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Coachella
It's 1983 in Coachella Valley and Yolanda Ramirez, a lowly phlebotomist at the Palm Springs hospital, has a hunch. Gay men, hemophiliacs, and women scarred by cosmetic surgery are dying. Safe blood, like the water keeping this desert green, is a lie.
In the nearby trailer, Isabel Ochoa Dreyfus disappears into a new identity: Marina Lomas. Somewhere in Iowa her businessman husband sits in the dark, staring at his drink, promising never to hit her again, if only he can track her down.
Despite herself, Marina finds companionship at Mac and Gil's annual Casa Diva fashion show. As glamorous men stride up and down a poolside runway, Yo awakens Marina's sleeping desire.
Elsewhere in Coachella, Yo's father Crescencio, a gardener, soothes Eliana Townsend, his secret love, by coaxing life from the earth outside her window. She is dying, most likely from AIDS, but no one will tell her the truth. And through it all Crescencio's sister, Tia Josie, keeps the family steady with wisdom from the Rockford Files and her dead Cahuilla husband.
Truths surge to the surface in this community of false fronts and deep roots as readers are whisked toward the deafening conclusion of Coachella, the latest from one of Chicano literature's finest writers.
In the nearby trailer, Isabel Ochoa Dreyfus disappears into a new identity: Marina Lomas. Somewhere in Iowa her businessman husband sits in the dark, staring at his drink, promising never to hit her again, if only he can track her down.
Despite herself, Marina finds companionship at Mac and Gil's annual Casa Diva fashion show. As glamorous men stride up and down a poolside runway, Yo awakens Marina's sleeping desire.
Elsewhere in Coachella, Yo's father Crescencio, a gardener, soothes Eliana Townsend, his secret love, by coaxing life from the earth outside her window. She is dying, most likely from AIDS, but no one will tell her the truth. And through it all Crescencio's sister, Tia Josie, keeps the family steady with wisdom from the Rockford Files and her dead Cahuilla husband.
Truths surge to the surface in this community of false fronts and deep roots as readers are whisked toward the deafening conclusion of Coachella, the latest from one of Chicano literature's finest writers.
197 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
55 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 29, 2024
4,5 stars!! This was a really quick and interesting read. The story is hard to follow at the beginning because there are so many characters, but eventually it all comes together which is very satisfying. The story highlights AIDS narratives that are often sidetracked in the mainstream history of the disease, which is interesting. I liked how the book further combines other societal issues and occasionally flips the traditional narratives about them.
July 31, 2021
When I checked the MLA International Bibliography database for critical studies of Coachella I was shocked to find no entries at all. You'd think it would have attracted a sizeable critical literature as one of the very first lesbian Chicana novels. But somehow it seems to have been overlooked (though there may be studies embedded in books that I do not know about).
The plot revolves around a swirl of the personal and the public. Marina (whose real name is Isabel), fleeing an abusive husband with her infant daughter, discovers her lesbianism through her relationship with Yolanda, daughter of an illegal immigrant, who, working at the local hospital, comes to conclude that women who've undergone blood transfusions have contracted AIDS. The setting is Palm Springs, California, and the Coachella valley in the 1980s, the early years of the epidemic, when the infective agent and the means of transmission by blood were still unknown.
The writing is beautiful, serene, and composed, the characters drawn with clarity and (mostly) sympathy. Marina and Yolanda are especially complicated and real, sometimes self-contradictory, struggling with emotional conflicts, but none of this is overblown--it all feels like the kinds of trouble we all have in relationships and in love.
My only complaint is that the straight white male characters are all broken, often in ways that discharge in violence, emotional or physical, against women. The only sympathetic males are Latino, and of them one is dead, the other, Crescencio, Yolanda's father, who, however, is deeply conflicted about her sexuality: he wants grandchildren, whom she insists she'll never provide. (The gay males are presented highly sympathetically.) That men have such problems is undeniable, but that all the men here are so encumbered feels just a tad false.
Still, Coachella stands as an excellent novel; it is not propaganda. It ends in a single act of violence meant as protection for its lesbian dyad but leaves us wondering how that act will reverberate in the women's lives. The book lingers.
The plot revolves around a swirl of the personal and the public. Marina (whose real name is Isabel), fleeing an abusive husband with her infant daughter, discovers her lesbianism through her relationship with Yolanda, daughter of an illegal immigrant, who, working at the local hospital, comes to conclude that women who've undergone blood transfusions have contracted AIDS. The setting is Palm Springs, California, and the Coachella valley in the 1980s, the early years of the epidemic, when the infective agent and the means of transmission by blood were still unknown.
The writing is beautiful, serene, and composed, the characters drawn with clarity and (mostly) sympathy. Marina and Yolanda are especially complicated and real, sometimes self-contradictory, struggling with emotional conflicts, but none of this is overblown--it all feels like the kinds of trouble we all have in relationships and in love.
My only complaint is that the straight white male characters are all broken, often in ways that discharge in violence, emotional or physical, against women. The only sympathetic males are Latino, and of them one is dead, the other, Crescencio, Yolanda's father, who, however, is deeply conflicted about her sexuality: he wants grandchildren, whom she insists she'll never provide. (The gay males are presented highly sympathetically.) That men have such problems is undeniable, but that all the men here are so encumbered feels just a tad false.
Still, Coachella stands as an excellent novel; it is not propaganda. It ends in a single act of violence meant as protection for its lesbian dyad but leaves us wondering how that act will reverberate in the women's lives. The book lingers.
October 29, 2025
Really simple and effective characterization. In the span of just two pages I immediately felt as though I knew the inner world of these characters and what motivates them. I especially appreciated the treatment of death in this: So many AIDS narratives are centered on the trauma of dying from a disease that, especially in the 80s and 90s, was extremely misunderstood. The narratives in Coachella do center illness and dying, but in a larger sense we see survival and community. There's a really interesting ecological theme running throughout as well (water and blood are both life-giving), and themes of land and heritage and who "belongs" to the land. I thought the thread of patriarchy and what that does to the bodies of women was also really carefully woven throughout this text as well.
July 4, 2023
This was a great novel by a talented Chicana writer. 4.5 stars
October 9, 2007
Coachella is a series of love stories. It is a love story between Tia Josie and her ghost of a husband Gary Luna. It is a love story between Eliana Townsend, who is dying of AIDS and does not know it, and her gardener, Josie’s brother Crescencio. It is a love story between Mac and Gil, lovers who run a hotel, with Gil dying of AIDS. And finally it is a love story between Crescencio’s daughter Yolanda and Marina Lomas, who has taken her infant Carolina and is fleeing her abusive white husband, David. The novel is also a mystery. It is set in the moment before it is known that AIDS is in the nation’s blood supply. Eliana has gotten AIDS from plastic surgery. Yolanda works in the office and figures out the mystery (that women like Eliana have AIDS and why they have AIDS) and no one wants to hear it. Her boss even lets his wife get plastic surgery - despite his strong doubts - to prove Yolanda wrong (the novel implies the wife gets AIDS). Meanwhile, David, bad rich white man number one, is stalking his former wife, and arrives in Coachella. I enjoyed reading the novel. It kept the pages turning. Much of the writing was amazingly poetic. I felt the ending was a bit abrupt, and purposefully lacked some closure. I wanted to get to know some of the characters better. It was depressing, but not nearly as depressing as it could have been. (I don't like depressing books. Given my politics, finding uplifting novels is difficult). And I’m not sure why it contained the typical ending of happily couple with child as the romantic end, the meaning of life, according to the novel. Happiness is a happy nuclear family? This is a book I would consider teaching.
August 8, 2011
This is a quiet, loving novel. Taylor pulls back from the temptation of melodrama and grand gestures repeatedly - instead, all feels real-life sized and paced for a real life too (until the very end). I really appreciate the way Taylor moves through different characters - of different genders and ethnicities and sexual orientations - with warmth for every angle. Yum.
February 17, 2015
Interesting journey leading to discovery of AIDS in small CA community during the early years of the disease.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews