Stones for Ibarra

Published when American writer Harriet Doerr was seventy-three years old, her debut novel, Stones for Ibarra (1983), follows a middle-aged Californian couple, Richard and Sara Everton, as they relocate to the Mexican village Ibarra, hoping to reopen a copper mine operated in the nineteenth century by Richard’s grandfather. The novel is loosely based on Doerr’s own experience of living in Mexico with her husband, Albert.

As the novel opens, Richard and Sara are driving through central Mexico, towards Ibarra, a “declining village of one thousand souls.” We learn the couple’s backstory: Richard is a little over forty, Sara a little under; in mid-life, they have decided to move to Mexico, where Richard intends to reopen the Malagueña copper mine, abandoned by his grandfather during the 1910 Revolution. They are also excited to restore the adobe mansion in which Richard’s grandfather lived. The Evertons have mortgaged their San Francisco home and borrowed against their insurance to fund this project.

As the couple nears their destination, the narrator informs us that their dream is doomed. Not only is their dream based on nothing more than “a great-aunt’s recollections,” but Richard will soon be diagnosed with leukemia.



For the time being, however, Richard and Sara set to work rebuilding the shattered house, restoring the mine, and hiring villagers to work in it. They begin mining, and the villagers are grateful for the work, but Richard and Sara cannot establish meaningful relationships with the locals. Nor can the locals comprehend the new arrivals. When Sara plants maguey cactuses in her front yard, the villagers assume she wants to make mescal. She explains that she just likes the way they look, and even the relatively cosmopolitan village priest finds it “very curious.” The Mexicans start referring to their new North American neighbors as “mediodisorientado, meaning half-disoriented.”

Richard receives his diagnosis. Given six years to live, the Evertons decide to keep his illness a secret, in order not to alarm the villagers employed in his mine.

As Sara learns more Spanish, she begins to understand more of the villagers’ lives. A series of chapters are devoted to the villagers’ tales, embellished by Sara’s imagination. “The Life Sentence of José Reyes” recounts the story of a drunk who murdered his brothers for refusing to lend him money. On a trip to the fictional city of Concepción, Sara learns the story of “Kid Muñoz,” a boxer who lost his sight in a brutal bout and now ekes a living selling lottery tickets. Another tale is built around a nine-year-old mentally disabled boy named Pablo, who drowns in the mine’s waste dump. From small hints, Sara concocts the fantasy that the boy might have been drowned by his cousin Juan, exhausted by the labor of caring for him. A succession of assistant priests provides comic interludes: one is a womanizer, another gets bitten by a dog while he is praying. “The Red Taxi” tells the story of the village’s only taxi: in Sara’s version, its owner Chuy Santos killed his two best friends in order to take possession of it.



Interwoven with these half-invented tales of village life are bulletins from reality: at the medical facility in Concepción, Richard receives regular reports on the slow creep of his cancer. Sara, however, struggles to reconcile herself to Richard’s illness. Just as she fantasizes about the secret lives of the local people, she half-convinces herself that Richard will somehow cheat death. After imagining an especially romantic backstory for Madre Petra, a nun who is teaching her Spanish, Sara finally tires of her own myth-making. She realizes she has been sheltering herself from reality. Nevertheless, she continues to have a “superstitious” faith that the right medical intervention will somehow save her husband.

Sara discovers that their cleaner, María, has been concealing charms throughout the house. The villagers have noticed that Richard is unwell and that Sara has been in contact with an American doctor. They offer to put the Evertons in touch with local healers, brujos and curanderos, and cannot understand why the couple refuses.

Five years since Richard’s diagnosis, he finally confronts her about her failure to accept his impending death. He tells her to “stop making things up.”



One night, he comes down with a bad fever, and Sara thinks he is dying. She hires Chuy Santos’s red taxi to take her to Concepción. Richard survives, but in the novel’s final moments, we learn that he will die, a year later, in San Francisco.

Stones for Ibarra tackles themes of decline, cross-cultural misunderstanding, nostalgia, and the various ways in which people fail to confront reality. Writing in the New York Times, Anatole Broyard called it a “remarkable picture of a declining Mexican village…and a charming book.”