A brassy bartender and a charming professor work together to find a buried treasure and save a historic bar in Lopez’s After Hours on Milagro Street (Carina, July).
Opposites attract in Alex and Jeremiah. How did you craft their differing perspectives?
I asked myself, what is the thing that makes them like two magnets bouncing off each other? Then I put the book together chapter by chapter, point of view by point of view, showing the slow evolution of understanding the other person. One of my favorite chapters is when Alex finally comes to Jeremiah and apologizes for her behavior. It really gets inside who Alex is. She’s thinking, “I don’t apologize to the world, but in this case, I was actually in the wrong and I need to let him know that.” I think that provides an opportunity for us to be sympathetic towards her. But I want to hold that off for as long as possible.
Alex has a complex relationship with her grandmother. Tell me about your approach to this dynamic.
It was important for me to show this big, boisterous, loving family, and I loved the idea of a family bar as this joyous, celebratory place to be. So, what was the thing that made my heroine not want to be there? I think that people who’ve read me more than once know that they need to strap in with my heroines. If you have a male hero, he doesn’t show up on page excusing himself for his strong points of view. I want to write strong heroines the same way. So I decided on Alex being at odds with Loretta, the family matriarch and this incredible woman who is loving and wise and stubborn and sarcastic. They’ve both let each other down, but in a way that doesn’t exclude deeply loving each other.
Alex’s family backstory hinges on the influx of Mexican immigrants to the U.S. in the 19th century to build the railways. Why this history?
This story is my family story. I’m third-generation Mexican American from southeast Kansas. Growing up we had piñatas at birthday celebrations and tortillas at these huge Sunday meals. I didn’t realize there was this whole heritage behind it until I went to college. Then, I took a step back and thought, wait a second, a bunch of Mexican Americans living in southeast Kansas for generations is different. And I looked up one of my uncle’s obituaries, and it said he moved here with his family to work on the railroad; he was a traquero. So I knew about the history for a long time. Then came the wave of anti-Mexican thought during the Trump presidency. The first time he talked about Mexicans, those “bad guys,” I thought, “Well that’s it, the country won’t stand for that.” But we did, and I’m still speechless years later. When I was coming up with this series, I really wanted to talk about who Americans really are, who we have been for generations, and who we will always be. America is a better place because of all the diversity within it.
