It is one of the tragedies of Elena's life that she's never been wholly trained in the ancestral cultures of either of her parents. Her mother was born to an Ohlone family that was undergoing cultural disintegration in Santa Cruz. She left there to live in near isolation with Elena's father who was here in California, many thousands of miles from his Spanish-Mexican family in Guadalajara. So essentially she felt like a woman without a culture, constantly trying to grasp at shreds of what was left of the Ohlone way of life... though she couldn't fit in with a native village when she tried.
There were only a few books in Elena's life. The Bible of course, was one. Another was a book of poems. When she got to SF she discovered more books and the start of a city newspaper.
What's mainly lost to her is the knowledge of how her ancestors lived. She is on her own from an early age and thus falls victim to cult mind control and subjugation.
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