HURRICANE SEASON: Breaking the silence & impunity around femicide

Season 1, Episode 7 Transcript

(Note: following this transcript is a list of other books by Mexican authors, which you may purchase through The Lift Up’s shop on bookshop.org*)

V: Happy Wednesday! I’m Vina Orden, here with Tamara Crawford. And this is The Lift Up Podcast, inviting you to discover empowering reads by marginalized writers. In this Episode #7, our final episode of the season, we’re discussing Fernanda Melchor’s English-language debut novel, Hurricane Season.

Melchor is a Mexican writer who was born in Veracruz, which figures in the book as the fictitious setting Villagarbosa. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in major Mexican newspapers such as Milenio and Excélsior; the Mexican cultural and literary online magazine Replicante; as well as international publications such as The Paris Review, Le Monde diplomatique, Vanity Fair Latinoamerica, GQ Latinoamérica, and Vice Latinoamérica. In 2018, Melchor won the PEN Mexico Award for Literary and Journalistic Excellence. The German translation of her third novel, Hurricane Season, won the International Literature Award and the Anna Seghers-Preis in 2019. The English translation of the novel has been shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Awards.

So, let’s get right to it.

V: Hi, Tamara!

T: Hey, Vina!

V: So, we’re recording this final episode of Season 1 just days before the presidential election here in the U.S. Between the record numbers of absentee ballots, early voting, and expected turnout during Election Day (despite it not being a national holiday that people can get off from work), I’m pretty confident about who I think will win the popular vote. But, I have to say, I’m really anxious when I remember what happened to Hillary Clinton four years ago when she won the popular vote but not the electoral college, and even twenty years ago when it came down to the state of Florida in deciding the election of George W. Bush over Al Gore. So, how are you feeling about things, Tamara?

T: It’s really interesting watching the campaigning and election from here. Being abroad, I was able to cast my vote using my absentee ballot in enough time to ensure that it made it to the Board of Elections on time. But I find it really interesting how much focus there is on the US elections abroad — it really has a massive global impact. So, for example, I try to watch the news in Japanese to keep up my listening skills and there is always, without fail, a section on the US elections, or, they’ll run something about the US debates. And then, reading newspapers and articles here in Europe, there’s always a lens on the US election having a knock on effect to the global economy and global stability. So, in terms of my feelings of the direction — while this is a record year for voter turnout (which is amazing that people are exercising their right to vote), I’m not going to call it. I mean, we’ve been shocked before, and based on past experience, polls have not been a good indication of results. But, you know, at this point nothing surprises me anymore. I just know the results that I’m hoping for …

V: Yeah, and it’s striking that we’re discussing this book in the context of what’s happening around the world politically. So, this book is really a critique of the misogyny and rampant violence against women and trans people in Mexico that goes unnoticed and unmentioned in society. And, if you remember, it was around this time four years ago that the Access Hollywood tape where Trump says he could do anything because he was a star, including “grabbing women by the pussy,” leaked … And he still won the election against the country’s first female presidential candidate …

T: See why I’m not surprised?

V: Exactly. And this misogyny and violence against women and trans people seem to go hand in hand with the rise of a sort of macho-fascism and militarism around the world.

So, last month, Pilipinos just commemorated the six-year anniversary of the murder of Pilipina trans woman Jennifer Laude by U.S. Marine Joseph Scott Pemberton in the Philippines. It was an outrageous case — not just because of Pemberton’s defense (so, he claimed that he felt “raped” by Laude for performing oral sex on him without disclosing that she was transgender) and his lenient sentence (twelve years, later reduced to ten), but also because Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte — who’s had his fair share of misogynist remarks, including instructing soldiers to shoot female activists in the vagina— pardoned Pemberton in September, who is now back with his family in the US. And, the Philippines actually has the second worst record in Asia for murdering trans people, next to India, which, when you think about it, is a country with 11 times the population of the Philippines. It’s really bad there …

T: I had no idea about those statistics — it’s crazy …

V: It’s really bad … But back to the book, for those who haven’t read it yet, I think we have to issue a trigger warning. It’s difficult to read because of the violent, often graphic language and actions targeted at the female and trans characters in the book … So, what were your initial thoughts about the style and content of Hurricane Season, Tamara?

T: Yeah, I definitely have to echo the trigger warning here. This book is not for the faint of heart or for the prudish. This book is incredibly raw in language and imagery, and I do have to commend the translator, Sophie Hughes, for being able to (in what I understand from various interviews) stay true to Fernanda Melchor’s sentiment when translating many of the colloquialisms into English.

When I originally looked at the book, I thought it was going to be a magical, fantastical story set in Mexico. I generally try not to read any of the reviews before choosing a book, and I kind of skim them a little bit, but maybe I should’ve dipped in a little bit deeper. But that’s what we found out, is actually that’s not what this story’s about. Rather, it’s a complex narrative that contemplates the results of myth, stereotypes, poverty, and unseen motives as the underlying drivers for hate and eventually murder.

And, you know, reading the book was very uncomfortable and intense, but I think this is exactly Melchor’s point with the language and style. After all, she says in The Punch Magazine interview, “a novel with such violent language would also need a violent form.” And in using stream of consciousness as a narrative tool, I did feel closer to the characters and their personalities. I felt that style removed any barriers to them. So, I felt all of this was necessary to drill home the key themes under discussion with a level of depth and empathy that would be difficult to achieve had she written it differently. And actually, in the Booker Prize interview with Melchor and Hughes, Melchor notes in her response as to why she chose this writing style:

I never imagined I could write a novel like this. I like to think that this particular style was born out of necessity: an intense novel, full of spiraling anger and obsession, needed a style capable of holding the momentum, a narrative voice capable of entering the mind of the characters without losing a sort of skeptical cynicism, and to come and go through different timelines and stories. At the beginning of the writing process I wrote hundreds of pages from the perspective of the different inhabitants of La Matosa, especially the women; it was sort of a medium-like activity, listening to these jaded gossiping women telling me about the Witch and her killers in hushed voices, at times contradicting themselves, so even though most of this material didn’t make it to the final version because I didn’t like the idea of this novel being a pure recollection of first-person testimonies, some of that popular speech fluency end up shaping the final form. At some point I learned a lot from the strategies used by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in The Autumn of the Patriarch, or from Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters, which are authors I admire.

And I love Marquez, so I can sort of see where she’s going with that. But I think another point worth mentioning here is her response to the view that this story portrays “the real Mexico,” as discussed in the Southwestern Review interview, where she says:

I think it’s impossible to speak of one unique reality in Mexico. The social inequality gap is so wide that one is tempted to admit there are several very different Mexicos within the same territory. But it is true that violence could be the common experience of the average Mexican, and I am not just talking about the spectacular forms of violence, like shootings or femicides or beheadings, but of more pervasive and insidious forms of violence, like discrimination, classism, injustice, and impunity. So yes, in a way we can say Hurricane Season portrays some of these violent experiences of being Mexican nowadays, and it does so through a coarse language that mimics the way people speak, but at the same time I really think it’s impossible to establish a direct link between history and literature, or between reality or literature, because the writer’s task is to create something different out of reality, to disguise and betray and divert this political or ideological material and transform it into something else: a fiction, something that is neither true nor false. Another kind of reality, as Piglia used to say.

V: Yeah, I think it’s interesting that, as a journalist, Melchor decided to write a story that was initially based on a real-life crime she read about in the paper about a man who murdered a woman allegedly for using witchcraft to make him fall back in love with her. Partially, it’s because it would have been dangerous for her to actually write this story the way she conceived it, so something along the lines of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood where she would have had to interview people in a town notorious as a narcos hideout. But I do think fiction allowed her to explore so many of the other issues she obviously wanted to highlight.

For example, I thought it was interesting that Melchor included this scene at the very beginning of the book:

… who knows how, some say with the devil in her ear, she learned of an herb that grew wild up in the mountains, almost at the summit, among the old ruins that, according to those suits from the government, were the ancient tombs of men who’d once lived up there, the first dwellers, there even before those filthy Spaniards who, from their boats, took one look at all that land spread out before them and said finders keepers, this land belongs to us and to the Kingdom of Castile; and the ancients, the few who were left, had to run for the hills and they lost everything, right down to the stones of their temples, which ended up buried in the mountainside in the hurricane of ’78 … and the ruins where those herbs were said to grow, the herbs that the Witch boiled up into an odorless, colorless poison so imperceptible even the doctor from Villa concluded that Manolo had died of a heart attack …

So, I didn’t know much about the history of Veracruz, which was the inspiration for the fictitious setting of Villa/Villagarbosa, but Melchor condenses so much in this one paragraph about the indigenous origins of the city and the state on the east coast off the Gulf of Mexico.

Researching it a bit further, I learned that enslaved Africans who were brought to Mexico to work on Spanish plantations (haciendas), had escaped to the mountains where they lived with indigenous people. For over two centuries, they resisted the Spanish, carrying out revolts and attacking haciendas until slavery was virtually eliminated in the area (it was formally abolished in 1829 by the leaders of a newly independent Mexico). And Melchor doesn’t really go into Veracruz’s African and indigenous roots beyond this paragraph, but as a writer, I admire how she manages to bring it in when she talks about the food, like lamb tamales and mojarra frita (deep-fried tilapia flavored with citrus), or music, like the cumbia, which has its origins in African dance music.

T: Yeah, she doesn’t really revisit it in depth, but she does include additional references in the way she describes certain characters, their appearance, or even stereotypes based on their heritage. For example, the way she describes Luisimi and Norma or even Brando’s description of a boy whom he has interest in taking advantage of, where Brando notes, “For years he’d kept one eye on him around the place, especially because he seemed to look a bit like Brando as a boy, well a whiter version, an improved version of himself …” And even how she describes Yesenia as an “ugly, dark skinned, lanky thing … a lizard on two feet,” or that her straight hair was the only beautiful thing about her, prompting her grandmother to punish her by cutting it all off. So I think Melchor brought a lot of that undercurrent into the story but very subtly.

V: And there’s also the way the mother and daughter aren’t given names — so, they’re just called Witches the whole time. And there’s also this tension between the people believing in their healing powers but then, at the same time, denouncing them as the devil’s associates. And it actually made me think of a parallel in Pilipino indigenous culture.

So, in precolonial times, women and trans people were elevated as priestesses, herbalists and healers, and even warriors, and they were called babaylan. And when the Catholic, patriarchal Spanish colonizers arrived, they were so threatened by this indigenous system of social organization that they’ve never really seen before. So, they carried out “witch hunts,” and they famously cut up the bodies of the babaylan and fed them to crocodiles to make sure they wouldn’t survive.

T: Wow!

V: Yeah. And just like the Mexicans in the book, many Pilipinos cling onto superstitions — and it’s probably inherited memory from pre-colonial times — while being consumed by Catholic guilt. It’s really that strangeness of multiplicities, right, where it’s normal to see an arbularyo, mangkukulam, or the hybrid “faith healer,” as it is to go to confession or to consult a priest.

T: Wow — that is very interesting. Wow. And just going back to your point about the Witches, I find the branding of these women as witches very symbolic of the commoditization of others, be it women, girls, children in this story. Even the Witch’s gender identity is not her own, depending on who’s discussing or describing her. And I use “her” here just because it seems to be the prevailing pronoun throughout the story. But her humanity is predicated upon her usefulness. And it’s clear that the people in the town hate her, make up stories about her, and warn their children not to go near her, but then they’re willing to visit her when they need something. And even the Witches’ stories weren’t theirs to tell, because it was really for others to tell about them. So, we never really get to know who they were except through the eyes of others.

V: Yeah, that’s a good point … I’m also impressed with the way Melchor manages to explain the impact of the US-Mexico relationship on everyday Mexicans, again without being too heavy-handed. So, both the men and women set their sights on oil country up north “where rumor had it there was plenty of work.” And we see the wealth gap between those benefiting from globalism, whether its norteños like Barrabás who come in to Villa to recruit for his armed gang of sex and drug traffickers or the “engineer (who works at the Oil Company) an absolute picture of a gentleman with his immaculate long-sleeved shirt and gold bracelet on his hairy wrist and the latest model phone hooked onto his waistband” who takes Luismi, “his hair all ruffled and his feet filthy from walking around in flip-flops” out for a drink every Friday after work in exchange for a hookup. He also dangles the prospect of a job at the Oil Company for Luismi:

head in the clouds shit because Luismi had barely scraped through elementary school and he wasn’t fit for anything but fucking and being fucked, and no one in their right mind would give him work, not even as a street sweeper.

T: Indeed, and in doing whatever is needed to survive the poverty they live in, we see the commoditization of women and children for sex, for fun, for relief, for shelter, as one of the key threads in this story. And this all leads to some of the other themes explored, such as misogyny, femicide, homophobia, transphobia, and toxic masculinity …

V: Yeah, I found chapter 6 interesting because it’s told from the point of view of one of the young male characters, Brando, and is written in such a way that we, as readers, get to experience being hazed into a toxic masculinist culture, so from being teased about his “gayboy name,” to discovering and eventually becoming desensitized to porn, to feeling shamed by his inability to perform during a gang rape, to repressing his sexual attraction to his friend Luismi and channeling all that frustration into homophobic and misogynist anger and violence — I mean, it’s a lot. And through the course of the chapter, Brando never develops self-awareness about how poisonous and destructive this cult of masculinity is, not just to women, but also to the men, who are figuratively and literally imprisoned because of it but don’t even know it.

And in many ways, it’s the marginalized — Luismi, whose status changes when his friends find out he actually likes having sex with men, and not just doing it for a power trip; the Witch, who helps women terminate unwanted pregnancies because of rape or the sex work they do to survive; the trans women who try to help out the Witch after she’s battered and pull together resources to give her a proper burial — who are the freest because they don’t have to worry about conforming. They also are the only characters who have empathy for others, even their tormentors.

T: That is true. And just going back to a point that you made earlier on, I do think this chapter on Brando, which also happens to be one of the longest within the book, is so important in pulling the story together for the reader, as well as many of the themes that are woven throughout this book. Because, as you touched on, the key here is the relationship Brando has with himself that impacts the friendship between himself and Luismi. And in Brando’s awkward coming of age and the ribbing he gets from his friends for not yet having sex with a girl, that impacts the understanding of his own sexuality, and in that exploration, we do see that he finds himself attracted to Luismi. And then one night, after a drug and drink-filled Carnival, he finds himself at Luismi’s where Brando actually initiates the sexual encounter with a completely wasted Lusimi and runs away at his own embarrassment the next morning whilst Luismi is asleep. And this, I think, sets in motion a number of the feelings and actions on Brando’s part that end up impacting the entire group leading to the Witch’s murder. And just to read some parts to give some of the insight into Brando’s psyche, after that night, he goes:

… that instead of having run away like a fucking coward, he should have taken advantage of Luismi’s defenselessness as he slept to straddle and then choke him with his bare hands, or better still, with his belt, anything so he wouldn’t have to spend the whole of Carnival cooped up at home with his mother-to her delight-too afraid to meet up with his friends, who, having had the full debrief about what had happened with Luismi, would castrate him in front of the whole town …

But the thing is, Luismi never tells anyone anything about what happened, and yet, Brando has this obsession with his encounter with him and it consumes him with this murderous desire …

Brando seethed at the thought of what they, he and Luismi, had done together, on that never-to-be- repeated night, the memory of which tormented him so mercilessly he wanted to pull out his own brain; and he couldn’t stop wondering who knew their secret, who else Luismi has told … Why was Brando becoming more and more obsessed with the idea of killing him before that could happen? All he had to do was get hold of a gun, which was easy enough, and kill him, which wasn’t a problem either, and then dispose of the body, probably just dumping it in the irrigation canal …

And I find this so interestingly ironic, considering Brando was the one who completely outed Luismi and the engineer to every one of their friends without a second thought and honestly is the mastermind behind Luismi’s subsequent actions within the book. But Luismi has no clue at the strings that Brando has been pulling that impact his life and choices and still treats him the same way, as if nothing had happened between them … And I think that leads us into a discussion around internalized misogyny and self-hatred, because you could argue that is characteristic of Brando and all of these feelings and the psyche we see coming out of him and what we also see in a number of the other characters, which eventually drives these characters towards their hateful actions.

V: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that made this book hard to read was how aware the women are of being mistreated just for being female, yet, they mirror that same treatment with other women — so, the name-calling, the spreading of false rumors to destroy someone’s reputation, calling a woman out for the same thing a man can do without any consequences.

And you really see this in the chapter narrated by Yesenia. You feel her rage about being constantly, unjustly punished by her grandmother Doña Tina, who excuses anything her male cousin Luismi does as “boys will be boys,” “like father, like son” type of behavior. And we learn it was like that with Doña Tina and her children too. On the one hand, we see her doing everything for her son Maurilio — visiting him in jail when he was doing time for murder, selling her business and the family’s sole source of income to pay for his medical bills, then spending money she doesn’t have on a lavish funeral and mausoleum when he passes away. But then, we see her routinely calling her daughters whores and “despicable, greedy shit-stirring harpies,” and she doesn’t seem to care that they leave La Matosa, never to return.

And so many of the women in the story just disappear — we don’t know whether they’ve just managed to get out and make better lives for themselves or have become just another statistic. I looked it up … Approximately 10 women are killed every day in Mexico, and more than 40 percent of femicide victims knew their killer. These crimes are particularly brutal: women are more likely than men to be killed by strangulation, drowning, suffocation, and stabbing, and many of the bodies have been mutilated. And what’s worse is that over 90% of femicides are neither reported or investigated, so these killings are happening with impunity.

T: Wow. And those statistics are really hard to take in — they’re really difficult to take in. But if I go back into the book, I really do feel for the stories of Yesenia and Norma in this book. And it actually reminds me of a point Chabela makes about survival when she’s talking to Norma, and she says:

Got to keep your wits about you in this world, she pontificated. You drop your guard for a second and they’ll crush you, Clarita, so you better just tell that fuckwit out there to buy you some clothes. Don’t you be anyone’s fool …

V: Yeah, at first glance, it seems that the women are just victims. But, you know, when you actually think about the everyday reality these women face — so poverty, violence, the police and state that not only condone these crimes but also participate in them — you see how strong these women are, finding the motivation to persevere and to actually survive, one day after another by any means possible. And I think the scene you mention between the pregnant teenager Norma and her boyfriend’s mother Chabela really captures this. There’s a point in the scene where Chabela shares her own story:

I was fourteen when I met him, I’d just landed up in Villa, sick to death of picking lemons over on the ranch while my dad lost all our money betting on cockfights, until, one day, I learned they were building a new highway to connect the oil wells with Puerto, and people said it was going to be a real gravy train, bring in a ton of work, and all I knew how to do was pick lemons, but I came down anyway, and what do you know?

… People used to say he (her husband Maurilio) forced me into the work, like a pimp, but that’s bullshit, he didn’t have the brains for that; he was no entrepreneur. I started turning tricks off my own back, thank you very much; and why not, when it comes so natural?

… in the end, all kids are a burden, spongers, parasites who suck the life and all your blood from you. And to top it off they don’t appreciate any of the sacrifices you’ve got no choice but to make for them. You know what I’m talking about, Clarita, you watched your mom clock up the kids, one after the other like a fucking curse … when push comes to shove it’s you who has to bust your balls and squeeze the little fuckers out, then bust your balls to look after them, then bust them some more to pay for them while your fuckwit husband hits up the bars and rolls in when it fucking well suits him.

T: I know … And the part where Chabela notes that she built this house herself:

What do you reckon, Clarita? Shall I send him packing or keep supporting the lame old bum? It is my house, after all, I fucking sweated by tits oof to build it, and do think for one second that cunt raised a finger to help me do any of this …

Just going back to a point you mentioned earlier about the violence from the police state, especially when the Witch was murdered. The police weren’t even interested in finding her murderer or even interested in the confession of her murder. They just wanted to find her gold; they just wanted to find a fortune that was a myth, that didn’t even exist. So, I found that all really interesting.

But I think there’s another character whose story carries so many themes, and obviously, we don’t have enough time to go into it. But I think Norma’s story— from Chabela calling her Clarita after her dead younger sister (and that resemblance is probably the only reason she’s drawn to her and helps her), to being sexually groomed by her pedophile stepfather, to running away with the view that her only out of this life is death …

You know, the sadness of this story is the implication that any relief from this world or the situations the people are in is only in death, and I quote the Grandfather here who’s responsible for helping bury the dead:

You had to reassure them first, make them see there was no reason to be afraid, that life’s suffering was over now and the darkness would soon fade … Don’t you worry, don’t fret, you just lie there, that’s it. The sky flashed with lightning and a muffled boom shook the earth. The rain can’t hurt you now and the darkness doesn’t last forever, see there? See that light shining in the distance? The little light that looks like a star? That’s where you’re headed, he told them, that’s the way out of this hole.

V: Wow. So once again, a thought-provoking chat about a difficult but important book Hurricane Season. You know, I don’t think I could’ve gotten through or gotten as much out of this book if we hadn’t read and talked about it together. We’re looking forward to including a list of additional books to check out by Mexican writers on our Medium blog on medium.com/the-lift-up-podcast. As always, if you have favorite Mexican authors or books that you want to share with us, please interact with us through our Instagram page @theliftuppod.

T: I completely agree — it was a difficult book, but necessary to discuss. So I can’t believe it’s a wrap for our first season of the Lift Up! So we just want to say, thank you so much to all of our listeners around the world. And we’re gonna shout you all out — the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Canada, Switzerland, the Philippines, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Ireland, Romania, Taiwan, and Mexico! You kept us all going with your comments and encouragement, so from the bottom of our hearts, we want to thank you! We’re taking a break for the holidays and look forward to a new season in the New Year.

In the meantime, you can catch up on episodes you’ve missed, and also keep an eye out for musings and reading recommendations on our blog, medium.com/the-lift-up-podcast, or on our Instagram page @theliftuppod. We’ll be sharing some of our holiday reading so you can curl up for the holidays with a couple good books!

And, if you enjoy listening to the podcast, tell your friends to tune in too! You can also support the show and local booksellers by purchasing books featured on the show and on our recommendation lists in our shop on bookshop.org. This is not an ad, we just really think that what bookshop.org is doing is great in how they support local, independent booksellers, so please go check it out. And again, thank you so much for listening and being a part of Season 1 of The Lift Up Podcast! Our family wishes yours a safe and happy holiday!

*Books by Mexican authors/authors of Mexican heritage (click on links below to purchase titles through The Lift Up’s shop on bookshop.org):

• Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria E. Anzaldúa (semi-autobiographical book of essays and poems)
• Chloe Aridjis’ novels Asunder and Book of Clouds
• The Book of Lamentations by Rosario Castellanos (novel)
• Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me by Ana Castillo (memoir)
• Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s memoir Children of the Land and his poetry Dulce: Poems and Cenzóntle
• Sandra Cisneros’ fiction Caramelo (novel), Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories: And Other Stories, and The House on Mango Street
• Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue
• Laura Esquivel’s novels Pierced by the Sun, Malinche: A Novel, and Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies
• Manuel Gonzales’ fiction The Regional Office Is Under Attack! (novel) and The Miniature Wife: And Other Stories
• Rigoberto González’s poetry The Book of Ruin, Unpeopled Eden, and So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water until It Breaks; his novel Crossing Vines; and his memoir Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa
• The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande (memoir)
• Yuri Herrera’s novels The Transmigration of Bodies and Signs Preceding the End of the World
• Umami by Laia Jufresa (novel)
• Valeria Luiselli’s novels Lost Children Archive and Faces in the Crowd and her nonfiction essays Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions and Sidewalks
• Gabriel García Márquez’s novels Love in the Time of Cholera, The Autumn of the Patriarch, and One Hundred Years of Solitude; his novellas Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and No One Writes to the Colonel
• Cherríe Moraga’s poetry Loving in the War Years and essay anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (edited with Gloria E. Anzaldúa)
• Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novels Mexican Gothic, Gods of Jade and Shadow, and Untamed Shore
• The Body Where I Was Born by Guadalupe Nettel (novel)
• The Art of Flight by Sergio Pitol (blends fiction and memoir)
• Luis Alberto Urrea’s nonfiction The Devil’s Highway and Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life (memoir); his poetry The Fever of Being; and his fiction The Water Museum: Stories
• Juan Pablo Villalobos’ novels I’ll Sell You a Dog, Quesadillas, and Down the Rabbit Hole

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