My Name is Emilia del Valle: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

As a child, Emilia learns both Spanish and English. She is insatiably curious. She loves to read. Her adored don Pancho has but one vice: an addiction to sensational dime novels, and she devours his extensive library of them as she grows up. At 17, when it becomes clear that she doesn’t share her parents’ knack for teaching, she decides to embark on a career writing dime novels instead.

The dime novels, which Emilia publishes under the pen name Brandon J. Price, are something of a family project. Emilia does the writing and don Pancho edits, but it’s Molly whose vivid imagination most frequently provides the plots. Emilia’s first novel, The Damsel’s Revenge, sells 9,000 copies in English and 2,900 in Spanish. To celebrate, don Pancho gives Molly a pair of garnet earrings and Emilia a Virgen de Guadalupe medallion, which she has worn daily ever since. It’s about a wronged woman who gets revenge on the men who gang raped her by murdering them all. In the sequel, A Bad Woman, the wronged woman becomes a vigilante and offers her services to other wronged women.

The title A Bad Woman is something of an inside joke. When Emilia was young, Molly was forever talking about the virtues of a “good woman.” One day, during a tantrum, six-year-old Emilia shouted that, if being good meant doing what she was told without thinking for herself, she wanted to be “a bad woman.” And think for herself she does, even when her choices (like writing dime novels) are unconventional. But her income helps to keep the family afloat financially.

Six years “slip away” in this manner, with Emilia writing and helping don Pancho run the school while Molly bakes and sells bread, does charity work, and raises Emilia’s younger brothers. In her early 20s, however, Emilia decides to branch out, and she applies for a job with The Daily Examiner, a San Francisco newspaper newly acquired by news magnate William Randolph Hearst. She manages to wrangle an interview with Mr. Chamberlain, the editor in chief. He’s dubious about hiring a female reporter and isn’t impressed to learn that Emilia has been publishing dime novels as Brandon J. Price for years. But he agrees to give her a chance and tasks her with writing a column showcasing a fresh angle on the recent murder of Arnold Cole.

A wealthy and well-connected politician known for his incendiary, white-supremacist rhetoric, Arnold Cole belongs to a very different class of society than Emilia and her neighbors. But that isn’t an impediment to her story, since Mission District rumors make it clear that someone—in this case, Josefa Palomar, an old friend of the Claro family—knows something. Josefa worked for Arnold Cole, cleaning a secret little love-nest apartment he maintained. She informs Emilia that he entertained male visitors there. And that she saw his naked corpse on the floor of that apartment the day before his (clothed) body was discovered in the street. And Don Pancho passes along other details gleaned from friends who work at the police station and morgue.

The next day, Emilia brings Mr. Chamberlain her draft. He hands it to Eric Whelan, the star reporter who’s been covering the Cole case. In vivid and occasionally overwrought prose, the column recounts the discovery of Cole’s body, notes that coroner’s judgement that he’d been dead for at up to 36 hours before that point, and suggests that he might have been murdered elsewhere—perhaps a secret love-nest apartment—and subsequently dumped. Both Whelan and Mr. Chamberlain consider the column little more than “pure speculation,” but Mr. Chamberlain likes it. He assigns Emilia to cover the case alongside Whelan as a color and opinion columnist rather than a strictly factual reporter.   

Emilia becomes a journalist working alongside Eric Whelan on the Cole case. She tags along when he goes to the morgue to witness and report on the autopsy, although as a woman she’s not allowed into the room. Still, she learns from a custodian that Cole wasn’t wearing socks or underwear when he was found. When Whelan comes out of the autopsy room, he reports that the coroner’s findings confirm Emilia’s suggestion that Cole was gay. It’s looking more and more like his murder was personal rather than politically or financially motivated. Emilia tells Whelan to tell his police department contacts to search near the intersection of Lombard and Fillmore streets for the love nest, although she declines to be more specific to avoid implicating Josefa.

Under Whelan’s tutelage, Emilia becomes an accomplished journalist, covering everything from salacious crimes like Cole’s murder (unfortunately, his widow squashes the investigation before her husband’s sexual preferences and gambling debts become public knowledge) to dockworkers’ strikes, to immigrant communities, to the scourge of coyotes stalking backyard hen houses. She likes her job, although she still cherishes dreams of publishing a legitimate novel one day under her own name. But eventually she becomes bored and wants to stretch her wings, so she pitches a travel column to Mr. Chamberlain and books train tickets to New York City, despite Molly’s and don Pancho’s objections.