In her novel, Garcia tells the intertwined, intergenerational stories of a group of women, starting in 1866 with María Isabel, a cigar factory worker affected by the bloody stirrings of Cuban nationalists’ fight for independence from Spain, and ending with two of María Isabel’s descendants whose fates converge with those of a Salvadoran mother and daughter in present-day Miami.

As the women’s stories progress, Garcia, who studied sociology and communications at Fordham College at Rose Hill, tackles opioid addiction, migrant women in detention, and the stories told and untold that shape their lives and legacies.

Hispanic Women uses both social science and literature to examine the changing roles of Latina women in society with regard to Latino men, motherhood, the labor force, sexual awareness, media, political and economic power, and women’s liberation. Using literature as a lens, students in Rodríguez’s course examine the structural position and changing concepts of Hispanic women in the Americas.

And visiting authors like Garcia help with this exploration. A few weeks before her visit, students also heard from Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, the author of Daughters of the Stone and Woman of Endurance.

During November’s hourlong Zoom session, Garcia, who has her own fond memories of taking a class with Rodríguez before graduating in 2007, shared how Fordham helped shape who she is today, her favorite part of the writing process, and why women figure so prominently in her work.

She also delved into the meaning of “salt” in the novel’s title. Though she was drawn to the word’s versatility and varied connotations, Garcia said she “looked at elements that kept coming up multiple times [as she was writing the novel], and salt was one of those. And it can mean so many things,” from the salt of the ocean and sweat and tears to biblical references.

Liliana Gutierrez, a senior in the Fordham Theatre program, asked Garcia about the nature of history and why she adopted a nonlinear, vignette style for the novel.

Garcia explained that such a structure ensures that the book has “that feeling of stories.”

“When I think about history, I think it’s important to always realize that we’re talking about a story. It’s in the word,” she said. “I knew that I didn’t want to write a sweeping saga that went into all the details of these past characters fully: I wanted glimpses,” like those you have of your own history.

Hannah Berggren, a sophomore majoring in urban studies and sociology, wondered how extensive the research process was for the novel, particularly regarding the intimate details that emerge regarding migrant detention centers and the experiences of the women held there. Garcia drew from her own experiences to fuel those passages, she said: Prior to enrolling in an MFA program in creative writing at Purdue University, she did some organizing work with women in deportation and detention centers.

Rodríguez said she felt that the “section on detention was one of the best” in the book “because you see this coverage in the media where people, or politicians essentially” drop in with platitudes, “but it’s only when you read your descriptions from the women’s perspective that you really get the full picture,” she told Garcia and the class.

Garcia, who also writes poetry and short stories, is at work on her next novel. Though it’s early stages yet, and she’s “still figuring out the meat of it,” she knows one thing for sure: It will center on women characters.

In Of Women and Salt, breakout novelist Gabriela Garcia takes readers from 19th-century Cuba to modern-day Miami, Texas, and Mexico, illuminating migrant mothers’ choices and the fractured legacies they pass on to their daughters.

As much as Gabriela Garcia loved creating stories when she was growing up, she didn’t plan to pursue fiction writing as a career. A Miami native, she studied sociology and communications, graduating from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 2007. She worked in the music and magazine industries and as a migrant justice organizer until she realized that writing fiction was all she wanted to do, all the time. She dove in, earning an M.F.A. from Purdue University, as well as several fellowships and awards that helped her turn her thesis project into a highly acclaimed debut novel.

Published in April, Of Women and Salt (Flatiron, 2021) was immediately chosen as a Good Morning America Book Club pick and soon became a New York Times bestseller. In it, Garcia tells the intertwined, intergenerational stories of a group of women, starting in 1866 with María Isabel, a cigar factory worker amid the bloody stirrings of Cuban nationalists’ fight for independence from Spain, and ending with two of María Isabel’s descendants whose fates converge with those of a Salvadoran mother and daughter in present-day Miami. Jeanette, a first-generation Cuban American, is Carmen’s only daughter. She’s struggling to overcome an opioid addiction when she sees U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrest her neighbor Gloria. Despite a tenuous hold on her own life, Jeanette decides to take in Ana, Gloria’s young daughter. Of Women and Salt delves into the betrayals and the stories told and untold that shape these women’s lives and legacies.

Of Women and Salt combines your interest in Cuban history, American identity, immigration detention and deportation, addiction, and social privilege. What fueled those interests?
I’d been doing work around detention and deportation for many years, and organizing with a lot of women in detention. I grew up traveling to Cuba most of my life, so that’s something that I’m always thinking about. I was also really interested in writing against the idea of a monolithic Latinx community because I grew up in Miami, the daughter of a Cuban immigrant and a Mexican immigrant. Miami is a city that’s Latinx majority—one of the few in the U.S.—but there are all of these divisions along racial lines, along socioeconomic lines. I was interested in portraying the complicated version of Miami that I know. All of those things were swirling in my mind, and I wanted to find a way to be able to write into all of those interests.

Which character came to you first? Did you feel that you needed to tell readers more of any one character’s story?
Yeah. It’s been interesting to hear from readers how everyone gravitates toward a different character. Some people really wanted more from the María Isabel story, or wanted to see more of Gloria, or really connected with Jeanette, you know? It’s just been fascinating how people are super invested in different characters. When I started, I wasn’t sure who the hinge was going to be. As I was writing, it sort of became Jeanette.

Why did you choose this multigenerational, vignette format for the novel?
When I sit down for conversations with my family, we’ll start on one thread, and then it’ll go into something else, and then it’ll go into a memory and connect to other things. I wanted the book to have that feeling of stories, of memory, of historical accounting—where there are these spaces of knowing where it shifts kaleidoscopically.

While men hover at the periphery of the novel, male violence and abuse is a central theme. Talk a bit about your decision to have that experience or fear figure prominently.
I was really interested in exploring women navigating these really patriarchal worlds, in the generational echoes, and also in how women navigate male violence. I wanted to center the women and I wanted to write against a lot of tropes that exist, like even the idea of strong women surviving. I wanted to show that, oftentimes, there’s a cost for that survival, and that these expectations of strength are imposed when what a lot of these women deserve is rest or care or healing.

I was also interested in the idea of immigrant mothers as perpetually suffering or sacrificing as the expectation. Not that the women in my novel don’t often sacrifice or suffer, but they’re also so much more than that. There are times when Gloria questions if she even wants to be a mother. I wanted to show the relationship between women as they navigate these worlds.

There’s the expectation that it’s really noble that women should sacrifice everything as a mother, rather than asking why it’s necessary to have to sacrifice so much of yourself. What is there structurally or societally that requires that sacrifice?

A couple of 19th-century literary works figure prominently in your novel. How did you choose which books to feature?
I looked into the actual books that were read to workers in Cuban cigar factories during that time. That’s where the choice of Les Misérables and Cecilia Valdés came in. I sort of imagined this character of María Isabel as finding her world cracking open through literature, through these books that are read to her.

At the same time, I was struck by how most of the books being read to workers were overwhelmingly written by white, European men or white, European-descendant men in Cuba. I was thinking about how everything that she is absorbing is coming through this particular lens. That made me think about stories in general and whether there’s the ability to reclaim some of that story for herself, whether that’s even possible, and how things are passed down and how we absorb things—from what perspective.

I wanted to point to the ways that things can be inherited, but they don’t have an essential meaning. The books come to mean different things to different people throughout generations. Preserving just one meaning through generations feels almost impossible. I wanted to point to some of that impossibility, too, in the way that we pass down stories and histories.

—Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Sierra McCleary-Harris.

They were at the start of the second volume of Les Misérables, chosen by a vote of rare consensus after the lector had finished The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The entire workshop had broken into applause at Notre Dame’s conclusion, for which Don Gerónimo, who ruled the workshop as though he were Notre Dame’s wicked archdeacon himself, reprimanded them. But the workers cheered when Antonio disclosed that he had in his possession a Spanish translation of yet another Victor Hugo novel, this one spanning five volumes about rebellion and redemption, political uprisings, love, one that promised to move and enlighten before an aching conclusion.

This had been the least contentious vote in all of Porteños y Gómez’s history. And now María Isabel spent the afternoons traveling far past the sugarcane fields and sea-salt-washed plantations to the hazy shores of France. In her mind, she walked the cobblestone streets of Paris, dipped her feet in the Seine, traversed the river’s bridges and arches by carriage like a noble. She smoothed a gristly leaf between her lips, breath drawn in anticipation as police inspector Javert recaptured Valjean, the escaped convict. She thought of escape, of recapture. She thought of herself. Of what it would be like if someone wrote a book about her. Someone like her wrote a book.

“‘A person is not idle because they are absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.’”

Antonio channeled Victor Hugo with fervor, as though their own labor, the rolling of tobacco, depended on his delivery. And in many ways, it did. María Isabel told herself that she, a young woman who ought to be home awaiting courtship, toiled in this sweltering factory because she’d been left an arid plot of land without a father or brother to provide. But she looked forward to each day, hungry for the worlds that opened as she hunched over her leaves, perfecting each roll and seal—news from the capital to which she’d been only once, announcements of scientific curiosities and denouncements of barbaric or dishonest plantation owners, travelogues from distant places she could barely imagine.

Also there were the gifts. She’d been on her way out and seen Antonio beside the foreman as Don Gerónimo read aloud the day’s production and quotas. Antonio had tied his horse to a post and fixed a saddle on its back, something María Isabel had never seen but in La Habana, where the gentry did not ride bareback as in the countryside. That impressed her, and perhaps he’d mistaken her stare for something of another nature, because the next morning a strand of violet bougainvillea flowers lay on her rolling desk. And then, before Antonio began to read that day’s news stories, he’d tipped his hat, looked her in the eyes, smiled.

She’d been afraid, of course—afraid that Don Gerónimo would see the flowers on her desk and call her out for indecency, perhaps garnish her wages or, worse, think her impious, increase his advances. Who knew what Don Gerónimo deemed permissible. His anger was of the untamable sort, unpredictable, without reason. He’d threatened her many times, once grabbing her by the back of the neck when she became distracted by a reading and slowed her rolls. He left finger-shaped bruises that lasted weeks. No man had defended her, not even Antonio. So she’d tucked the flowers down her collar. And in the evening, she’d shuffled out with her eyes to the floor, concerned that Antonio would look toward her once again and sure she would not know what to say.

But the gifts continued—a fragrant, ripe mango; an inkpot with its delicate quill; a tiny filigreed brooch forged of metal. She would find them hidden beneath layers of tobacco leaves and conceal them as best she could. She told no one of the courtship and avoided Antonio’s gaze, though at times he’d read an especially tender passage, and she would glance up for just a second, and always his eyes fixed on her.

And then she’d walked in one morning and there on her desk, unhidden: a book, its spine blue and rough to the touch, its pages a thin, smooth papyrus. She could not read the title, and she hid it beneath the ledge of finished cigars. María Isabel knew Don Gerónimo would think her presumptuous to bring a book to the workshop, accuse her of idleness, perhaps send her home, convinced a woman would never learn the strict norms required of labor. But she raced home for lunch, book tucked beneath her arm, and as she boiled yams over a wood fire, María Isabel fanned the smoke with its pages. When she was sure her mother wasn’t looking, she traced the words, her fingers trailing the curves and abrupt edges of their shapes. It was like rolling tobacco, this need to follow the arcs and bends on the paper, to memorize the feeling. She hid the book beneath her bed.

When she met Antonio by his horse that afternoon, before he could say anything, María Isabel made her request: “If I could be so bold as to inquire, and forgive me the indiscretion, as to the title of the book you placed on—”

“What makes you think it was I?” Antonio’s smile stretched his pockmarked cheeks. María Isabel instinctively gathered her skirt to leave.

But Antonio stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Cecilia Valdés,” he said. “A novella. I did not know you cannot read. I should not have been so presumptuous. I hope you’ll forgive me and accept a sincere assurance I meant no harm by it.”

“Why did you give it to me?”

“I will probably sound trite in saying you embody the protagonist, Cecilia Valdés. Perhaps that is why I am drawn to you.”

She did not know how to respond, so she only looked away and said, “I must get home before dark,” after which he’d asked her name.

“María Isabel, will you let me read to you?” he said.

“You mean to say outside the workshop?”

“It would be my greatest pleasure.”

She handed the book to him.

“Thank you for an offer so generous,” she said. “But I’m afraid I cannot accept.”

María Isabel had thought she was ready to accept, to fulfill her obligation. Can one learn to fall in love with a mind? She regarded the bullnecked lector. How amusing that men thought they could so easily know a woman. She would wait until she couldn’t.

****

Her mother was getting worse though. This she knew by a cough that doubled her over and shook her. Some evenings Aurelia so lacked an appetite that she retired early and left María Isabel to eat alone. And still her mother woke each day and prepared for her trek to the sugarcane fields.

María Isabel pleaded with her, but Aurelia would work to the day of her death—and afterward if she could. This they both knew.

And then the war bled into Camagüey. Inevitable, she understood. Every year, La Aurora informed of more Cubans and fewer jobs; the economy increasingly concentrated on sugar, on plantations run on slave labor. Also in the paper: the abolition movement, Spanish taxation worse. She’d heard a wealthy plantation owner in Santiago freed his slaves and declared independence from Spain. She’d heard whispers of clandestine meetings. But she hadn’t expected the fight to reach her life so quickly.

María Isabel woke one night to the sound of boots crushing through vegetation and the light patterns of lanterns dancing on the walls. She peered out the window, careful to remain hidden as best she could, and made out dozens of men in the unmistakable blue-and-red of the Monarchy, their lapels bearing the colors of the flag. They carried muskets and swords, their faces drawn and weary, and she saw, faintly, what looked like dried blood on the breeches of some.

She couldn’t sleep that night and clutched her body, heard the first far-off thud of a rifle, her mother waking across from her and coughing in fits all night. They spent two days like that, huddled in the shadow of their bed platforms, as though behind wooden shields. Cries and shots, metal hitting metal, men whose anguish echoed through the noise.

On the third day, Aurelia ran a fever, and María Isabel held her in her lap, wiping her face with a washcloth and whispering prayers to Nuestra Se ora de la Caridad as her mother broke into cold sweats. On the fourth, the fighting stilled. Just as penetrating as the sound of sudden war had been, so, too, was the intensity of the quiet that followed, the stench of rot. They hadn’t eaten in days, and so they rummaged through cans of sugared guava and fruta bomba and tomato they’d prepared months before, María Isabel spooning slivers into her mother’s mouth as she lay supine. And when she was sure the silence persisted, María Isabel ventured out along the path she walked to work each day, now clogged with wisps of smoke, the smell of charred palm. She needed to find food. She needed to find her neighbors. In the distance, she could see fire, and she prayed silent gratitude it’d spared her home. She walked and walked through the quiet, listening for other people, for signs of life. Only the rustling of sugarcane and saw grass answered her calls.

Then, as she made a turn toward the riverbank where she did the wash each Sunday and bathed in the sun, she stumbled over what felt like a log anchored in the grass. She looked down and screamed.

A man, his open eyes to the sky and his mouth a permanent expression of disbelief, had his neck impaled by a sword, the pointed end emerging on the other side. Thick, coagulated blood pooled around his head and flies swarmed the wound. María Isabel looked up, past him, and saw it—a field of dozens of men just like him, left rotting in the heat, their innards and flesh unrecognizable, one giant mass of scorched meat, and as a final insult, a hog chomping through the remains, its face and teeth smeared in dark blood. She recognized the face of a fellow tobacco roller.

The grass quivered with María Isabel, oblivious to the carnage to which it bore witness. It began to rain and she stood there until a stream of red forced a jagged path to the river. Then she ran in her dress, torn and muddied and soaked, calling out to her mother as when she was a child, calling out to the giant unheeding span before her, and fell at the door of their home, her sobs heavy.

That night, her mother died.

****

Nothing was the same after the skirmish in Camagüey. Porteños y Gómez emptied to a third of its workers, the rest dead in the slaughter that had visited them or fleeing to la Florida, chasing rumors of tobacco factories offering refuge in exile. Don Gerónimo left, and Porteños, the owner of the tabaquería, began to oversee the work himself. The mood sobered, the readings changed.

On the first day back in the workshop, after the weeks of burials and rebuilding, Antonio took the lectern and announced that they would suspend the usual reading of La Aurora, as the rebellion had delayed its delivery to Camagüey. They would finish Les Misérables after the lunch hour, and they would begin another novel, one by a Cuban writer, that morning.

María Isabel could not bring herself to look up at him. She concentrated instead on each roll of the leaves, on making tighter and tighter bundles.

“Cecilia Valdés,” Antonio began, “by Cirilo Villaverde.”

Her hands shook. Tighter rolls, she told herself. Tighter rolls.

“‘To the women of Cuba: Far from Cuba, and with no hope of ever seeing its sun, its flowers, or its palms again, to whom, save to you, dear countrywomen, the reflection of the most beautiful side of our homeland, could I more rightfully dedicate these sad pages?’”

Antonio’s voice carried the workers through that dismal morning. It spoke of the Spanish and creole social elite; love between free and enslaved Black Cubans; a mulata woman, her place in their island’s history. Even so, the author creole, an influential man. Not so unlike the other authors. After a lunch of hardened bread and bitter coffee, alone in her now empty home, Mar a Isabel returned to hear a continuation of Les Misérables.

The days went by like this.

Nightmares and crying fits gave way to tired collapse. And for whatever reason, possibly loneliness, possibly realizing she had no one left in the world, a month later she waited for Antonio and said, “I am not Cecilia Valdés.” And then, “I would be honored if you would read to me from any text.”

From Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia. Copyright © 2021 by the author. Reprinted by permission of Flatiron Books.