Villaviciosa is a poor town in the Sonoran desert where Lalo Cura’s family history unfolds across generations of women named Maria Exposito. The town’s recurring violence, poverty, and inherited knowledge of healing shape that history; when Lalo is born, his mother gives him the name Olegario Cura Exposito, altering the family’s customary surname and marking a struggle over how he will belong to it.

Setting and family history

The story of Villaviciosa reaches back to 1865, when the first Maria Exposito, a nameless orphan, was raped by a Belgian soldier outside town. She died in childbirth; her daughter, also Maria, was raised by peasants and grew up without learning to read or write, but became known for her knowledge of herbs and medicinal salves. The family’s history is narrated to Lalo amid his study of criminology, as voices recount the generations that preceded him.

Violence recurs in the lives of the women, while practical knowledge passes from mother to daughter. In 1898, a Maria Exposito returned to the town after seven days away, injured and unwilling to explain what had happened. Her mother did not press her for an account. The next generation inherited her healing practice, as well as the family’s habit of enduring periods of violence and extreme poverty.

Poverty, work, and survival

In 1914, a sixteen-year-old Maria Exposito accompanied her mother on monthly searches for rare herbs and washed clothes behind the house in an old wooden trough. The men of Villaviciosa were known for their bravery, and several joined the Revolution after Colonel Sabino Duque came seeking recruits. One boy who had been Maria’s occasional playmate raped her after she laughed at his declaration of love; he died in a skirmish before he could return. She later supported herself by selling potions and eggs from her henhouse in nearby towns.

The family’s circumstances changed only gradually. By 1953, five generations of Maria Expositos lived outside Villaviciosa in a house expanded with additional rooms and a large kitchen. At dinner they gathered around the work of preparing remedies, discussing saints, illnesses, weather, and men. Their shared life is described through both ordinary domestic routine and the long accumulation of what the women have endured.

Lalo Cura’s origins

The family history connects Villaviciosa to Lalo’s birth and to the name he receives. In 1976, his mother, a young Maria Exposito, met two students from Mexico City in the desert. They spoke of a distant, still-invisible revolution and disappeared after a week. Three months later, Maria became pregnant. When her great-grandmother asked who the father was, she experienced a vision; the narrative supplies no further confirmation of the students’ identity as Lalo’s fathers.

Against her family’s wishes that the boy be called Rafael, Maria named him Olegario, after a Catalan saint, and registered his surname as Cura Exposito. She explained the change by saying that Exposito was a name for orphans, a point the students had told her. Her great-grandmother regarded placing Cura first as arrogance, but Maria kept the name. The choice makes a family naming convention into a visible dispute over inheritance and identity.

Narrative role

Villaviciosa is presented less as a neutral setting than as the ground through which Lalo’s ancestry is transmitted. Its recurring names and inherited remedies coexist with stories of abandonment, sexual violence, wartime death, and poverty. The history arrives as voices remembered or heard by Lalo while he studies crime, so family lineage itself becomes a layered account rather than a settled record.

Later, as Lalo rides with Epifanio, he thinks of life in the desert as life at sea: the border between Sonora and Arizona becomes a chain of haunted or enchanted islands, while towns are boats and the desert an endless sea. That image enlarges Villaviciosa’s setting into a landscape of isolation and movement, connecting the family’s local history to the wider border region.