This is how research works for writers. Pay attention, writers. (Literally and figuratively.)
In preparation for writing The Harvey Girl, I read a bunch of books to do with Gilded Age America and the American Southwest in the 1890s, which must perforce include reading about Mexico during that same time.
One very useful book was Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands by Kelly Lytle Hernandez.
On page 92 of the above was this one single sentence:
Also during the 1890s, a journalist named Catarino Garza had led several raids against the Díaz regime from south Texas.
Garza is mentioned at no other point in the book, which means he is one of those footnotes to history so beloved of novelists, because it means we can Bend Them to Our Purpose without their actual history getting in the way.
So I hightailed it over to Wikipedia and googled his name, et voila:
I gave the article a quick read through, but what I really wanted was at the bottom, any links to legit sources, which Wikipedia is very good at, and lo and behold…
A copy of which I now own.
And thus the character of wannabe revolutionary Señor Catarino Garza in the second and third Harvey Girl novels was born.
I could not do what I do without the heavy lifting of real live actual honest-to-god historians, of which I am most emphatically not one. All my gratitude and respect to them.
Expecially the ones who can write without obtruding “as we shall see” into every second paragraph.*
*snark. In case you missed it.
Launching from the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona,
at 2pm on February 28th.
#thiswritinglife Chatter Random Saturday The Harvey Girl Bad Mexicans Catarino Garza Elliott Young Kelly Lytle Hernandez Remembering Catarino Garza's 1891 Revolution