The Donkey Lady
by Carmen Tafolla

There is something quietly subversive about the disclaimer that opens The Donkey Lady, Carmen Tafolla’s graphic parable, illustrated by Thelma Ortiz Muraida: this book is not intended for children under nine—or for small-minded adults. The warning is sharp, but its purpose is serious. Tafolla is asking us to reconsider what we think we know.

For generations, the Donkey Lady has haunted the folklore of South San Antonio, frightening children from beneath bridges and along dark roads. Tafolla begins before the monster.
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Before the Donkey Lady, there is La Callada.

She speaks with trees and birds, with plants, with the wind. Nature knows her before society decides what to call her. That distinction matters, because the violence at the center of the story begins with the human impulse to decide whose presence counts and whose may be erased.

Tafolla places mestizaje at the heart of the parable while restoring the African ancestry so often pushed to the margins of Mexican and Mexican American identity. La Callada’s dark skin becomes part of the machinery through which others attempt to diminish her humanity. Racism and greed converge, exposing how easily possession disguises itself as superiority.

Yet Tafolla refuses to let brutality define her. La Callada emerges as a woman whose softness is never weakness. Her courage is rooted in certainty: she knows who she is and where she belongs. Her refusal rises into a chant strong enough to outlast those who would displace her.
Ortiz Muraida’s charcoal-and-pastel illustrations deepen that transformation. The images hover between memory and dream, their textures perfectly suited to a story carried through generations. Charcoal suggests erasure and return; pastel brings warmth into the shadows. The result is less an illustrated legend than a recovered communal memory.
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Tafolla’s achievement is not simply to revise a ghost story. She asks us to consider who gets made monstrous inside folklore. A woman becomes an animal. Dark skin becomes strangeness. Resistance becomes something frightening enough to warn children about. Over time, the injustice disappears while the monster remains.

Tafolla reverses that process and gives the ghost back her name. In doing so, she transforms the Donkey Lady from an apparition into a figure of belonging and refusal. The old tale transforms from something that frightened the community to a vehicle that fortifies it.

That is why this book feels so timely. Tafolla rescues a South Texas legend from the narrow fate of being merely a ghost story and raises it as a valiant flag:

“No sir, No sir, this is ours, and here we’ll stay where the trees and the birds and the wind know our names.”

After Tafolla, it is difficult to hear the story of the Donkey Lady the same way again. The monster has stepped out of the darkness, and now we know a brave woman was there all along.
Reviewed by
Rossy E. Lima
8/9/2026
Rossy Evelin Lima, PhD, is an award-winning writer, scholar, and translator. She has shared her journey as a writer through a TEDx talk and a nationally broadcasted PBS documentary. Her poetry has been set to music and performed at venues such as the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. She was named Poet of the Year by The Americas Poetry Festival of New York (2018) and has received multiple awards and recognitions in Italy, Mexico, and the U.S.
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