Conclusion

This analysis has focused on how, in poor and violent Mexico, despair in the novel becomes hopelessness and frustration, which in turn lead to hatred towards others, especially women, girls and homosexuals. In the end, any attempt to break the circle of violence leads to a black hole: prison for the murderers and a common grave for the murdered. Melchor shows how Mexican society (which operates as another character through gossip) objectifies female bodies and relegates women and sexual minorities to an uninhabitable space. This happens because the institutional neglect perpetuates a hetero-patriarchal model that favours males’ power over women. Overall, Temporada de huracanes reflects how Mexico is governed by a network of archaic cultural practices and representations that exclude all those who do not conform to the expectations of the system.

We have seen how, in the novel, violence against women is a problem of great dimension and is a social practice that is widely accepted by society and exerted by different aggressors of all genders, including partners, mothers, grandmothers, neighbours and strangers. In this way, the novel shows evidence that the violence against women and girls in the area is embedded in a specific process for gaining control over women’s bodies. This violence occurs at the hands of endriago subjects, who are violent males and females who exert violence against women and homosexuals. They, as we have seen, are victims of a dysfunctional and violent system against the poor and disadvantaged.

Therefore, the characters in the book are representative of the many forms of gender violence happening in the country at present. The story of Bruja Vieja provides an account of the impunity and social acceptance of sexual violence against women and how the experience traumatises the victims. Bruja Chica’s tale shows evidence of the controversial situation for homosexuals in the patriarchal system and how homophobic prejudices marginalise individuals to a hidden, violent and lascivious space and cause isolation and suffering for them. Norma’s story shows the normalisation of child abuse and the dangers of sexual abuse for girls at home, on the streets and in institutions. The narrative of Norma’s mother shows the difficulties that single mothers face in a male-dominated environment and how prostitution is the only solution for many women to be able to support their children and husbands. The story of Norma, in short, reveals the ins and outs of the mentality of her abuser – a prototype of a virile man.

The story ends when the undertaker, known as el Abuelo, is about to put the corpse of Bruja Chica in a common grave, together with other bodies. He directs the souls towards the light, transmitting that now the dead bodies, even after the worst of deaths, rest in peace. This is a celebration of the dead in consonance with the beliefs of the country regarding death and a glimpse of hope for Mexico.

Latin America and the Caribbean head the list of places with the highest rates of violence in the world, as indicated before. Gender violence in the region is chronic and has traumatic implications for the victims’ mental health and for the relatives of the victims, such as the victims’ children, who witness acts of brutality and cruelty. In Latin America women are victims of femicide, disappearances, forced displacement, domestic violence and police abuse, among other forms of lethal violence. Women also suffer attacks that, even when they are non-lethal, damage, hurt and debilitate them.

The chronic poverty, crime and lack of opportunities in the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America (namely, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador) and in Mexico force thousands of women to migrate to the northern countries in search of a better life. Many of these women travel with their children. Most of the studies on the criminal phenomena encountered in this area focus on the drug trafficking and gang dynamics. As stated in the introduction, despite having a place on the national agendas, violence against women is still considered a marginal issue in studies on the violence and crisis of security provision in the region. As a result of inadequate diagnoses violence against women is often oversimplified, as is its impact on the victims.

The extreme impunity that has characterised the crime of violence committed against women in Latin America reveals the deficient public policies on the security provision for women who are at risk of suffering physical, mental and/or sexual harm. In settings characterised by conflict, institutions may develop complex negotiations and/or may coexist with the illegal criminal groups operating in the area (e.g. drug cartels and gangs). In peaceful contexts this may be due to the lack of means and interest from governments to address the issue. In both contexts, however, we find evidence of a derogatory popular discourse towards women that is widely tolerated by society. As a result, the victims of gender violence often feel that they cannot rely on the relevant authorities to achieve justice or improve their situation. This breach of the State’s obligations towards the individual leaves vulnerable women in a perilous situation – one of abject abandonment.

Without a security policy that is able to interrupt the reproduction of gender violence, feminist activism is forced to address violence against women as yet another manifestation of political violence in the region. This perspective is shared by, for example, those leading the battle for the defence of women’s rights in El Salvador where women who suffer miscarriages are taken to court under accusations of murder, and in Argentina where the legalisation of free and safe abortion for all women has recently been approved.

Each of the writers studied in this volume sees the onus for resolving the urgent problem of violence against women as falling to the relevant governmental and State authorities. As we have seen in our study, the State in Latin America is blamed by twenty-first-century female Latin American writers not only for turning a blind eye to violence against women but also for being behind the violence perpetrated against women and even, in some cases, actually executing violence against them. As a result of this, the State in Latin America is seen as having lost its legitimacy, being a ‘failed state’. Despite their different approaches to this phenomenon, the women writers analysed in this volume join hands in viewing the State’s action in terms of mere lip-service, since it has to date perpetuated a patriarchal order in which men are considered holders of power and women are relegated to passive subjects without a voice. This is the reason, as we have seen, that Latin American female writers have resolved to stand up and be counted, so that their voices can be heard loud and clear. Their works denounce the governments’ ineffectiveness in protecting the vulnerable victims of violence and their families. Ultimately, these authors use their writing as an act of resistance that makes visible the various ways (covert and overt) in which violence – including epistemic violence – against women operates in twenty-first-century Latin America and the Caribbean.

In Cien botellas en una pared, the Cuban writer Ena Lucía Portela presents the mechanisms employed by intellectuals and sexual minorities to survive the censorship, political persecution and homophobia during the Special Period of the 1990s. The novel is also an allegory of the political, economic and moral stagnation on the island at present, affecting those who do not fit in the regime’s parameters. In Negra, Wendy Guerra addresses institutional racism as a form of violence against women in twenty-first-century Cuba. In the novel, the Cuban government-State exercises racial discrimination and gender violence with mechanisms that limit black women’s chances to improve in life. In both novels, Cuba is presented as a suffocating place driven by stereotypes, which increase females’ desire to challenge the norm and leave the island.

In Quién no, Claudia Piñeiro problematises women’s role as wives and mothers in competitive and patriarchal Argentina. For Piñeiro, only those women who manage to free themselves from gender and class prejudices escape the system. Chapter 6 focused on four stories of Quién no. ‘Claro y contundente’ tells us about a woman’s frustration as a mother for not being able to fit in with a conservative and prejudiced social environment that is especially cruel to her son, who has special needs; in ‘El abuelo Martín’, the discovery of a femicide in the family home dismantles the apparent happy life of a middle-class family; ‘Basura para las gallinas’ presents how the practice of illegal abortion was the only alternative for women without economic resources before the bill that granted women the right to the voluntary termination of pregnancy was passed on 30 December 2020; and ‘Un zapato y tres plumas’ offers an account of the violence against women and children in the home environment as a metaphor for the political violence during Rafael Videla’s regime. In Chicas muertas, Selva Almada addresses the unresolved femicides of three young women in rural Argentina as State crimes in that the relevant authorities fail to guarantee the safety of women and leave the investigations abandoned.

In #EllosHablan: testimonios de hombres, la relación con sus padres, el machismo y la violencia, the Mexican writer Lydia Cacho addresses the violent and discriminatory social dynamics against children and women in the home environment. The testimonials selected for this book and Cacho’s approach to machismo highlight the need to create a more fluid and inclusive approach to masculinity in twenty-first-century Mexico. In Temporada de huracanes, Fernanda Melchor presents women, girls and sexual minorities as carrying a stigma that makes them preferential victims of the male system in Veracruz. The violence against this group of people is political in that it is rooted in a dysfunctional and ineffective socio-legal space that exacerbates their discrimination and subordination to male power.

The four novels chosen to represent Colombian and Chilean twenty-first-century women’s writing – by Laura Restrepo, Alejandra Jaramillo Morales, Diamela Eltit and Carla Guelfenbein – point to the broad gamut of styles used by contemporary writers to express their views of the world. Restrepo and Jaramillo Morales draw their readers back to the violent and ruthless struggles that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s in Colombia between the State on the one hand and M-19 and the drug cartels on the other, and they explore the intersectionality between impunity, corruption and femicide. It is always, it seems, the women who pay the price for men’s misdeeds. Eltit’s novel, Fuerzas especiales, is similar to the work of Restrepo and Jaramillo Morales in that it delves back into the past – in this case the repressive lockdowns that the Pinochet regime in Chile imposed on large sections of the precariat living in deprived districts of Santiago – in order to extract some lessons for the present day. Guelfenbein’s Contigo en la distancia, in contrast, uses the leitmotif of the ‘distressed female body’ – in this case it is the body of a famous writer who has been thrown down the stairs – in order to explore a wide portfolio of issues, including the difference between what men and women want from relationships, as well as the ways in which literature can become a site of healing in our troubled modern world.

The authors selected in this volume tell the stories of women who defy the chronic and systematic violence experienced by women across the board in their countries. These stories reveal that the desire to preserve their identities in an exclusionary society can lead women to suffer collective rejection. The innovation of the narratives arises from their unclassifiable nature, as they mix chronicle, biography and fiction. These narratives help readers to understand how women cope with discriminatory gender stereotypes and violent policies in different contexts; how women manage to express their identities and the consequences of this; and how violence frames their prospects in life. These narratives also reveal that the legal impunity governing gender violence results in countless forms of violence against women, including femicidal, domestic, sexual, gender, racial and historical violence, as well as other forms of violence that are more subtle and accepted by society but are equally traumatic for women. Ultimately, violence against women is central to the narratives of Latin American women writers in the twenty-first century because it continues to be a naturalised phenomenon in the region.

By highlighting the issue of violence against women, and ‘de-familiarising’ that violence in their narratives, the authors included in this study are enacting the first stage of a step change that needs to occur across the board in Latin American society. This is where literature has a significant and intrinsic role to play. The sociologist, for example, is able to harvest the statistics that provide empiric evidence relating to the frequency of events and acts of violence against women occurring in a given society in a given period. This data allows policy-makers – if they are so inclined – to set goals relating to the reduction of crimes committed against women, such as femicide and other types of epistemic and/or discriminatory violence. The legal expert, for his or her part, can also provide crucial ammunition to the mission of reducing and negating the prevalence and habitus, in Bourdieu’s sense, of violence against women. One way in which this might occur, for example, is when a specific type of violence against women can be re-categorised legally as a hate crime, which – as a result of being a crime which aims to do harm to an individual as a result of their gender – may be evaluated as a more serious crime and therefore punishable by a longer prison sentence. Sociological discourse and legal discourse possess significant potential to bring about concrete changes in society, as suggested above, in the battle against violence against women as a result of their empiric weight by producing, for example, scientifically verifiable information about the frequency of acts of violence against women over a specific period of time, which can – in and of itself – lead to a change in governmental policy as well as a change in the law. Literature – as we have argued in this book – does have a significant role to play in this calculus equation in that it has the potential to allow readers to enter into the world, via the imagination, of, for example, a female individual who is suffering the impact of violence against women in her everyday life. Whereas sociology and the law can provide highly accurate and empiric snapshots of the frequency of acts of violence in the habitus of a nation, a city or even a street, literature offers the opportunity for a more holistic and granular picture of the everyday lives of the victims of violence against women. This, we would argue, is the principal contribution made by the novels analysed in this study. Often, it is the portrayal, along with the study, of a particular individual that allows for a ‘displaced’ empathy to be engendered in the reader’s mind, which itself can lead the reader to conclude: ‘Enough is enough: this has got to stop!’

Since the majority of the books studied in this book often elicit this type of reaction in the reader’s mind (i.e. ‘We need to change this state of affairs’), it is legitimate to argue that – to the extent that they have this effect – these are political novels, where the word ‘political’ is being used in a broad rather than ‘political party’ sense. This is not to say that sociological discourse or legal discourse cannot also be political – clearly this will be the case in certain types of sociological discourses and legislation, for example, designed to ameliorate the situation of a given section of the population – but it is literature where the emotional reaction of the reader to the individual depicted in the narration, including his or her situation and circumstances, is a crucial component in the composition and make-up of the novel.

This is the main reason why the twenty-first-century female novelists analysed in this study claim their right to address the institutional helplessness faced by women in Latin America in the twenty-first century. Their narratives address the subject openly and from the perspective produced by new methodological configurations, including, for example, the conflation of history, fiction, sociology and legal discourse. The aim is to unsettle the reader and force them to confront a topic such as violence against women as an issue that is fundamentally intersectional and that has its roots in politics, economics, security and societal power.

Making violence against women visible is the first step in the process of rebuilding the identities of victims and/or women and girls who are at risk. This process requires patience, institutional presence, and the ability to provide support to the victims of violence and their relatives without judging them. It is necessary to map carefully the types of gender violence that occur and how they affect women and their environments, with the understanding that the victims sometimes cannot share their experiences simply because they are unaware that they are, in fact, victims. The learning process is only effective if family members and the rest of society participate in reversing the humiliating treatment of and public discourse against women in Latin America. As we have seen in this study, the writing of these stories entails an act of resistance to women’s silence and against their invisibility in Latin America. Only what is visible can be fought. The selected narratives function as a ‘cri de coeur’ against the many forms of violence that underpin and determine the lives of women in twenty-first-century Latin America and the Caribbean.