An in-progress linked short story collection, Purple Irises / Lirios Morados follows mostly women as they navigate love and betrayal across two countries—the U.S. and Uruguay—while political upheaval, cultural displacement, and economic oppression test their resilience and agency.

A twentysomething woman searches for love amid ethnocentric beliefs that attempt to erase her. A middle-aged daughter yearns for affection from her self-absorbed mother—a displaced immigrant who internalizes patriarchal views that insist a woman cannot live without a man. A man believes so deeply in the principles of the American Dream—equal opportunity and honesty—that he rejects his own culture, finding himself isolated until he finds an unexpected compadre. In other stories, a woman refuses to allow her oppressive family and Uruguay's dictatorship to silence her; a young girl draws on the mother-love she received to help heal her own mother from political trauma; and adolescent girls come of age in a world that limits them because of their class and gender.

The titular image—purple irises mistaken for other objects—reflects a core theme: appearances deceive, and people, objects, ideologies betray us. Yet through cultural memory and feminist perspectives, characters discover unexpected sources of strength. Blending realism with touches of magical realism and feminist Gothic—a house mirrors and supports its owner's resistance to sociopolitical oppressions and a lonely individual welcomes a ghost as un compadre—the stories interweave recurring characters into a communal Latinx narrative that spans two countries, two languages, and two cultures. Ultimately these characters discover that, wherever they may find themselves, empathy and connection—real or imagined—is the only path to survival.