Cemetery Boys

The novel opens with an epigraph from “La Martiniana,” a Mexican folk song: “I’ll always live, and my spirit will never die,” a quotation that highlights the novel’s themes around death and life (5).

Yadriel, the novel’s protagonist, is part of the brujx community. Brujx are people whose magical powers come from the deity they worship, Lady Death: Brujx have “The powers of life and death: the ability to sense illness and injury in the living, and to see and communicate with the dead” (7).

Brujx watch over the cemetery and the spirits of the dead. Some spirits linger after their death, bound by a tether to the human world, often a material possession. When these tethered spirits lose “the parts that made them human” and turn malignant or violent (7), Brujos “sever the connection to their tether and release them to the afterlife” (7). At 15, brujx go through the quince ritual where they are given their portaje, their “chosen conduits” (13). Often, men receive daggers while women receive rosaries, a traditional gendered practice that makes men protectors and women healers. As a transgender boy, Yadriel is determined to prove to his family and community that he is a brujo.