The Five Wounds

Kirstin Valdez Quade is a New Mexican author of mixed white and Hispanic ethnicity. She grew up in Albuquerque and now teaches creative writing at Stanford University in California. The Five Wounds is an expansion of a short story published in her 2015 collection Night at the Fiestas, and the two books share many common themes. Valdez Quade is interested in representing everyday life in northern New Mexico, a region known equally for the beauty of its landscape and the poverty of many of its communities. It is the ancestral homeland of several groups of Indigenous peoples and a region where the presence of Spanish settlers long pre-dates the formation of the United States as a country. Valdez Quade is interested in this history. She has spoken about the role that the Catholic Church played in the conquest of the Indigenous populations in what would become the state of New Mexico, and although she herself grew up Catholic, she finds the role of Catholicism in the violence of colonization troubling. The title of her collection, Night at the Fiestas, refers to the Fiestas in Santa Fe, an annual festival that takes place in September commemorating the “bloodless” re-conquest of Santa Fe by Spaniard Diego de Vargas.