Debra Castaneda's Blog
April 12, 2026
Debra’s Mexican Chorizo Brunch
I’ve loved chorizo ever since I was a kid, but once I grew up and realized what some butchers put in theirs, I became very selective about buying the real thing. Fortunately, I discovered Soyrizo, which is a delicious alternative that has much less fat and no unsavory ingredients! If you want to substitute good pork chorizo in this recipe, just make sure to cook it thoroughly (as you would any pork product). Everything else in this simple recipe is the same!
Prep Time: 10 minutes
Cooking Time: 1...
April 7, 2026
I Became a Writer Anyway
One of my favorite authors is Ursula Le Guin. She wrote ground-breaking, gender-bending novels of fantasy and science fiction with some dark-skinned characters. I’m currently rereading The Lathe of Heaven, my favorite work besides The Left Hand of Darkness and her lesser known The Beginning Place.
Recently, I came across a social media post lauding her works, and it included her bio. Like many author bios, it talks about her fascinating family and how everyone in her life supported her and contr...
November 15, 2025
Tormenta, My Upcoming Horror Release, Lands with Aethon Books’ New Imprint
August 21, 2025
Rooted in the Past, Blossoming in the Imagination
They say, “write what you know.” But when I decided to set several of my stories in Chavez Ravine, I didn’t know the area in Los Angeles first-hand. The city had evicted the residents long before I was born. But my mother and her family talked about what it was like living in the hilltop neighborhoods of Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop before the evictions.
My family described the rolling hills, the open spaces, a tight-knit community of Mexican Americans where everyone knew everyone (and their b...
March 28, 2025
Castaneda’s Easy Machaca Recipe
Prep Time: 1 hour
Cooking Time: 15 minutes
Ingredients:
Flank steak (no other cut of beef will do!)
2-4 Garlic cloves, peeled
Bay leaf (1 or 2)
Red salsa, 2-5 Tbs
Salt
Pepper
Olive oil
Directions:
~Add bay leaf and garlic to enough water to cover the flank steak
~Boil flank steak until it’s cooked through
~Remove flank steak from water and let it cool
~When you can touch it without burning your fingers, shred the meat
~This part can be done right away, or you can stick the meat in the fridge and finish it off before serving: add olive oil to a pan and sauté the shredded beef until the ends are lightly browned and a bit crispy
~Add enough salsa to lightly coat the beef and mix. Don’t add too much because that will make it soupy
~Add salt and pepper to taste
I love eating machaca by scooping it up with corn tortillas. You can also use it as a filling for tacos or burritos. Or scramble some eggs and mix it with the machaca. It makes an excellent breakfast dish!
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Castaneda’s Classic Mexican Rice
There are many ways to make Mexican rice, but this is how I learned to make it. It’s savory and delicious. I usually make a double batch so I have leftovers for quick and easy burritos.
Prep time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 30ish minutes
Serving size: 4
Ingredients: (If you want to make a bigger batch, double the amounts)
1/8 cup olive oil
1 cup long grain white rice
1 onion (I prefer white, but yellow is fine), finely diced
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 green pepper, finely diced
12 cilantro sprigs
2 Tbsp tomato paste
1 cup chicken broth (you can also use vegetable broth)
1 cup water
Salt to taste
Optional: a couple tablespoons of chopped tomato for color and/or 1/4 cup thawed frozen peas
Directions:
~Rinse and drain rice
~Heat olive oil in lidded sauce pan, add onions and green peppers (plus optional chopped tomato) and sauté until softened. Remove mixture from pan (you’ll add them back in)
~Add rice to sauce pan and lightly and evenly toast it. This takes about 5 minutes. About ten minutes if you’ve doubled the recipe. Add more olive oil if needed.
~Add the onion and green pepper mixture, garlic and cilantro if you’re using it. Stir and sauté about 5 minutes.
~Add the broth, water and tomato paste and give it a good stir until the paste is thoroughly mixed in.
~Add about 1/2 teaspoon of salt, or to taste
~Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to a simmer, cover the saucepan and cook for about 20 minutes. Occasionally check to make sure the rice isn’t burning at the bottom. Stir and add a bit of water if necessary.
~Remove pan from burner and let it sit for about 10 minutes.
~Remove cilantro sprigs and discard. Add the peas if you’re using them and gently stir them in.
~Use a fork to fluff the rice and serve
The post Castaneda’s Classic Mexican Rice appeared first on Debra Castaneda.
February 25, 2025
Remembering Eviction Day with Rachel Cantu
(originally published May 2021)
May 8, 1959 is a day that Rachel Cantu will never forget.
It’s the day Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies forcibly evicted her family from their grandparents’ home in the Palo Verde neighborhood of Chavez Ravine.
The media had turned out in force, so there are lots of photos from that day. A film clip that aired on a TV station still shows up in documentaries showing deputies carrying her mother out of the house.
All of this happened sixty-two years ago. While many Los Angelenos know about the mostly Mexican American neighborhoods of Bishop, La Loma and Palo Verde that existed before Dodger Stadium was built, not all do. And for some, the details and the timeline are fuzzy.
The short version: on July 24, 1950, the city of Los Angeles sent eviction letters to the families of Palo Verde and Chavez Ravine areas notifying them of a plan to build a housing project “for people of low income.” That plan fell through and never happened.
Most of the families took payouts and left, like my mother and her family. They were long gone by 1959, when only a few households remained, holdouts determined to hang on to their property.
While researching the evictions for my fiction book, The Monsters of Chavez Ravine, I once again came across the photo of a young woman, Aurora Vargas, struggling against sheriff’s deputies, bent over, hands behind her back.
An officer in the picture looks down at a little girl. She’s crying. Her face is a mixture of fear and disbelief. She has one hand on her mother’s back as she gazes up at the man. Did she say anything to the officers? What was going through her mind?
By pure chance, I connected with that little girl, Rachel Cantu, when someone she knew brought my book to her attention. I asked if we could talk, and she graciously agreed. She answered my many questions about her grandparents, Abrana and Manuel Arechiga and what she remembered from that day in 1959 when she was ten years old.
Rachel grew up on Malvina Street, surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. And while each of them experienced and processed that event in their own way, this is Rachel Cantu’s story.
Q&A
Q: In the photo you were seen crying with one hand on your mom’s back. Did you say anything to the deputies arresting your mother? What happened after the photo was taken?
A: I told him to let my mom go. My mother was put in the car and so was another lady. Her name was Glenn Walters. She lived on the hill. After that, they separated them and I was still screaming, and they let me go in the car because they were going to take my mom. Where I have no idea. Once I got into the car, they took us up to the top of the hill. It was called Mustard Hill, I believe. Once they let me out of the car, I went and I looked down and eventually I could see they were bulldozing everything. Then they took me back down to my grandma’s [house] and then they took my mom to jail.
Q: After your grandparents’ home was bulldozed, what happened?
A: Well, we were just there, and it was loaded with newspaper people, all our family and neighbors. Eventually, in the evening, they put up a large tent and we put up a campfire and we slept there overnight. The next day they sent people over. They said the children couldn’t stay there and they couldn’t camp there either, and then somebody volunteered a trailer and we stayed in the trailer for a few days. Eventually they came back again, and they made my grandparents leave.
Q: You’re describing such a traumatic incident. What do you think were the long-term effects of that eviction on your mother in your grandparents, and on you?
A: Well, my grandmother never forgot it. With the money they got, they purchased a property in City Terrace, and they just started living there. But they never forgot it, of course, and I moved with my mom to Pico Rivera at the age of ten.
Q: That transition from such a close-knit community to the big sprawl of Los Angeles must have been a big adjustment.
A: It was very much so, but we made it through. My sister and I didn’t talk Spanish in Pico Rivera because of the prejudice. People would call you names in school and stuff. And when we went to the market and my mom would talk to us in Spanish, people would turn around. By the time we were in our early teens, [my mom would say)] talk to me in Spanish, it doesn’t matter.
Q: Do you remember any conversations about why your family made the decision to hold out for so long, so many years after most residents sold up to the city and left?
A: Because my grandparents owned the property and the reason they had originally been told, eminent domain, that they were going to be given an apartment of their choice and they were going to be the first ones to pick and stuff. But they already had a house, and we had a yard and we had everything, and they were going take it away. [My grandpa, along with my uncles, built those houses].
Q: Do you remember them talking about other people leaving and them staying behind? That must have been a little unsettling.
A: Oh yeah. One time, I remember we saw people moving down the street. Like, maybe ten houses they were moving out and I remember sitting on the porch just looking at them and my sister waving at them. I would remember that when my parents and my grandma would be talking about how the city of Los Angeles wanted to take our house. That’s basically the politics I knew about at the time.
Q: What was it like living in Palo Verde at the end there, when it was mostly a ghost town?
A: To me, it was paradise. Those back hills had a lot of weeds and palm trees up there and we would get cardboard boxes and all the cousins would go there and slide down. My cousin Chuy and I would be playing war. We’d be knocking down weeds, taking [or stripping off?] the eucalyptus tree leaves and playing war and cowboys, playing in the street of Melvina. The Police Academy was right there, and they never told us anything. They were our friends. Sometimes, they’d stop and give us tennis balls. The Police Academy was our playground and because they knew us, they let us play around.
Q: Many people, including Latinos, blame the Dodgers for displacing the people of Chavez Ravine but as you mentioned, it all started long before the arrival of the team from Brooklyn. What’s your view on that?
A: It was politics, trying to make Frank Wilkinson a red/communist. It was stupid. They were just trying to pick everything out of it and instead of trying to pay the people, they should have paid fairly, and that includes my grandparents.
Q: To those people who say, “I hate the Dodgers, it’s their fault,” what would you say?
A: It’s not the Dodgers fault. Even my mom would say that. She never went to Dodger Stadium but she had a Dodger cap. She knew it wasn’t the Dodgers or anything, but they were there, and we weren’t. To this day, I’ve never gone back.
Q: If there’s one thing you’d like people to know who don’t know much about the old neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine, what would it be?
A: Well, one of the things that really hurts us is when they say it was a slum. The way I see it now, the houses weren’t a slum. We didn’t have rats or anything inside. We had running water. We had all the utilities that we needed. We had food. Everybody was always hustling to work to keep food on the table.
Q: Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you would like to add?
A: I really would love the story of my grandparents to be told. They were amazing people All they do is show my grandmother being a mean old lady, and she wasn’t. She was just trying to protect her property.
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My Mother as the Main Character in The Monsters of Chavez Ravine
(originally published May 2021) My mother always wore her hair short. Really short. It looked fantastic on her with her high cheekbones and high-bridged nose.
Then I was scrolling online and saw one of those clickbait galleries that show you what a famous person would look like today. Love those!
My big takeaway is how much a hairstyle can change a person’s appearance.
And then I became obsessed. What would my mother look like with long hair? What if my mother wore her hair in braids, like the main character in my urban fantasy novella, The Monsters of Chavez Ravine, set in 1952.
Twenty-two-year-old Trini Duran usually wears her wavy dark hair loose, but when it’s clear she’ll need to devote a lot of time to chasing monsters, she opts for a style that will survive a night of creature stalking.
I sent one of my favorite pictures of my mother taken when she was about the same age as Trini to an illustrator and made two requests: thicken my mom’s eyebrows because she overplucked them and add some lovely, loose braids.
Here’s the photo. It was taken at a nightclub in Los Angeles. My mother, Dora, is on the far right. My aunt Lily sits next to her.
When the illustration came back, it took my breath away.
I didn’t have my mother in mind when I dreamed up Trini Duran. She’s about as far from the slightly cranky, independent gunslinger that is Trini. They share only two things in common: both grew up in the Palo Verde neighborhood of Chavez Ravine and both are tall.
But damn if my mother, in braids, makes a pretty good Trini.
I’m on the fence about sharing illustrations of characters. I hate the idea of ruining it for a reader if they imagined something entirely different. But in this case, I’ll take the chance because while she’s not what I had in mind for Trini, she just might be yours.
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The Monsters of Chavez Ravine: An International Latino Book Awards Winner
The Monsters of Chavez Ravine will always be my favorite “book child,” so I was thrilled when it won the International Latino Book Awards Gold Award for Best Novel Fantasy/Sci-Fi English.
Here’s why it’s such a big deal to me:
I’m an independently published author who began writing full-time later in life, after a career in news. Why did I go this route? Because I don’t have a long ramp of time to write, query, and wait for responses from the traditional publishing establishment. The time to publish a book with a social injustice theme was now. Not years from now. Besides, I love the control that comes with self-publishing. That said, most of your validation comes from within. An award like this acts as confirmation that you haven’t lost your mind, that you are, in fact, an author, and one worthy of consideration for such an amazing distinction.It’s a LATINO book award! Not bad for a gal who got called a Pocha all her life. Meaning a Mexican American who isn’t one thing nor the other. Now I own the whole Pocha thing because as the nice man from behind the meat counter at Hernandez Market assured me, I get to enjoy the best of both worlds.The award isn’t just for me. Hopefully, it will shine a brighter light on this novella that is about the social injustice suffered by the thousands of Mexican Americans evicted from their homes in the old neighborhoods of Palo Verde, Bishop and La Loma in Los Angeles.As a kid, I loved to write stories, but it never occurred to me it was something I could do when I grew up. My family had blue-collar jobs, and my going away to college was a big enough leap into the unknown. College meant taking classes that could get me a more interesting job. That meant courses in journalism and TV news, not creative writing classes.How did I learn how to write books? By being a lifelong reader, reading about the craft of writing, and endless hours of writing. And I will never stop learning and, hopefully, improving. Monsters might not be a perfect book, but it was written with all my heart and soul.The post The Monsters of Chavez Ravine: An International Latino Book Awards Winner appeared first on Debra Castaneda.
Meet Dog Face Bride from The Monsters of Chavez Ravine
(originally published April 2021)
The monsters in my urban fantasy novella, The Monsters of Chavez Ravine, are many and come in different shapes and sizes, but the one that first popped into my head was Dog Face Bride.
I’ve been thinking about it since I was a kid.
Thank you, Grandma Chata. Whenever I asked my grandmother for a story, she told the same one every time. Now that I think back on it, it was a strange tale for such a sweet, kindhearted woman to tell a young child. I spent most weekends with my grandmother, a seamstress, at her house in Boyle Heights.
She swore the story was true. It went like this:
It happened in the old mining town of Bisbee, Arizona, my grandmother’s hometown. A friend of the family, a young and beautiful young woman, fell in love with a handsome man. She did not know he had a wife over the border. The young woman believed they were engaged, so she had a wedding dress made. Then she discovered her lover was a liar. She became crazed with grief, then rage. He fled back to Mexico.
Still, this miserable young woman could not get over him. I don’t recall the name my grandmother used, so for this story, let’s call her Anna.
The family called the local curandera, who tried one concoction after another, with no effect. The healer said the man had sinister powers and had bewitched her.
The experience left the jilted young woman deranged. Anna wandered around wearing her wedding dress (shades of Dickens’ Miss Havisham), talking to herself and making aggressive gestures at anyone who tried to console her.
For her safety and for those around her, the family locked her up in a shed made comfortable for her stay. She endured her confinement without protest, but everyone could hear her wailing and cursing her ex-lover. Her sisters took turns taking her food and visiting her.
My grandmother said she was a young teenager at the time and avoided visiting her friend at home because she found the ruckus strange and terrifying.
Then, one day, the noise from the shed stopped.
One of Anna’s sisters went to investigate. The sister stood outside the shed door and called Anna’s name. Nothing. No response. Then a low growl.
The sister unlocked the door and opened it. A large black dog emerged from the gloom of the shed, let loose with a piercing long howl, then ran off. Anna had disappeared, never to be seen again.
Well, you can see how a person told such a bizarre story could mash up the two: Anna and the dog.
Which is how I came up with Dog Face Bride.
When I commissioned an illustration, the artist asked the million-dollar question: “What kind of dog?”
Hell if I knew. Was there was a dog breed out there that matched the picture I’d formed in my head? This led to furious searching on the web.
And then there it was! The Xoloitzcuintli or Mexican Hairless, except not the toy version, but the standard size. It’s beautiful and scary. The AKC describes the Xolo as loyal and calm. A very nice dog to own, so I felt guilty using the breed as the basis for the monster. My youngest daughter, a huge Disney fan, pointed out that the dog in the animated movie Coco is a Xolo, so that made me feel somewhat better.
So, a final thanks to Grandma Chata for the inspiration for Dog Face Bride. Not so much for the nightmares.
And I have a few more notes of appreciation.
To Natalia, the freelance digital artist from Poland, who interpreted the monster. She NAILED it. You can find her on FIVERR.
And as for bringing Dog Face Bride to life with movement, I have Suzanne at Motion Kitty to thank. I think you’ll agree she did a fantastic job! And not only that, Suzanne works fast and is delightful to work with.
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