Women and homosexuals are stigmatised individuals in La Matosa. Let us focus on women first. In the novel, there are women with extraordinary stories, such as Yesenia; Yesenia’s grandmother, a bitter and misogynistic woman who shaves Yesenia’s beautiful hair because she said something negative about her cousin, Luismi; Norma’s mother, a maquiladora worker and a single mother of six; and Chabela, a smart and independent woman who has no choice but to provide for her handicapped husband, Munra, with her work as a prostitute in a club. There are indications that Chabela is kidnapped and perhaps killed by Barrabás, a criminal with whom she started a relationship and who, as we have indicated, recruits women and girls for sex trafficking.
All of these stories show evidence of the necropolitical mechanisms operating against women in contemporary Mexico. For reasons of space, I focus on the following characters: Bruja Vieja, who suffers a double stigma for being a witch and a woman; Bruja Chica, who I refer to in the feminine because she keeps her male identity hidden from everyone in town, except for the boys who visit her house; and Norma, a girl of 12 years old who is pregnant by her stepfather, Pepe, while also bearing the burden of looking after five younger siblings.
Witches are perceived as deviant women in superstitious places like La Matosa, where the inhabitants are faithful followers of Jarocha witchcraft.
1 Temporada de huracanes, p. 16. Witches have carried a stigma throughout history for being considered mysterious women with alleged magical powers, obtained thanks to a (sexual) pact with the devil. For example, in 1550, there was a violent hunt for witches, priestesses and healers in America that aimed to put an end to the ancient religious practices, which were understood as anti-colonialist manifestations.
2 Gloria Luz Godínez Rivas and Luis Román Nieto, ‘De torcidos y embrujos: Temporada de huracanes de Fernanda Melchor’, Anclajes, XXIII.3 (2019), 59–70. p. 62. In
Temporada de huracanes, Bruja Vieja and Bruja Chica are powerful women who pose a challenge to the deeply macho and misogynistic community. In
Las brujas y su mundo, the Spanish historian Julio Caro Baroja provides a social portrait of witches that is useful to understanding the complexity of these characters:
On the one hand, we have seen the enchantress of the Celestina type emerge. On the other, we have a strange, crazy, bizarre being, to whom we cannot deny all veracity, but whose personality perhaps must be considerably reduced. The rural witch, and an old one more times than a young one, on the fringes of society, feared and despised, seems to be a nervous woman, subject to great crises, who has to her credit the limited knowledge of healer, poultice, greeter, who sometimes practises divination.
3 Spanish original: ‘De un lado, hemos visto perfilarse a la hechicera del tipo de la Celestina. De otro, a un ser raro, alocado, estrambótico, al que no podemos negar toda realidad, pero cuya personalidad acaso hay que aminorar considerablemente. La bruja rural, vieja más veces que joven, al margen de la sociedad, temida y despreciada, parece ser una mujer nerviosa, sujeta a grandes crisis, que tiene en su haber unos conocimientos limitados de curandera, emplastera, saludadora, que practica a veces la adivinación’; Julio Caro Baroja, Las brujas y su mundo (Madrid: Alianza, 2015), pp. 314–35.Bruja Vieja has these characteristics: she is a country woman, middle-aged but aged, marginalised and feared for her knowledge, who suffers nervous breakdowns: ‘the women of the town […] sometimes listened to the screams and blasphemies and the shrieks that the old woman let out as she slammed the furniture against the walls or the floor’.
4 Spanish original: ‘Las mujeres del pueblo […] a veces escuchaban los gritos y blasfemias y los chillidos que soltaba la anciana al golpear los muebles contra las paredes o el suelo’; Temporada de huracanes, p. 28. Later, we learn that she started suffering nervous breakdowns after a group of young males raped her. Far from being ashamed of their act, the perpetrators presented it in the bar as an act of male power and virility:
[…] they kept saying how they got into the house and how they beat her to make her stay quiet and they could fuck her together, because witch or not, the truth is that that fucking old woman was very good, very tasty, and it looked like deep down she had liked it, because of how she squirmed and screamed while being fucked.
5 Spanish original: ‘[…] ellos siguieron contando cómo fue que se le metieron a la casa y cómo la golpearon para que se estuviera quieta y pudieran cogérsela entre todos, porque bruja o no, la verdad es que la pinche vieja esa estaba bien buena, bien sabrosa, y se ve que en el fondo le había gustado, por cómo se retorcía y chillaba mientras se la cogían’; Temporada de huracanes, p. 21.The men were narrating how they had dispossessed the woman of control over her body. The celebratory tone of their narration and the complacency of those who listened reveal how macho and misogynistic ideologies are embedded in the local culture. Bruja Vieja thus resents gender and social class prejudices. The males violated her because she was already a social outcast and they knew that nobody would stand up for her. Before the sexual assault, the legitimate sons of Bruja Vieja’s rich lover, Manolo Conde, had accused her of murdering their father for money. Therefore, by the time she was raped, Bruja Vieja was already carrying the stigma for having an extramarital affair with a rich man.
But there is more. Bruja Vieja is also marginalised because she challenges notions of sexual normativity by giving control of her body to the devil, with whom she is accused of copulating.
6 Temporada de huracanes, p. 17. Caro Baroja indicates that, historically, the frustration of being social outcasts pushed women to take refuge in magic and the occult space.
7 Caro Baroja, Las brujas y su mundo, p. 317. Unknown to others, this space offers Bruja Vieja the freedom to express her visceral hatred towards men:
saying that they were all drunks and jerks, some fucking dogs rolling around, some infamous pigs, and that she would rather be dead than let any of those assholes into her house and that they, the women of the town, were assholes for putting up with them.
8 Spanish original: ‘diciendo que eran unos borrachos y unos huevones, unos pinches perros revolcados, unos puercos infames, y que antes muerta que dejar que cualquiera de esos culeros entrara a su casa y que ellas, las mujeres del pueblo, eran unas pendejas por aguantarlos’; Temporada de huracanes, p. 17.Behind the crude language, there is a feminist plea in defence of the integrity of women. Yet, the inhabitants of La Matosa are unable to understand her message, and the women in the town want to know if any of their husbands are the father of Bruja Vieja’s daughter, whom they also attack: ‘that rudeness of a creature, and that is why they got goosebumps when the witch stared at them with a grim smile and told them that the girl was the devil’s daughter’.
9 Spanish original: ‘aquella grosería de criatura, y por eso se les ponía la carne de gallina cuando la Bruja se les quedaba viendo con una sonrisa torva y les decía que la Chica era hija el diablo’; Temporada de huracanes, p. 21. With Bruja Chica, Melchor goes a step further in the representation of
machismo and misogyny in the town. We first learn about this character when a group of boys discover her swollen corpse floating in the dirty waters of a canal: ‘the rotten face of a dead man among the reeds and the plastic bags that the wind pushed from the road, the dark mask that boiled in a myriad of black snakes, and smiled’.
10 Spanish original: ‘el rostro podrido de un muerto entre los juncos y las bolsas de plástico que el viento empujaba desde la carretera, la máscara prieta que bullía en una miríada de culebras negras, y sonreía’; Temporada de huracanes, p. 12. This image anticipates the vulnerable situation of this character because she is a poor witch who does not fit into the binary categories of gender and sexuality.
Bruja Chica is also a victim of domestic violence. Her mother insults her: ‘It was always you, stupid, or you, bitch, or you, fucking devil’s daughter, when she wanted the girl to come close to her, or to shut up, or just to stay still under the table’.
11 Spanish original: ‘Era siempre tú, zonza, o tú, cabrona, o tú, pinche hija del diablo cuando quería que la Chica fuera a su lado, o que se callara, o simplemente para que se estuviera quieta debajo de la mesa’; Temporada de huracanes, p. 33. This is because her mother treats her as the result of an evil act, her rape, for which she deprives Bruja Chica of a name and ostracises her. Hatred towards men leads Bruja Vieja to pass her son off as a girl, whom she mistreats and casts a premonitory curse upon: ‘I should have killed you when you were born, I should have thrown you to the bottom of the river’.
12 Spanish original: ‘debí matarte cuando naciste, debí tirarte al fondo del río’; Temporada de huracanes, p. 16. Her premonition anticipates her daughter’s destiny at the hands of violent males, who first treat her as a (sexual) commodity and then end up killing her and throwing her dead body into the waters of a canal.
Once her mother dies, Bruja Chica starts receiving young males, with whom she has violent sexual relations in exchange for money. Her obscure and lustful encounters allow her to unleash her true sexual orientation. Clandestinely, Bruja Chica is sexually objectified by her clients, while in daylight she dresses in black clothes and covers her face with a veil:
[…] she looked out, dressed in her black robe, and her veil twisted in the light of the day, in the messy kitchen, with the cauldron overturned and the floor filthy and spattered with dried blood, it was not enough to hide the bruises, the swollen eyelids, the scabs that split her mouth and the thick eyebrows.
13 Spanish original: ‘[…] se asomaba, vestida con su túnica negra, y el velo torcido que a la luz del día, en la cocina revuelta, con el caldero volcado y el piso mugroso y salpicado de sangre seca, no bastaba para disimular los moretones que le inflaban los párpados, las costras que partían la boca y las cejas tupidas’; Temporada de huracanes, p. 31.Bruja Chica’s masculine and feminine identities therefore fluctuate as she searches for social acceptance. She shows her bruises to other women and shares her concerns with them, ‘perhaps because they understood and felt first-hand how bastard men’s vice was’.
14 Spanish original: ‘tal vez porque ellas comprendían y sentían en carne propia lo cabrón que era el vicio de los hombres’; Temporada de huracanes, p. 31. Yet, such duality does not increase the long-awaited acceptance by her neighbours. When her corpse appears floating in an irrigation canal, they comment that the ‘poor crazy smiled’.
15 Spanish original: ‘pobre loca sonreía’; Temporada de huracanes, p. 32. ‘Loca’ (‘the crazy’) is a derogatory term for homosexuals, especially effeminate men. Bruja Chica was brutally murdered and thrown into the ditch by those males who visited her frequently.
Bruja Chica organises fringe performances in her dark and dirty basement, puts on makeup and disguises herself in front of drunk and drugged boys, who perceive that ‘the walls were melting, that their faces were filled with tattoos, that the witch had horns and wings, and her skin turned red and her eyes yellow’.
16 Spanish original: ‘las paredes se derretían, que las caras se les llenaban de tatuajes, que a la Bruja le salían cuernos y alas, y la piel se le volvía roja y los ojos amarillos’; Temporada de huracanes, p. 178. The house thus hides carnal fantasies and hidden pleasures; the basement represents hell and, at the same time, the entrance to heaven, as only those who have descended to the underworld have experienced glory. Luismi kisses Bruja Chica passionately in secret and later carries out her murder, which, in reference to previous discussions, is a femicide that is embedded in a necropolitical context. Brando also conceives his sexual attraction to Luismi (and to young children) as something forbidden that violates the norm. This leads him to devise the femicide of Bruja Chica. For Bruja Chica, femicidal violence continues after her murder because, although the police detain those involved in the crime, they do not allow her friends to give her a dignified burial, and her body is buried in a clandestine grave.
17 Temporada de huracanes, p. 20. Therefore, this killing has misogynistic and homophobic components in that it acts as a punishment for perceived deviation from sexual and gender norms.
However, there is more to this. On the one hand, Luismi wanted revenge on Bruja Chica for putting the life of Norma, his girlfriend, at risk with an abortive potion. On the other hand, Brando wanted to search for the treasure allegedly hidden in Bruja Chica’s home. Both Luismi and Brando are social outcasts: they suffer misery and emotional abandonment, lack paternal role models and instead support maternal figures that grapple with raising a child and with their own abandonment.
Violent dynamics operate against women and girls in the book. Let us focus on Norma’s story, which tells the story of hundreds of girls who face their pregnancies alone in Mexico and elsewhere. She initially seems a distant character to the main action, but she precipitates the murder of Bruja Chica. Her story also reveals the difficult situation for poor women in La Matosa. Norma is a pregnant adolescent who arrives in Villa, a town near La Matosa. She is mistreated by her mother and sexually abused by her stepfather, Pepe. She meets Luismi, with whom she immediately starts a relationship, although only in appearance because what Norma really inspires in him is tenderness. Norma meets Chabela, Luismi’s mother and a veteran prostitute, who discovers the young woman’s pregnancy and convinces her to drink an abortive potion from Bruja Chica. In this way, Bruja Chica puts Norma’s life at risk, prompting Luismi to kill Bruja Chica. Norma’s story can be read as the story of: (1) an innocent 12-year-old girl (Norma) who is abused by her stepfather; (2) a woman (Norma’s mother) who reproduces violent and misogynistic conduct with her daughter; and (3) a male (Pepe) who reproduces his masculinity on the basis of an ideology that grants power to males. In this sense, Norma, her mother and Pepe are victims of structural poverty and the prevalent machista ideology in the area.
(1) Norma is a 12-year-old girl who is pregnant by her stepfather. With reference to the three biblical archetypes, Norma embodies Mary the innocent. Her innocence allows us to establish an analogy with the character in the children’s story
Little Red Riding Hood. Norma is seduced by her stepfather, who plays the role of the big bad wolf (or
endriago subject, using Valencia’s terminology), a 29-year-old who disguises child abuse as affection. Like Little Red Riding Hood, Norma lives near a forest
18 Temporada de huracanes, p. 101. and wears a hood.
19 Temporada de huracanes, p. 128. Her mother, like the mother in the story, warns her about the dangers of the forest; in Norma’s case, the dangers are the loss of her virginity and the unwanted pregnancy. The girl awakens the sexual appetite of Pepe (the wolf), which for a while gives the girl pleasure. However, her deviation from the straight path of virtue results in her premature pregnancy, and this is brutally punished.
Other wolves or
endriago subjects also threaten Norma’s integrity, like those men who work for organised crime gangs and take control of poor girls and women and ‘put them to work in the brothels as slaves and when they are no longer useful for sexual encounters, they are killed like sheep’.
20 Spanish original: ‘las ponen a trabajar en los puteros como esclavas y que cuando dejan de servir para la cogedera, las matan como a los borregos’; Temporada de huracanes, pp. 50–1. Norma meets Barrabás and his colleagues on her way to Villa, but she manages to hide and avoid being kidnapped. This, along with Chabela’s story, is one of the occasions in which Melchor tells us that the commodification of female bodies implies dispossessing them of control over their bodies. Barrabás and others utilise violent and self-assertive necropolitical techniques to gain control over women’s bodies, whose value corresponds to their value in the market. Once women’s bodies do not generate benefit, they are slaughtered like cattle. In other words, women and girls have become illegal merchandise from which males can profit. Therefore, we learn that Norma the innocent is a victim of a long process of annihilation through which women must protect their integrity and their bodies. In this way, the femicidal violence they suffer entails more than criminal acts. It is a process that appropriates Norma’s mind and paralyses her with fear and the belief that she is inferior to Pepe.
(2) Let us focus on Norma’s mother. She is a complex character who embodies the three biblical archetypes of Mexican women: Mary the mother, Mary the innocent and Mary the prostitute. As a mother, this woman presents herself as a prototype of a female
endriago subject: she projects on her daughter her frustrations as a poor woman and a single mother of six and relegates Norma to the care of her younger siblings and household chores.
21 Temporada de huracanes, p. 127. The mother reproduces structural violence against girls at home, normalises threats and insults against Norma, makes her assume the responsibilities of the home and forces her to be a role model for her siblings.
Norma’s mother also adopts misogynistic behaviours against her daughter’s friends, whom she insults for wanting premature sex: ‘they already told me that this is full of louts just waiting to get their hands on the slimy girls, take advantage of them’.
22 Spanish original: ‘ya me dijeron que eso está lleno de malvivientes nomás esperando a meterle mano a las chamacas babosas que se dejan, aprovecharse de ellas’; Temporada de huracanes, p. 125. Paradoxically, she is a victim of the
machista belief that women are by nature tempting subjects and therefore blames them for everything bad that can happen to them, which in her case is motherhood. Due to all of this, Norma flees her house without telling her mother that she has been abused by her stepfather.
As the story progresses, we understand that the mother’s bitterness is the result of being the victim of a productive model based on the exploitation of workers. The mother, like so many other poor and working women in the area, works in a jacket factory, and her salary is barely enough to support the family. The impossibility of ‘holding onto’ a man who recognises the paternity of her six children forces her to prostitute herself: ‘she went out at night to get drunk, with bare legs under transparent stockings and high heels that she never allowed Norma to try on’.
23 Spanish original: ‘salía de noche a emborracharse, con las piernas descubiertas bajo medias transparentes y zapatos de tacón que jamás permitía que Norma se probara’; Temporada de huracanes, p. 127. In this way, the mother tries to prevent the girl from making the same mistakes that she has made. Yet the way she tries to protect her is wrong. Without the mother’s knowledge, Pepe is abusing Norma. Oblivious to what is happening in her house, the mother drives the girl away with insults and threats. In this sense, Norma’s mother is Mary the innocent.
In this way, Norma’s mother is dispossessed of control over her body through the predation, fraud and poverty associated with the privatisation of natural and human resources. Her chances to preserve control over her body and Norma’s body depend on whether they live in social and legal environments that secure their integrity and guarantee them gender equality and power over their lives. Yet, the necropolitical and misogynistic social environment of La Matosa is the prelude to criminal acts that annihilate their will.
(3) Finally, Norma’s story addresses the erroneous construction of virility and masculinity in the patriarchal system. First, Pepe is a factory worker and a prototype of a virile man who has been educated in the belief that, sooner or later, women become the property of men. His manhood thus implies gaining control over Norma’s body. This belief explains the impunity over the violation of Norma’s rights.
While Norma tortures herself thinking that there is something rotten inside her that makes her enjoy her sexual encounters with him,
24 Temporada de huracanes, p. 133. Pepe conceives these encounters as being part of the girl’s education: ‘that he was not a beast, on the contrary; he only gave her what she asked for […] it is Norma herself who asks for it, hers, her own body that demands it’.
25 Spanish original: ‘si él no era una bestia, al contrario; él solo le daba lo que ella pedía […] es la propia Norma la que la pide, su propio cuerpo que la reclama’; Temporada de huracanes, pp. 134–5. Pepe is unable to see Norma as an innocent girl; instead, he sees her as a ‘horny woman, a woman who would be his, sooner or later would be his, even if he had to prepare her first, right? Educate her, teach her, get her used to it little by little so as not to hurt her’.
26 Spanish original: ‘mujer cachonda, una mujer que sería suya, tarde temprano sería suya, aunque primero tuviera que prepararla, ¿verdad? Educarla, enseñarla, irla acostumbrando de poco a poco para no lastimarla’; Temporada de huracanes, p. 134. Pepe thus normalises males’ control over girls’ bodies and sexuality. The impunity over Pepe’s abuse reveals that violence against women perpetuates because it is entrenched in the
machista ideology prevalent in the region, in which men legitimately develop their roles as both dominators of and providers for women.
Melchor tells us that the violence against women in the family environment continues at the institutional level. For example, at the hospital, Norma is treated as an object, and there are no words of consolation from the medical staff regarding her situation. She thus stops recognising her body as her own, seeing it as meat for sale at the market.
27 Temporada de huracanes, p. 101. At the hospital, too, females act as
endriago subjects against the girl:
Norma closed her eyes […] so as not to see the noses wrinkled by disgust of the women in the nearby beds, nor the nurses’ accusing gazes, when they finally deigned to change her, without untying her once from the bed because those had been the instructions of the social worker: keep her prisoner there until the police arrived, or until Norma confessed and said what she had done.
28 Spanish original: ‘Norma cerraba los ojos […] para no ver las narices fruncidas por el asco de las mujeres de las camas aledañas, ni las miradas acusadoras de las enfermeras, cuando al fin se dignaban a cambiarla, sin desamarrarla ni un solo instante de la cama porque esas habían sido las instrucciones de la trabajadora social: tenerla ahí prisionera hasta que la policía llegara, o hasta que Norma confesara y dijera lo que había hecho’; Temporada de huracanes, p. 100. Misogyny has sexual connotations here. The nurses refer to pregnant girls as ‘excited bitches’ in search of men: ‘These bitches don’t even know how to clean their tails and they already want to fuck; I’m going to tell the doctor to scratch you without anaesthesia, see if that’s how you learn’.
29 Spanish original: ‘estas cabronas no saben ni limpiarse la cola y ya quieren andar cogiendo, le voy a decir al doctor que te raspe sin anestesia, ver si así aprendes’; Temporada de huracanes, p. 103. The nurses’ approach to infantile pregnancy brings together all the negative sides of the misogynistic discourse in the area: it degrades girls, sexualises them and, finally, blames them for their situation. In this way, the systemic contempt for pregnant girls and the lack of effective protective legal mechanisms leave Norma defenceless. One wonders what will happen to Norma when she leaves hospital and discovers that the only two people who have cared for her are absent: Luismi is in jail and Chabela, Luismi’s mother, has disappeared. The lack of institutional support increases the possibility of her returning to the forest.