After a disturbing confrontation with an aggressive priest, Althalia Cabrera's abuela Isadora has collapsed, and Althalia is arrested while trying to protect her. Now the young bruja—for the first time without Isadora's guidance—must attempt to summon both her innate strength and her years of training in the craft to try to save her family's beloved matriarch. But it may already be too late to take down the dark forces that seek to strip both of the Cabrera brujas of their power.

From the time she was little, Althalia’s abuela taught her about their culture; there was music, there was food, there was history, and then there was magic. The magic of the brujas. Althalia, along with her two companions, Dana, a were-coyote, and Chuey, a chupacabra, uses her abuela’s training to help and assist others from all manner of spirits, demons, hell beasts, and even priests who seek the brujas destruction.

After the sudden loss of her beloved abuela Isadora, young bruja Althalia Cabrera is desperate—if she can act quickly enough, she may be able to pull Isadora back from a cruel eternity she doesn't deserve. Going against both everything she was taught and the warnings of her family, Althalia opens a forbidden door to the ancient past and enlists the help of the Aztec death deities Mictēcacihuātl and Mictlantecuhtli. The connection supercharges Althalia's powers but threatens the balance she must maintain if she has any chance of saving Isadora without losing everything else she believes in.

Althalia Cabrera might seem like any other witchy Portland hipster whiling away her days behind the counter of a freaky occult museum, but there's more to her whole deal than a trendy pursuit of the craft. Althalia is a bruja by blood—the youngest in a long line of powerful magic users from a long-ago culture indigenous to Mexico. In her twenty years, Althalia has studied with her loving abuela by her side, supporting and mentoring her use of the family magic, and protecting her from the darkest parts of their practice's history. But just as Althalia's inner light and power begins to shine, the darkness of the past finds its way into her world and strikes a tragic blow, testing Althalia in ways she might not be prepared enough to survive.

Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Project is a national project to locate, identify, preserve and make accessible the literary contributions of U.S. Hispanics from colonial times through 1960 in what today comprises the fifty states of the United States.

Latinx representation in the popular imagination has infuriated and befuddled the Latinx community for decades. These misrepresentations and stereotypes soon became as American as apple pie. But these cardboard cutouts and examples of lazy storytelling could never embody the rich traditions and histories of Latinx peoples. Not seeing real Latinxs on TV and film reels as kids inspired the authors to dive deep into the world of mainstream television and film to uncover examples of representation, good and bad. The result: a riveting ride through televisual and celluloid reels that make up mainstream culture. As pop culture experts Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González show, the way Latinx peoples have appeared and are still represented in mainstream TV and film narratives is as frustrating as it is illuminating. Stereotypes such as drug lords, petty criminals, buffoons, and sexed-up lovers have filled both small and silver screens—and the minds of the public. Aldama and González blaze new paths through Latinx cultural phenomena that disrupt stereotypes, breathing complexity into real Latinx subjectivities and experiences. In this grand sleuthing sweep of Latinx representation in mainstream TV and film that continues to shape the imagination of U.S. society, these two Latinx pop culture authorities call us all to scholarly action.