[Feminist Press; 2024]

Tr. from the Spanish by Heather Cleary and Julia Sanches

Dahlia de la Cerda is very online. A brief scroll through her Instagram and X pages reveals recent selfies in Paris graveyards, up-to-the-minute commentary on Mexican politics, and snarky memes about her haters. De la Cerda identifies herself as “cholo-gótica” (a person, it seems, who blends regional Mexican culture and a goth aesthetic), is the co-founder/director of the abortion-support feminist collective Moras Help Moras, and channels her diverse aesthetic and political interests into essays and short stories. This month, anglophone readers get to experience the Aguascalientes-based author’s politically astute and electrifying writing through her short story collection Perras de reserva, luminously co-translated by Heather Cleary and Julia Sanches as Reservoir Bitches for Feminist Press. As one might intuit from her online presence, De la Cerda’s writing has flair, and fangs.

The first edition of Perras de reserva was published in 2019 by Editorial Tierra Adentro, to extreme popularity and critical acclaim in Mexico (it won the country’s prestigious Premio Nacional de Cuento Joven Comala in 2019). The collection was an extension of an earlier project in which De la Cerda wrote exclusively about femicides (the murder of a woman for being a woman), and included nine interlinked stories, plus three independent ones. The second edition of Perras de reserva, released by the Spanish-language publishing powerhouse Editorial Seix Barral in 2022, added four more stories, pieces that had some tingly paranormal activity going on in them. It is this second, expanded edition of Perras de reserva that Cleary and Sanches have so skillfully brought into English.

All of the short stories in Reservoir Bitches are narrated in the first person, by women. The women’s backgrounds vary—we have an assassin, a drug lord’s daughter, a “maquiloca,” and a teen mom, among others—but all of these women’s disparate lives are united by a common thread: violence. In the background of these stories, dismembered bodies hang from bridges, chests are mutilated, shots are fired poolside, and women are hit, then hit again.

In Reservoir Bitches, the narrators are mostly unfazed by the violence that surrounds them, made ambivalent to horror by its overabundance in everyday life. “There were also dozens of armed men,” the homonymous teenage narrator of “Regina” says, when recounting a pool party at her friend’s house, “but I decided to ignore those.” Regina is glib about the guns, affecting boredom when she realizes that her friend’s father is a drug lord: “When did I figure out her father was a drug lord? I don’t know, and I don’t really care.” To another narrator, Yuliana, in her story “Yuliana,” violence is also no more than an ancillary detail: “One day, I shot the gardener by accident,” she casually recalls. Later, Yuliana orders her bodyguards to take her private school nemesis down a notch by shaving her head, a bit of Carrie-esque revenge. For both Regina and Yuliana, violence is part and parcel of their über-wealthy lives. Regina is the daughter of an influential congressman, and Yuliana’s father, as she viciously thinks to herself, “is a big time capo, bitches, so you all can suck my dick!”

Other narrators are not so privileged. The “neighborhood spinsters” of “God Forgive Us,” for example, live in a dangerous, crime-ridden area because they were evicted from the city’s gentrifying historic district “for being dark-skinned and working class.” The narrator of “God Didn’t Come Through” also lives in this barrio. She sees “the doñas who work from sunup to sundown in the factory or cleaning rich folks’ shit in their bougie houses or selling donuts and never catch a break,” and decides that robbing people on the street is the more effective route to staunching her little brothers’ cries of hunger. “I was a gangsterette with principles,” she boasts, a modern-day Robin Hood. Other characters, such as La China, similarly grew up in poverty, getting out of an abusive marriage by becoming a lookout for a major cartel. Her escape from poverty had its own price: La China had to kill others in order to ascend the cartel hierarchy and keep herself alive. Like Regina and Yuliana, La China speaks in an offhand way about this violence: “How many lives have I taken? No clue, a lot. I don’t regret any of them though. I’m from the Sicilian school, zero remorse.” Across Reservoir Bitches’s thirteen stories, forms of political, domestic, and sexual violence are so omnipresent that they begin to border on white noise.

The blasé discourse vis-à-vis violence that De la Cerda has all of her narrators take on, as Ana Negri writes in her review of the collection, is a bit risky. The danger of having protagonists who uniformly adopt a “bulletproof” narrative tone, Negri contends, is that there is less room for their individual voices to come out. Negri goes so far as to say that the women of these stories, who are frequently the victims of femicide, or are the friends of femicide victims, have their individual subjectivities “silenced” by such a consistently disaffected narrative voice.

But my experience of reading the collection was different. Yes, the narrators tend to bring up torture, decapitation, and murder in a disturbingly detached way, but there are times when the narrators’ devil-may-care veneer cracks, the pain becoming visible underneath all that stylized bravado. These moments of vulnerability are all the more arresting for their scarcity.

For example, in most of “Mariposa de barrio,” the teenage narrator begins to tell her story from within a seemingly impenetrable shield of anger. “I showed that bitch her place,” she says, yelling, “don’t fuck with me, slut,” at another girl who is sleeping with her boyfriend. “Dumb skanks,” she thinks to herself. But, as the story progresses, the narrative tone shifts. We learn that the narrator is not just a jealous girlfriend, eager to take down other women, but that she also works twelve-hour shifts to buy milk and diapers for her young son. “I clock in at the shoe store where I’ve been working since I was fourteen at 10:00 a.m. and leave at 8:30 p.m., so I’m barely ever with him. I hope he realizes when he grows up that I did all this so he could have Jordans and Nikes and nice clothes and a fridge full of Danoninos.” After screaming so hard she loses her voice at a concert, the narrator cries and tells us readers, seemingly in a whisper, that “I was heartbroken but I wanted to be strong for my little one.” For just a cab ride, we see the narrator let down her guard.

In “La Huesera,” meanwhile, the narrator writes in a diary, each entry addressed to her best friend who was murdered in an apparent femicide. Grieving this loss, and herself teetering on the edge of suicide, the narrator becomes obsessed with news articles and statistics about femicides in Mexico. There are almost five full pages dedicated to a litany of these headlines, a brutal, incessant machine-gun list of instances of violence against women that turn into a sort of macabre catalog poem—here, the overwhelm is the point. But after the narrator’s removed, unemotional recounting of instances of femicide, the narrator is momentarily overcome by a simple memory of her friend. “Memories pop up when you’re not looking for them, I guess,” she says. She turns to a trio of quirky analogies to describe this pain instead of addressing it head-on: “Like confetti snakes springing out of a can when you least expect it. Like getting your period early just as you’re headed to the beach. But not like finding fifty pesos in your pocket to hold you over until payday.” Here, slightly humorous figurative language is used to deflect and defer the hurt, but underneath the narrator’s punchy dark humor there is heartbreak.

What the “bulletproof” discursive mode tells me, then, is that these narrators know that they cannot normally go around unarmed. In a country that has one of the world’s highest femicide rates, an irreverent tongue works as an imperfect, slapdash shield.

De la Cerda’s female characters are not only the recipients of violence. In a recent interview, De la Cerda said that she is dedicated to crafting female characters that are capable of both committing and living violence at the same time. Women can be multidimensional, she shows, and not always in a good way. La China was beaten by her ex-husband, so she had him killed. In the story “Constanza,” the titular character likewise has her sister’s murderer taken out. And, in the phenomenal “Smile,” the narrator, a trans woman who was working in the notoriously dangerous maquiladora factory landscape of northern Mexico when she was raped and murdered, returns from the dead to kill her killers.

This insistence on representing women as capable of both suffering and inflicting violence is a growing trend in hispanophone short form fiction. From María Fernanda Ampuero’s Human Sacrifices (translated by Frances Riddle), to Mayra Santos Febres’s recently released Mujeres violentas, or Lina Meruane’s Avidez (the latter two only available in Spanish as of now), short story writers across Latin America have been giving serious consideration to women as agents of violence, not merely as recipients of it. Instead of reproducing one-note narratives in which women are always and only victims, De la Cerda, Ampuero, Santos Febres, Meruane, and others emphasize that power relations must be seen in an intersectional manner. De la Cerda’s most recent book, the essay collection Desde los zulos, elaborates her thinking about “feminisms from the margins” (the title is a racial and class-informed challenge to Virginia Woolf’s phrase “a room of her own”; a zulo is an underground space often used for hiding smuggled objects, or kidnapped people). Above all else, De la Cerda is interested in a plurality of female identities, not in the universalization of a singular—often upper class, white—female experience.

Part of that emphasis on complexity comes through in the employment of language. The thirteen stories that comprise Reservoir Bitches are slick with regional northern and central Mexican slang, and flush with profanity for emphasis. It is unsurprising that the writer Andrea Abreu, known for her use of Canarias-specific youthful patois, blurbed De la Cerda’s text.

There is a lot going on in the translation work. The co-translators, Cleary and Sanches, have, in the words of Susan Bernofsky, “turned up the volume” on this slang, giving it a distinctly Gen-Z tone. Regina’s hair “gives California,” “nacas” is glossed as “basic bitches,” and “fam” and “babe” alternately stand in for the all-purpose “plebe.” At other times, De la Cerda’s slang is left untranslated in the English version: Words like mija, naca, buchona, and chava adorn Cleary and Sanches’s text, tiny sequins of Spanish that remind us readers that we are in an effervescent, youthful, and markedly Mexican cultural landscape. De la Cerda’s Spanish-language stories, meanwhile, are fluttered with italicized English words (likes, twerking, shopping, look, duckface, boobies, mini pig), and anglicisms (stalkear). In Cleary and Sanches’s translation, these English words and English-derived phrases are re-domesticated into English: “Yo le respondía haciendo un buen twerking” becomes “I’d respond with a good twerk”; here, the English word twerking is re-translated into English. It’s like a game of telephone; online slang in the anglophone world is refracted back into English after having passed through De la Cerda’s snarky Spanish. In Perras de reserva, the (already in English) line “American dream, you know” becomes “Gringo dream or whatever” in Reservoir Bitches. It is to Cleary and Sanches’s credit that they choose to translate a phrase that was already in English in the source text. Even the cover of Reservoir Bitches, on which a fanged mouth pops against a zingy brat-green background, emphasizes the vivacity of the language in this translation.

It should be no surprise that Cleary and Sanches have brought De la Cerda’s stories into English in such a dazzling manner. Cleary has translated a panoply of verve-y contemporary Latin American authors (Brenda Lozano, Fernanda Trías, and Roque Larraquy, among others), and has been long-listed twice for the National Book Award in Translated Literature. Sanches, meanwhile, works across Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan in her translation work, and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize for her potent translation of Eva Baltasar’s Boulder. Together, the two are a formidable team, demonstrating the power and possibilities of collaborative translation work.

In August of this year, De la Cerda released her second book of collected short fiction, titled Medea me cantó un corrido (or, Medea Sang Me a Corrido), a collection that was nominated for the prestigious Premio Ribera del Duero, in a year that the judging jury was chaired by the Argentinian gothic writer Mariana Enríquez. In her sophomore collection, De la Cerda continues to engage the same themes, discourse, and perspectives as Reservoir Bitches, exploring the effects of racism, violence, precarity, and lack of opportunities in contemporary Mexico from the vantage point of diverse, mainly female narrators. As De la Cerda writes in a post on X, the nomination for the prize is significant to her because it shows that the types of people represented in her stories “are important and deserve to be listened to, and that even in the spaces where lots of people experience violence, marginalization, and apologies to crime, there is also art.” Like Perras de reserva, then, De la Cerda’s second short story collection accomplishes big things in Spanish. Now anglophone readers just need to wait for a translation. Perhaps Cleary and Sanches can come out for an encore?

Anna Learn is a PhD student at the University of Washington, where she studies Persian, South Asian, and Hispanic literature. You can find her work on her website.


 
 
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