Sterling Bennett

In 1916, young mining engineer Frank Holloway, confused by mercury poisoning, rides his father's mare Tosca down into Mexico and tangles with Pancho Villa and his two Apache enforcers, while moving across a high desert tapestry rich in history, culture, danger and love.

Himari Likes Water is the sequel to Playing for Pancho Villa, the second novel of A Mexican Trilogy. In Himari Likes Water, Frank Holloway returns half-broken from the bloody fields of France and WWI and rides back down into Mexico, looking to calm his soul in the sage-scented mountains of Northern Mexico. The year is 1920.

Reading through one's short stories is like pressing MRI images up against a backlit screen, then stepping back and trying to figure out what was going on in the writer's mind when he wrote them. Surely partially something that was happening below consciousness. But largely to give the explanations my parents and others could not give. Like holocaust, war, family deaths. Rich images and unusual stories about the Mexico I went to live in. Revolution, love, loss, sadness, joy, striking events in Mexican and California history. My relationship with the past, and with the crimes I did not commit yet still feel haunted by.

The Queen of the P nuco is the story of a Mexican Federal Policeman once tasked with protecting the President of Mexico L zaro C rdenas, but now disgraced for petty theft. He and his wife Mariana travel to the oil port Tampico on the Mexican Gulf Coast, looking for their estranged son Rey, where they stumble into the struggles between Socialist petroleum workers and those who would suppress them to the point of assassination. All this, on the eve of the expropiation of Mexican oil by L zaro C rdenas in 1938 and the Second World War. Complicating the situation, Rey turns out to be a lawyer who protects workers' rights and is married to a passionate young Irish woman who has fled Madrid and the on-going Spanish Civil War, where she took fateful measures to protected non-fascist militia women from rightist urban attacks and predations by supposedly helping Soviet co-fighters.

At the end of 1899, in the Mexican state of Sonora, National Rural Policeman Miguel ngel Ibarra, recovering from a small stroke that has changed his view of the world, begins to think that the rights described in the Mexican Constitution of 1857 should also apply to the Yaqui Indians, whom first the the Spanish, then the Mexican governments, had been trying to wipe out for hundreds of years. This new conviction marks him as an enemy of State and Federal forces and throws him into a deadly situation, as he tries to solve a robbery committed against an American-run mine in the Bacatete Mountains east of Guaymas. There he stumbles onto a dark secret when he comes into contact with Yaqui miners.