We Lived Inside Sadness Itself

On Brenda Navarro’s novel ‘Eating Ashes,’ newly translated by Megan McDowell.

By Cory OldweilerJanuary 20, 2026

• Fiction

IN THE INTRODUCTION to her nonfiction collection This Is Not Miami (2013), Mexican author Fernanda Melchor explains that while the dozen stories that make up the volume are all based on reporting she did in her hometown of Veracruz between 2002 and 2011, she never intended for them to be taken as reportorial contributions to the historical record. Rather, she is more concerned (per Sophie Hughes’s 2023 English translation) with how the events she depicts affect Mexican society: “At the heart of these texts is not the incidents themselves, but the impact they had on their witnesses.”

This empathetic, almost humanist intent can also be felt in Melchor’s two novels, Hurricane Season (2017) and Paradais (2021), as well as in numerous standout titles from other Mexican authors published in recent years—both fiction, such as Clyo Mendoza’s Fury (2021) and Brenda Lozano’s Mothers (2025), and nonfiction, like Cristina Rivera Garza’s Pulitzer Prize winner Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice (2021). The incidents underlying and animating all these stories are violent and destabilizing, stemming either from the misogyny festering in Mexico’s patriarchal society, a scourge responsible for the deaths and disappearances of thousands of women and girls each year, or from the combustible mixture of drug traffickers, military personnel, and police, a conflagration that too often ensnares everyday citizens—by chance or through their own ill-considered actions—who are just trying to go about their lives.

Brenda Navarro’s second novel, Ceniza en la boca, has all of the above elements lurking in the background. However, the book considers them through the eyes of those who have grown so desperate to escape the cycle of violence that they leave their home and, at least temporarily, their family in search of a happier, safer, more prosperous life. Originally published in 2022, the novel is newly available in Megan McDowell’s English-language translation under the title Eating Ashes. The narrative tells the story of a Mexican brother and sister struggling to adapt to life in Spain, where they have rejoined their mother after a long separation, but Navarro’s focus is on the stresses and sorrows that accompany absence and arise out of longing for friends and family, one’s distant homeland, and the freedoms that are promised or imagined.

Eating Ashes is told by an unnamed narrator who is left, along with her three-year-old brother, Diego, at their grandparents’ house in Mexico when their single mother goes to Spain in search of work. But even after the trio are reunited in Madrid nine years later, the children don’t find the relief they have been seeking. Their mother is working 18-hour days, six days a week, caring for someone else, and the kids themselves, in addition to experiencing the physical disorientation that comes with relocation, are treated like outsiders, leaving them “desperate and seeing enemies everywhere.” Something is missing for both the narrator and her brother: “They’ve cut off our Mexico. But not Mexico the country, Mexico as a yearning. As what in Portuguese they call saudade. You get sick, you come down with saudade, you die a little.”

In Spain, Diego is bullied and gets into fights at school. He steals money from his mother and his sister, contributing to the latter’s realization that he has changed into someone she “didn’t know and couldn’t get to know.” She continues: “Diego, running away right in front of us, in front of Mom and me, he was leaving right in our faces, and we let him run far away.” Though they think and hope he will turn back toward them, two years after their arrival in Madrid, Diego jumps from the balcony of their fifth-floor apartment. The boy leaves behind no note, no mystery to solve, only another immeasurable loss and potentially unconquerable source of grief for his mother and sister.

The narrator, whose age is never specified, though we know she has at least attended some high school by the time she leaves Mexico, dislikes everything about Spain, starting with the crowded Madrid neighborhoods she describes as having “so many buildings so close together, so cramped and so tall, like cages, like jails, so monotonous, as though standardizing us, as though telling us we were so poor that we couldn’t even have color.” She can see no evidence of what her mother was seeking in Spain, finding “no promise, no comfort, nothing.” The narrator explains: “[I]f anything, I felt a little poorer in Madrid than in Mexico; if anything, more backward and more excluded.” She works sporadically as a babysitter but soon relocates to Barcelona, both for better work opportunities and for a bit of independence. Once there, she takes jobs cleaning houses, delivering food, and working as a live-in caregiver. She slowly becomes part of a tight-knit community of immigrants, many of whom are doing what her mother did at one time—namely, sending money home to their families in Central and South America while dreaming of being reunited with them permanently.

The narrator is continually reminded of her outsider status, whether on the street, where she and her brother are spat at and called “wetbacks,” or at work, where an elderly Spanish woman she is caring for calls her a “squaw,” a “peasant,” and a “greaser.” Even in her Catalan language class, a Spanish guy expresses a wish for “fewer immigrants” in his country. This type of oppression, while not inherently deadly, is every bit as pernicious as the threats the narrator’s family left behind in Mexico: “Another kind of violence awaited us in Spain, a kind that was less showy but equally cruel, where they demanded our loyalty while meticulously humiliating us for not being like them.”

McDowell’s translation is characteristically excellent throughout, including a brief lyrical passage that riffs on Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem,” which begins with the famous line “What happens to a dream deferred?” Also memorable is the way she describes the narrator as worried she will be “caught Diego-handed,” as opposed to red-handed, the first time she licks her cremated brother’s ashes off her fingers, something she does occasionally to feel closer to him. One of the translation’s most valuable elements—and something that will never be replicated by artificial intelligence no matter how much publishers try to hasten its adoption—is McDowell’s decision to retain certain Spanish words in order to emphasize the way the Spaniards treat Mexicans as outsiders. One prime example comes when the narrator explains that it didn’t even matter where she and her brother were from: “Where are you from, Bolivia? No, Mexico. And they’d start speaking Mexican to us: Oh, órale, cuate, órale güey. Where are you from, Colombia? No, Mexico. Oh, Chavo del Ocho [a Mexican sitcom of the 1970s]; oh, right, tacos; oh right, spicy food.” Because of this correlation between language and one’s right to belong, the narrator comes to believe that having a voice is a privilege and being quiet a weapon: “And maybe that’s the power of silence: it keeps you isolated, makes you into an island that survives in spite of the waves of fools crashing all around you.”

The retention of Spanish words is also used to show comity, as when the narrator first identifies a woman named Nagore as a fellow immigrant after hearing her say “pendejo,” a Latin American slang term meaning “idiot”: “And she said everything to me in my language, with all that pendejo, güey, mamar, all those words I’d stopped using, along with her Spanish from Spain, all that tía and joder, and it made me feel like we were friends, language friends.” Later, that same word features in a lengthy fight between the narrator and Diego, each of whom prefaces their every insult with pendejo or pendeja, emphasizing their shared upbringing. Other times, McDowell keeps just a word or two of Spanish and offers up an in-line definition that is of a piece with the rat-a-tat pace of much of Navarro’s prose, as in “Why wouldn’t people call us panchitas, when that’s what we were? Ragged, beleaguered strays.”

Fearing the same xenophobic treatment from her onetime English teacher and sometime boyfriend Tom, with whom the narrator has a lust-contempt relationship, she lies about her jobs and keeps him at arm’s length, pretending to be “someone else with him.” She will let on that she’s worried about the person her brother has become in Spain, how he has “turned into a good-for-nothing teenager, and he’s stubborn and sarcastic and dumb and vulgar.” But she hides the fact that she misses so much about her home, from her grandfather taking her to the movies to “the damp smell in [her] grandmother’s room, because she would rather poison herself with mold than throw out her paintings and things from the past.” But what she really misses in her displaced isolation in Spain is the collective vulnerability of life in Mexico, expressed in the novel’s most poignantly stinging passage:

[W]e lived inside sadness itself. We were all a bunch of sad motherfuckers, and we didn’t really know why, though we didn’t lack for reasons. On the contrary, so much death and so many disappeared people in the news and so many guys who bullied you in the streets and all because they’d been bullied too, and badly fed and badly fucked and badly loved. I missed the communal feeling of knowing ourselves to be so damn forsaken, and useless, arrogant, but also passionate.

Those reasons factored into the mother’s decision to leave Mexico as well, but there were also more personal considerations. The narrator’s mother was long considered the “ugliest in her family, the awkward, dull one”—“ugly in her voice, ugly in her sense of humor, everything ugly.” And though she did find happiness with Diego’s dad, it was transitory, as the man died from cancer just two years after they were married, a loss that dampened her affection for her son: “[S]he couldn’t see Diego, because Diego was the spitting image of his father.” The narrator knows nothing of her own father, who has never been in her life. Her grandmother believes that her father was someone who raped her mother, partly because that horrifying world is the only one the grandmother knows, having been raped herself as a girl by her neighbors because her father felt it was “better the neighbors than someone else we didn’t even know.”

The mother is also seemingly queer, a life that may have been unavailable to her while living in Mexico as the daughter of a service member. In Madrid, the narrator’s mother lives with a Cuban woman named Jimena, whose own mother stabbed her when she came out, though their relationship is never explicitly stated to be a romantic one. Throughout the novel, Jimena acts as both a resource for the narrator, providing her with employment contacts in Barcelona, and a source of adult wisdom unfettered by the baggage attached to one’s own parents, as when she defends the mother’s decision to leave Mexico: “Girl, you think we want to leave, just because? I’d like to see you have all that trauma and baggage and still say: Oh, it’s better to stay put and get caught and killed right here.”

The threat of violence toward women is omnipresent in the novel. The narrator’s mother warns her from abroad that Mexico is unsafe, telling her daughter that “women get killed, they get raped, they get kidnapped.” And Nagore explains her reasons for emigrating with a simple statement: “Growing up there, seeing how people disappear, no, I just can’t.” When the narrator returns home briefly with her brother’s ashes, she is confronted by tangible proof of these dangers: the next-door neighbor Joana has been kidnapped by “some ex-military men in a gray truck” and her longtime friend Ruth has been killed along with her cadet boyfriend and several other military members during an ambush at a bar. Even her aunt Carmela disappears, right around the time several decapitated bodies are found hanging from a pedestrian bridge.

All of this death, danger, and dislocation intensifies the stresses and losses that the narrator has carried with her since the day her mother first left. Though she got a “soliloquy” about responsibility and how the separation needed to happen, the girl took it personally: “I hate you and you hate me, and we hate each other, and you hate my brother and how he keeps you awake all night, and you hate everything: you hate yourself and my grandparents and your dead husband and me.” And the narrator can’t even grieve or vent her anger because her brother starts to cry, and she has to be strong for him. During these years helping her abuela raise Diego on the military base where her grandparents live, the narrator develops a roiling stomach, “like a hollow sound trying to surface, clamoring for attention,” that persists throughout the novel.

As bad as the narrator’s burdens may seem, however, there is a generational divide, with anyone who is older telling her that perhaps she doesn’t have it as bad as she thinks. Her grandmother says, “So what if you don’t have a dad? Have you had to go without anything? Love, affection, toys, food? Why do you want to know who your father is, what difference would it make?” And later, in Spain, Jimena makes a similar point, pushing back when the narrator is seen to be exaggerating her suffering: “Those were your grandparents, not you. Choose your pronouns well, honey, around here we yank out our own eyes to see who can win Most Miserable, and you’re going to lose.”

Yet, by the end of the novel, the narrator finds that “there’s nothing that seems worth fighting for.” The agglomeration of stresses and malaise she has borne throughout her life, a condition collectively referred to as Ulysses syndrome, has left her so hopeless that she even comes to support Diego’s decision to jump to his death: “There was no full life ahead of us. […] At least my brother had the clarity to see it, and to take the risk of being the only one to decide his fate.” Their mother, however, has found happiness in her physical and mental distance from Mexico: “Here I’m so far away from everything, it’s like I don’t even exist there anymore.” As a parent, you can wish for your children to find the contentment, success, and happiness you’ve worked to provide, but you can’t give those things to them. You can only set an imperfect example and hope that they heed the words of Diego’s favorite band, Vampire Weekend, whose almost irresistibly uplifting music is quoted throughout the novel, particularly the line “I don’t wanna live like this, but I don’t wanna die.”