostly male dominated field.
It's not a surprise that her flawed behavior is just as present as her dedication to her job. She is brave and protective of her suspects. She is able to make the connections in the murder investigation to arrive at potential suspects and motives but she is also packed with vulnerabilities and insecurities that this case tests.
Nazario falls down, doubts herself, and is caught up in her personal struggles as much as the victims and suspects. In one terrifying chapter, she falls off the wagon so badly that she loses consciousness and has to be cared for by her ex. She also has a dark past which says that she understands what it means to be a woman of color caught in a bad situation which could mark her for life.
Esperanza represents the recent immigrants and their experiences moving to a new country trying to fit in and be accepted. While she has all of her documentation in order, she understands how easy it is to be thought of as “an illegal.” It could be someone with a criminal history or for some innocuous reason like forgetting where they put their papers. She understands because she has been there and knows the struggle to leave one politically and economically unsafe country, move to a potentially hostile and judgemental one, and live there with very little.
Esperanza has very little in her life except Alex and it is he whom she takes pride in. He's a genius who is overly mature with a rational scientific mind. She pushes him to become an American success because she is unable to. She is very protective of Alex and often worries about him in a dangerous neighborhood surrounded by drugs, violence, gangs, and a potential premature loss of life.
It is Esperanza's place in society as a recent immigrant that puts herself and Alex in the situation that they find themselves in. They witness the murder but can't tell anyone about what they saw. It's a conspiracy of silence brought on by fear, mistrust, and suspicion towards the authorities. This conspiracy is the effects of the racism and xenophobia towards newly arrived immigrants and the American society that often protects and even at times rewards that behavior.
The third side in this triangle is Millie. She represents the white American activists who either help or hinder the immigrant cause. While one would expect she and her husband would be anti-immigrants, they are the opposite. They defend them because many are part of their congregation. They help them receive important services like food pantries and counseling. In fact, they help local immigrants so often that they weigh the consequences whether Eric, an ICE agent who attends their church presents trouble for them and their parishioners.
An early chapter shows the conflict inside Millie. She attended a protest defending immigrants and Eric arrives to not only uphold his position as an ICE agent but so Nicky can share his own personal story. While Millie recognizes that the agent is exploiting the boy's grief for his own purpose, she also sees how parental he is towards him and it moves her.
Millie has problems in her own life with an unhappy marriage and a troubled son with whom she is estranged. However, she has to hide it all under a veneer of respectability within the community. She denied a lot of her own anguished personal trauma and now she has someone whom she can confide in and fall in love with. Her affair with and empathy for Eric and involvement in the case causes her to question everything that she originally thought and believed.
The investigation causes Nazario, Esperanza, and Millie to examine themselves and their feelings towards justice, personal happiness, identity, racial profiling, and what it means to live in America. The issues raised in the book move far beyond a simple fictional murder and resonates in real life.
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