Decent People: A Novel

Set on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border and spanning more than a century, this powerful multi-generational debut charts the fate of a gifted, young Mexican American woman and the corrupting consequences of misogyny, racism, and colonialism on her family, her community, and, ultimately, her life.

Omar has known Martha since they were kids running around the same East Dallas neighborhood. But when she unexpectedly returns home to finish high school after years away, he hardly recognizes her. Though she’s still the bookish, defiant, overachieving girl he knew, now it’s her body that everyone, including Omar, notices.

Martha is interested in only one thing: creating a life that matches her potential. So she refuses to let the unwanted attention, her devotion to her brother, or a growing relationship with Omar change that.

As Martha pursues a plan she hopes will let her chart her own course, the stories of the women who came before her unfold alongside her own. Mariana, her mother, a light-skinned beauty, leaves Mexico and heads north, into the arms of America. Imelda, her grandmother, falls silent as a new political order takes hold after the Mexican Revolution. And Ana, her great-grandmother, a fierce soldadera, rides with Pancho Villa only to meet a violent end. The more Martha learns about the forces that shaped these women, and the closer she grows to Omar, the more clearly she sees how someone like her was never going to be allowed to just live on her own terms. Only later will Omar grasp the full weight of that reality and the part he played.

A blistering debut set on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, Decent People is at once an intimate coming-of-age tale and a powerful reckoning with history, an unforgettable window into the ways entitlement, inheritance, and quiet violence can shape a life—especially a woman’s. In showing us that confronting the past may reopen old wounds, Guel also demonstrates, with extraordinary intelligence and empathy, how owning that history offers our best hope of healing.