This is Not Miami
Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes (Text Publishing, available now)
Acclaimed essayist and novelist Juan Villoro describes the Latin American genre of crónica as the ‘ornitorrinco de la prosa’ (prose’s platypus) because it mixes reportage, short story dramatism, interviews, theatre, essay and memoir techniques. In This is Not Miami, Mexican writer Fernanda Melchor uses this form to present her first collection of twelve sobering, sometimes heartbreaking crónicas of the coastal city of Veracruz and its surroundings.
You won’t find stories celebrating the city’s rich history or tourist attractions here. In these stories, we discover how the veracruzanos survived the years of the allegedly corrupt governor Fidel Herrera Beltrán and the belligerent, far-right president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa. During their regimes, the Mexican government launched its ill-fated war against the drug cartels. Given its strategic location, Veracruz, whose port connects the Gulf of Mexico to the rest of the country, was one of the first states to see a rise in violence.
The stories are acts of rebelliousness and bravery.
Despite the breadth of this journalistic genre, Melchor’s crónicas defy easy categorisation. In the author’s note, she tells us that she prefers to call most of the stories in this book relatos, which roughly translates into English as accounts. These narratives are often anecdotal, sometimes personal—‘they don’t include accurate dates, hard facts’—and are made up of testimonies about everyday occurrences. Melchor, born in 1982, was a child when cartel-related violence became more evident in the streets of Veracruz. The book—divided into three sections: Lights, Fire and Shadows—explores the complexities of what it means to live in and be shaped by such conditions, from the absurd and eerie (think UFOs and haunted houses) to the heartbreaking.
Because of the spiralling violence, Veracruz (and Mexico at large) has seen an increase in assassinations. On average ten women and girls are murdered every day in Mexico, and in 2022 at least nineteen journalists were killed. Why do these numbers matter here? As a woman and a journalist writing about cartels, Melchor could put the people she interviews, and her own personal safety, at risk if she presented these stories as investigative journalism. That is why her stylistic choices matter: the fiction narrative tropes of crónica allow her to analyse narco-violence and government corruption in an exploratory and compelling way that resists sensationalism or exposing vulnerable people. However, there is no melodrama or excess in her prose, not even when describing a lynching or the gruesome way a former beauty queen killed her sons. Understood like this, the stories are acts of rebelliousness and bravery.
Melchor has won numerous awards for her novels Hurricane Season and Paradais. With the translation of This is Not Miami, originally published in Spanish in 2013, the author continues to establish herself internationally as one of the strongest new voices in Mexican literature, sitting alongside writers such as Yuri Herrera and Valeria Luiselli.
—Gabriella Munoz
