“Thirty-three years old, same as our lord, but Amadeo is not a man with ambition. Even his mother will tell you that, though it breaks her heart to say it. Yolanda still cooks for him, setting a plate before him at his place at the table.”

This early passage speaks to Amadeo’s characterization: He does not have steady employment, does not take an active role in parenting his daughter, and still relies on his mother for food and housing. Amadeo is self-aggrandizing, self-involved, and self-serving. He hopes that his role as Jesus will bring him redemption, but ultimately he earns redemption instead through recognizing the responsibility he has to his family, which entails real personal and spiritual growth.

“And as the blade slid into his back, Amadeo’s swelling sense of his own falseness.”

Amadeo is well aware that he is an odd choice for the role of Jesus. Part of why he is so invested in his performance is that he sees playing Christ “well” as its own kind of redemption: He hopes that if the town thinks that he does a good job, they will forgive his many sins and misdeeds. His role in this early part of the novel lays the foundation for the theme of Redemption and Faith, which the following part explores with more depth and nuance.

“All this beauty. Also underfunded public schools, dry winters, a falling water table, shitty job prospects. Mostly what people have now is cheap heroin.”

This passage speaks to the motif of heroin within the novel and the role that the opioid epidemic has played in the socioeconomic depression of the region. In many ways, the town of Española is the epicenter of the current opioid epidemic in northern New Mexico; Valdez Quade draws attention to that issue through her