The Bruja's Sons

Brujería, or witchcraft, has been, and continues to be, a subculture. All the real and true practitioners of this craft have been secretive for many reasons, not the least of which is the risk of persecution at the hands of frightened and ignorant people. If someone claims to be a bruja openly and/or suggests possession of power, it is most probably not true and they have no understanding of what it really is to be a bruja. The concept of magic or black magic is one of superstitious and misinformed people. There are apparently brujas who use their knowledge to hurt people physically, but this is not done by magic. It is done by manipulating nature to a certain end. There are bad people in all stations of life. A popular misconception is that brujas gather in covens. In truth, brujas are an extremely solitary lot, restricting their members to immediate family, such as the mother who is teaching the daughter. Any particular line of brujas has evolved completely independent of any other line. They may arrive at the same understanding of how nature works and how to manipulate it, but they do it in different ways and at different times. Brujas do not exchange information or share knowledge outside their line; and then only mother to daughter. Because of this, different lines of brujas are in varying stages of development. Some are quite knowledgeable and skillful; others are barely past the curandera (healer) stage. Some lines end, even if they are hundreds of years old, when one bruja makes a mistake or fails to understand something she has discovered and gets killed. All the knowledge gained in that line is then lost forever, gone in the blink of an eye. At the heart of this work is the author’s wish to dispel the many myths and stereotypes surrounding brujas and how they interact with society. It seeks to explain how they do the things they do and why people know so little about what they really are. This is a saga of three witches; Esperanza Gomez, Licha Herrera and Leticia Morales. It revolves around Esperanza's two sons, Julian and Arturo, whose fates are intertwined with all three. After their mother sends them away at a tender age for reasons unknown to them, they spend the next twenty years in a search for answers. The many adventures and pitfalls that follow are only a prelude to the final confrontation where Julian and Arturo finally understand why they were sent away; and what they are.