Chispa.” The Spanish word for “spark” is the title of the third chapter of Susan Straight’s Mecca. Brought on by the Santa Ana winds, “fire weather” in Southern California canyons sits at the novel’s heart. Straight’s evocation of a spark signals the inevitable losses that plague a state where people build their lives on the edge. There is no California without natural beauty and risk, and yet people have long sought opportunity in its apocalyptic landscape. Mecca captures the state’s singular, absurd existence as it raps constantly on the door of its own undoing.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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Readers follow highway patrol officer Johnny Frias, single mother Matelasse Rodrigue, and Ximena, a Mixtec woman from Oaxaca, as well as a web of other interrelated characters from the oft-overlooked working class, as they navigate the COVID-19 pandemic through mutual support and contend with racism, the burdens of work, and natural disaster. Delving into the state’s history of colonialism and slavery and its treatment of Indigenous and Mexican people, the novel considers borders, lines of ancestry, and family to be mutable. As one character says, “Mexico and California was all the same land till somebody made up a border.”
“It had to be one of the most beautiful places in the world,” Straight writes as two characters drive south on Highway 111. “A gorgeous series of layers and colors—the base of golden sand and white dunes, the silver and green ghost trees and smoke trees floating like strange baby’s breath.”•
Heather Scott Partington is a writer, teacher, and book critic. She is a regular contributor to Alta Journal and a board member of the National Book Critics Circle, where she serves as fiction chair. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in Elk Grove, California.
