In ‘Rag Doll,’ the Plague’s the Thing

Tustin novelist Alejandro Morales had planned on taking a young character from “The Brick People,” his 1988 novel about Mexican immigrants in Montebello during the first half of the 20th Century, and placing him in a contemporary setting.

Then he heard historian John Jay Tepaske of Duke University lecture at UC Irvine on medical practices in colonial Mexico.

“As soon as I heard him speaking about the medical practices, things just clicked,” recalls Morales, who abandoned his original plan and instead wrote “The Rag Doll Plagues” (Arte Publico Press; $17.95), in which Latino doctors--each of whom is related to the other--battle deadly infectious diseases over three centuries.

Described by the Library Journal as “an imaginative, prophetic work” and by the Texas Review as “a unique blend of fact, magic and utopian fantasy,” “The Rag Doll Plagues” opens with the arrival in 18th-Century Mexico of a young physician who has been sent to the New World by the king of Spain to use the latest medical advances to fight a mysterious plague that is decimating the population.

The people have named the disease La Mona (the doll) for, as Morales writes, “when life withdraws from the body La Monita leaves a corpse that feels like a rag doll.”

In describing the effects of the deadly plague through the eyes of the young doctor, Morales writes: “The patients of the third ward were the most atrocious. Upon first seeing them, I prayed to God that they would die almost immediately. La Mona had eaten away at their faces, transforming them into monstrous mutilations.”

But Morales, whose research into colonial-period medical practices took him to Mexico, uses the Old World as only a starting point for his novel, which is equal parts historical, contemporary and futuristic storytelling.

Part II is set in 20th-Century Orange County, where a young Latino barrio doctor struggles to save his actress lover, a hemophiliac, from a newly identified incurable disease: AIDS. In the third section, a 21st-Century doctor of gene engineering battles a new plague that is ravaging the technocratic society of Lamex, a confederation of what was once California and Mexico.

“The book deals with scientists confronting diseases that science cannot really solve,” said Morales, a UCI professor of U.S. Latino and Latin American literature. “The book is basically about the origins of diseases: Where do they come from? Why do they come back again? We think we have them solved and yet they will reappear. I feel it has a lot to do with economic and social conditions.”

Appearing throughout “The Rag Doll Plagues” are two mysterious spirit-like characters that only the physician in each section can see. But rather than being supernatural entities, they are what Morales describes as “computer ghosts” from the future who have escaped the parameters of technology.

“I think we have reached the point where in the future we’ll be able to describe the characteristics of human beings right down to the minutest detail and eventually those characteristics will, in a sense, become some kind of an entity that will survive in computers,” he said. “They’re so powerful that they’ll break away from the limitations of the computers themselves.”

As have nearly all of Morales’ novels, “The Rag Doll Plagues” also deals with the contributions the Mexican population has made to the United States: The histories of both countries are intertwined and, as the third part of the novel shows, the 21st-Century residents of Mexico City have an unlikely hand in the development of an antibody to the deadly plague.

“The book deals with the future of California, the United States and Mexico,” said Morales. “In (the third section) there isn’t a border anymore, and one of the points I wanted to make is that catastrophic events such as earthquakes, great diseases or ecological events will force us in the long run to deal with each other in a different way.”