Monarchs in the Wild

After witnessing the tragic death of a classmate, seventeen-year-old Cal desperately searches for a way out of his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it rural town of La Sombra, California–before he, too, becomes a nobody-migrant statistic.

Set in the summer of 1994, in California’s Central Valley, seventeen-year-old Cal “California” Garcia is a Latine boy who can’t seem to escape the gossip and horrified looks of the La Sombra residents. They judge him on nothing more than the long scar on his face, his beat up ’68 Mustang, and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Cal constantly feels set up to fail. His pa left his family after the tragic accident that gave him his scar. Ma spends all her time at church enchanted by the words of a crooked pastor. And his new-old Mustang brings more trouble and chaos than it’s worth. On top of this, his life is turned upside down when he finds Nora, valedictorian Nora, having jumped off a bridge, ending her life. The monarch butterflies stitched onto her jeans are seared into his memory forever. Cal, having found the body, becomes a suspect in Nora’s suspicious death and frantically searches for a way to escape accusation in La Sombra.

Through a string of increasingly devastating events, Cal is guided by the unlikeliest of people: Two down-on-their-luck cholos, looking for some “easy” money; a bruja who lives on the edge of town, imparting ancient wisdom and car parts; and a greasy mechanic who might or might not have stolen Cal’s money.

With time running out and nowhere to hide, Cal must decide who he is and what he deserves in a world where he’s seen as just another nothing-statistic in a migrant, farm-worker town.