Winner, 2022 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award (Autobiography/Memoir category)

With its roots in the Spanish verb querer—“to want, to love”—the term querencia has been called untranslatable but has come to mean a place of safety and belonging, that which we yearn for when we yearn for home. In this striking essay collection, Harrison Candelaria Fletcher shows that querencia is also a state of being: the peace that arises when we reconcile who we are. A New Mexican of mixed Latinx and white ethnicity, Candelaria Fletcher ventures into the fault lines of culture, landscape, and spirit to discover the source of his lifelong hauntings. Writing in the persona of coyote, New Mexican slang for “mixed,” he explores the hyphenated elements within himself, including his whiteness. Blending memory, imagination, form, and language, each essay spirals outward to investigate, accept, and embrace hybridity. Ultimately, Finding Querencia offers a new vocabulary of mixed-ness, a way to reconcile the crosscurrents of self and soul.

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher is the author of Presentimiento: A Life in Dreams and Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life. He teaches in the MFA programs at Vermont College of Fine Arts and Colorado State University.

I WHITE OUT
Open Season
Through Walls
Masked
Conjugation
White Out

II ORIGIN STORY

III COYOTE LAND
Coyote Cookbook
Coyote Drive-In
Coyote Yearbook
Of Ink Wash and Light
Identity Theft
Coyote Combat
Coyote Curfew
Imprint

IV ALTAR OF LEAVES
The Crossing
Slightest Edge
Water for Roots
A Place She Goes
Altar of Leaves

V CONFLUENCE

VI EXCAVATION

VII INHERITANCE

VIII BORDERLAND

IX COYOTE

Epilogue