La Matosa is a land with few inhabitants, and there is no work or resources to be exploited, with the exception of cane plots, mango trees and a river with a canal. La Matosa reminds Melchor of a jungle with green grass that grows with no control: ‘You almost make your way with a machete and it closes behind you, and you don’t see anything because the cane is so tall and lonely’.
1 Spanish original: ‘Casi vas abriéndote paso con un machete y se vuelve a cerrar tras de ti, y no ves nada porque la caña es altísima y está solitario’; Gloria Luz Godínez Rivas and Luis Alfredo Román, ‘En el corazón del crimen siempre hay un silencio: entrevista con Fernanda Melchor’, Revell, 3.20 (2018), 188–95. La Matosa, in short, represents those places in Mexico where citizens succumb to a necropolitical regime of infantile and sexual violence that operates within the framework of obscurantism and lust.
It is worth noting that in
Temporada de huracanes, the characters do not make a single criticism of the system, let alone demand the better treatment of girls and women. The dynamics of violence in the town manifest via choral gossip. These comments are particularly critical of women and are almost never well intentioned, and the veracity of the facts to which they refer is not verified. In her interview with Cartas, Melchor said about this: ‘I wanted it to be a novel that would catch you like the stories of your aunt the gossip, who starts to tell you something and you want to know more and more and more’.
2 Spanish original: ‘yo quería que fuera una novela que te atrapara como la narración de tu tía la chismosa, que te empieza a contar algo y tú quieres saber más y más y más’; Cartas, ‘Temporada de huracanes es un cuento de hadas de la modernidad’. In this way, facts and personalities have a fictional component because they are configured mainly by hearsay that varies from the initial story, the germ of fiction devised by ‘gossipy people, the envious people of this fucking town, people who have nothing to do but go around inventing nonsense’.
3 Spanish original: ‘gente chismosa, la gente envidiosa de este pinche pueblo, gente que no tiene otra cosa que hacer más que andar inventando tonterías’; Temporada de huracanes, p. 51. Rumours are useful to this analysis because they reveal how the prejudices in the town generate stigma and marginalise people, particularly women, girls and homosexuals.
The town is therefore governed by necropowers that subordinate the population to the fight for the control of the territory and its people. In the novel, Barrabás embodies the prototype of an endriago subject who aims to profit from women’s bodies. He is a human trafficker in the region, and he stalks the villagers in the shadows. He and his colleagues call to Norma, as a potential victim of sexual trafficking, from the top of a truck:
[…] they called her, smacking their lips as if she were a dog, and the man who was driving, a blond guy with dark glasses and a cowboy hat, lowered the sound of the thundering music,
I’ll pretend to be a normal man, and ordered Norma to get into the truck, […] but she was very afraid and ran into a plot.
4 Spanish original: ‘la llamaban chasqueando los labios como si fuera una perra, y el hombre que conducía, un sujeto rubio de gafas oscuras y sombrero vaquero, bajó el sonido de la música que tronaba, me haré pasar por un hombre normal, y le ordenó a Norma que se subiera a la camioneta, […] pero ella tuvo mucho miedo y corrió a internarse en una parcela’; Temporada de huracanes, p. 118.Later, we find out that Barrabás makes a veteran prostitute in the area, Chabela, disappear. Barrabás thus acts as an endriago subject not only with the innocent girl but also with more-experienced women, who, beset by poverty, yield to the praise of the trafficker.
The other
endriago subjects in
Temporada de huracanes are Brando, Munra, Norma’s stepfather and many unnamed others who participate in the system that predates on women and girls. La Matosa arises around the construction of a road that connects the port and the capital with the oil wells of Palogacho. The place is full of inns, canteens and brothels ‘where drivers and operators and merchants passing through and day labourers stopped to escape for a while from the monotony of that road lined with reeds’.
5 Spanish original: ‘en donde los choferes y los operadores y los comerciantes de paso y los jornaleros se detenían para escapar un rato de la monotonía de aquella carretera flanqueada de cañas’; Temporada de huracanes, p. 25. Melchor describes a scenario in which capitalism and patriarchy exclude women from proper paid work and subordinate them to male power. Such is the case with Norma’s mother, a single mother of six, who Norma barely sees ‘because she had finally found a job in a jacket factory, and sometimes she would do two shifts in a row so that the money would reach them’.
6 Spanish original: ‘porque al fin había encontrado un trabajo en una fábrica de chamarras, y a veces hacía dos turnos al hilo para que el dinero les alcanzara’; Temporada de huracanes, p. 137. Norma’s mother gives us some glimpses into the misogyny against factory workers (
maquilas) and the degrading sexual component attached to it.
Reporting on her study on foreign factories in Ciudad Juárez, Debbie Nathan explains that the female factory workers (
obreras) were often perceived as prostitutes (
rameras). Also known as ‘maqui-crazies’ (
maqui-locas), the
maquilas were stigmatised for taking part in beauty contests; dancing with
cualquiera (anyone) in nightclubs; drinking alcohol; and using drugs.
7 Debbie Nathan, ‘Work, Sex and Danger in Ciudad Juárez’, NYU Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 25 September 2007; https://nacla.org/article/work-sex-and-danger-ciudad-juarez [accessed 29 January 2021]. Norma’s mother had to prostitute herself to support her children before meeting Pepe, a factory worker and a sexual predator. We will return to this story later. For the moment, we are left with the idea that the productive system in place favours precarious employment for women, structural poverty and, finally, misogynistic and homophobic behaviour that, as in the story at hand, can end in death.
La Matosa Carnival in the novel, which represents the carnival in Veracruz, gives us some glimpses into the construction of gender and sexual normativity in contemporary Mexico. The event offers a space for sexual liberation that fills the streets with homosexuals from all corners of the area, disguised as dancers, fairies with butterfly wings, Red Cross nurses, muscular gymnasts and girlfriends. La Matosa Carnival initially unleashes the libidos of the attendees. However, Melchor narrates how, soon, effeminate males, mostly disguised as women, begin to fight, tearing off their wigs and tiaras and rolling on the ground ‘with screams, leaving blood and sequins scattered while the mob laughed’.
8 Spanish original: ‘entre alaridos, dejando sangre y lentejuelas regadas mientras la turba reía’; Temporada de huracanes, p. 171. Therefore, the maddened crowd treats effeminate males and women alike. Melchor says in this regard: ‘the joke is to ridicule women. I mean, what’s more ridiculous than dressing up as a woman? But they don’t allow women to cross-dress’.
9 Spanish original: ‘el chiste es ridiculizar a las mujeres. Es decir, ¿qué hay más ridículo que vestirse como una mujer? Pero no permiten a las mujeres travestirse’; Chigo, ‘Analizar la raíz de la violencia sexual’. While the carnival seemingly encourages liberation, it actually excludes and ridicules women. This episode reflects a network of archaic cultural practices and representations that objectify and take control of female bodies and relegates sexual minorities to an uninhabitable space because they do not conform to the hetero-patriarchal norms of the system. This event ultimately reflects how life in La Matosa is subordinated to social exclusion, and this brings dramatic consequences for all the characters in the novel, as we shall see next.