Monsters Among Us: Vampires and Colonial Violence in Isabel Cañas’ Vampires of El Norte

Cover to Isabel Cañas' Vampires of El Norte: A Novel

Isabel Cañas

In Isabel Cañas’ Vampires of El Norte, vampires are not the only monsters haunting the borderlands of Texas. Set in 1846, at the dawn of the Mexican-American War, childhood friends Nena and Néstor reunite at Rancho Los Ojuelos. Nine years earlier, a mysterious attack drove Néstor away, believing Nena had died. Now he returns, intent on joining the vaqueros in resisting the encroaching U.S. settlers—only to discover that Nena is very much alive. A curandera, Nena still carries the memory of that night and the pain of Néstor’s unexplained disappearance.

Far from the glittering vampires of 2010s film and TV, the bloodsuckers in this novel are closer to Guillermo del Toro’s grotesque creatures—pale, eyeless, with gaping maws and screeching cries. These monsters lurk in the shadows, known through whispered stories among vaqueros and borderland inhabitants.

In Vampires of El Norte, the line between the supernatural and the human blurs: both vampires and the Yanquis and Rinches (Anglo-American settlers and Texas Rangers) are rendered monstrous. Each poses a threat to life and land, but in different, though equally violent, ways.

As William Calvo-Quirós discusses in “Líbranos de todo mal/But Deliver Us from Evil: Latina/o Monsters Theory and the Outlining of Our Phantasmagoric Landscapes,” the 19th century U.S. expansionist period was pivotal in constructing Mexican and Mexican American identities as “Other”—as monstrous. Cañas flips this dynamic. The novel doesn’t just depict vampires as the only terror; it reveals how settler-colonial violence, masked as civilization, is perhaps the most insidious monster of all.

In the novel’s climax, following a defeat in South Texas, Nena and Néstor return to Los Ojuelos, now under threat from Anglo settlers and Rangers intent on seizing her family’s land. They learn that these Rangers had been capturing and enslaving vampires, using them as weapons to kill Mexican landowners. Here, Cañas offers a profound twist: the so-called “monsters” are victims, manipulated into violence by colonial forces. Nena, who was bitten nine years before, comes to understand that survival lies not in combat, but in communication. She chooses not to fight or become the monster—she listens.

Cañas masterfully blends historical and speculative fiction, crafting a story that feels both grounded in the historical violence of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and fresh in its reimagining of genre. Vampires of El Norte is a powerful contribution to Latino-centered storytelling that reclaims horror as a space to explore memory, resistance, and survival.

This year, Cañas drops The Possession of Alba Díaz, once again inviting readers back in time to 1765 Mexico with the promise of yet another potent mix of horror, history, and romance.