Lady Without Land: Señorita Sin Tierra

Lady without Land is a story told in fragments about señorita who feels lost in and lost without Los Angeles. She uses classic literature and cocktail recipes to organize and populate bits and pieces of a life: growing up as a Mexican middle-class girl in a predominantly white suburb where neighbors labeled her family the ＂dirty＂ Mexicans; being bullied by an older sister on car rides from Los Angeles to Mexico, grappling with a father’s gambling addiction, and, later, his death; journeying on the continuous carousel of lovers the Pacific and Atlantic coasts have to offer. A shaken and stirred abecedarian, a sloppy yet put-together künstlerroman, about charting one’s life path amid cultural pressures and the grip of the ever-present past, the book can be read forwards or backwards and, with any hope, completely out of sequence so that no reader can read this novel the same way twice.

KRYSTAL ANALI VAZQUEZ is a writer and an attorney from Los Angeles living in Brooklyn. Her work navigates the roads in the México lindo of her family’s past and present with those above the border. She holds degrees from Loyola Marymount University, Georgetown, and Columbia Law School. At Georgetown, she was a fellow in the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. As part of her legal practice, she is a member of her firm’s team that defends the legality of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Lady without Land is her first novel.