Lifestyles of the Rich and the Abject

Caroline Tracey explores, via Dahlia de la Cerda’s “Reservoir Bitches,” the possibilities and limits of women’s agency on the fringes of Mexico’s narcosphere.

By Caroline TraceyOctober 21, 2024

• Fiction

• Gender & Sexuality

IN THE 1992 FILM Reservoir Dogs, which depicts eight robbers before and after a jewel heist that goes awry, the character Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) straddles a chair and, taking puffs from his cigarette, considers what to do in a tough spot. “I don’t wanna kill anybody,” he says. “But if I gotta get out that door, and you’re standing in my way, one way or the other, you’re gettin’ outta my way.”

The title of Mexican writer Dahlia de la Cerda’s recently translated collection of short stories riffs on Quentin Tarantino’s classic film. Yet in Reservoir Bitches, the characters have none of Mr. Pink’s hang-ups. “[Y]ou get used to killing,” says the assassin La China. “I’ve got no qualms about my job, and that’s the whole truth.” Tarantino’s characters draw their charm from the evocation of old-school mobsters: they dress in matching suits with skinny ties and sunglasses and spit insults back and forth. De la Cerda’s characters, by contrast, are part of a distinct, novel struggle between law and order. Theirs is that of contemporary Mexico, where the homicide rate is nearly four times that of the United States, 94.8 percent of violent crimes go unpunished, and the economic impact of violence adds up to a fifth of the country’s GDP.

De la Cerda has stated in interviews that her ear for women’s life experiences derives from her own participation in class-based feminist activism. In 2012, she co-founded Morras Help Morras, an organization that provides sex education workshops and accompaniment to women undergoing medication abortions in her home city of Aguascalientes, where abortion was illegal until August 2023; in a 2022 video, she referred to it as a city “ruled by the clergy.”

Reservoir Bitches seeks to render this world in 13 short stories, all told from the point of view of women in some way marginalized, whether through poverty and racialization or living outside the law. Originally published in Mexico in 2019 by the press Tierra Adentro and, after making a splash in literary and feminist circles, reissued by the larger Sexto Piso in 2022, the book now appears in English from the Feminist Press, translated by Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary.

Nine of the book’s stories stand alone. These include the opener, “Parsley and Coca-Cola,” narrated by an orphaned college student undergoing an abortion; “The Smile,” which follows an Afro-Mexican woman who migrates from Oaxaca to Ciudad Juárez atop “the Beast,” the freight train that crosses Mexico—a rapid but notoriously dangerous way to reach the US-Mexico border; and “Sequins,” a trans woman’s story of being kicked out of her home and becoming a sex worker.

The other four—the most compelling of the bunch—form a linked narrative showcasing the ways that power, violence, and style overlap, and trace the collisions of traditional political elites and narco-elites. Those stories start with Yuliana, the daughter of a narco boss in what seems to be a fictionalized Sinaloa, whose haughty classmates at private school in Guadalajara make fun of her for what they perceive as new-monied bad taste. But she finds one friend in Regina, a congressman’s daughter desperate to be Instagram-famous. Regina narrates a story of Yuliana teaching her how to dance, to walk in heels and ride horses—and eventually helping her land a boyfriend from the cartel, a man who soon murders Regina and calls it a suicide. Then La China’s story comes in: trained as a cartel assassin, Yuliana sends her in for the revenge killing of Regina’s boyfriend. Finally, there’s Constanza, Regina’s sister, whose eyes are so set on maintaining her traditionally elite role and becoming the country’s First Lady that she buys into the official story that Regina committed suicide.

Both the linked and nonlinked stories are short and read like something between character sketches and fairy tales. Since each is narrated in the first person, the undulations of characters’ lives are delivered quickly—often too quickly, without time to enjoy the dramatic tension. Just as Regina swiftly transforms from a scion of the white elite into a “buchona”—a woman whose aesthetic is often affiliated with organized crime, including boob, butt, and lip filler and conspicuous consumption that mixes ranch aesthetics with luxury brands—her sister Constanza changes into a mestiza-passing national icon in a handful of pages. “You can’t be Mexico’s most beloved First Lady as a blond in a country where everyone’s brown,” she narrates. “I got a tan, started wearing dark contact lenses, and dyed my hair a deep chestnut. […] No one remembered the blond socialite I once was. Perfection, no?”

The concise narration smooths over the details and rough edges of the characters’ stories to the point of losing all verisimilitude. “[A]t twenty-two […] there’s over a million dollars invested in this little body in surgeries alone,” narrates Yuliana. “We’ve also traveled to Dubai, France, Egypt, Canada, Japan, Thailand, and another fifty countries I don’t remember. It’s all on my Insta.” While it’s true that many women affiliated with (or aspiring to be affiliated with) organized crime in Mexico undergo extensive plastic surgery and flaunt their consumption on Instagram, those in Reservoir Bitches feel too rich, too hot, too famous, and too skilled for the realm of possibility. They cease to feel real.

And while there may be a place in the world for narco fairy tales, their effect in this case is to limit the world Reservoir Bitches conjures. With a topic like organized crime, there’s a lot that journalists—and, in turn, the general public—don’t know. Recent nonfiction works like Narcas: The Secret Rise of Women in Latin America’s Cartels (2023) by Deborah Bonello and Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence across the Border (2024) by Ieva Jusionyte have done a valiant job of tracking down interviews and paper trails to better understand how women become part of, and stay part of, organized crime organizations. But even with those important contributions, the world they probe remains shrouded in secrecy.

That’s where fiction could come in. Reservoir Bitches’ interlocking stories of Yuliana, Constanza, Regina, and La China could have expanded the reach of the known, dramatizing questions about the lives of women close to organized crime in Mexico: What does it feel like to become accustomed to violence? What awareness do wives and daughters not involved in the trade have of their spouses’ and fathers’ work? What do they think of it? How do they negotiate the complicated line between privacy (for security) and public flaunting of the power and wealth they derive from their connections to criminal organizations? How much do you share with your friends from the civilian world? What is it like for politicians to negotiate intimacy with crime organizations?

Yuliana, Regina, Constanza, and La China would make excellent vehicles through which to contemplate these unknowns. Yet the stories spend little time with the characters’ interior lives, skating quickly past such questions. (Regina narrates: “Did I mention my father’s a congressman? […] He knew [Yuliana’s] father was in the business, obvi, but he didn’t care.”) By forgoing the boundaries of the real rather than working to fill in the details within them, the book feels, paradoxically, less interesting than the real world; its world is underimagined.

Where the book can fail to paint complete portraits of its characters, however, Sanches and Cleary’s translation manages impressively to enrich them. In Spanish, some readers critiqued de la Cerda’s narrators for speaking in a caricature of Sinaloan regional style. But the translators’ rendering of the characters’ brassy and slang-filled voices is pitch-perfect: they find English phrases and words that reflect the Spanish attitude and profanity, but they never sacrifice sentence structure to do so; they translate the characters’ modes of speaking, rather than treating their speech as a collection of idioms.

Reservoir Bitches portrays lives ordinarily overlooked by literature, an important undertaking given how elite the literary world remains, including and especially in Mexico. Nevertheless, the stories don’t quite do their characters justice. While reading the book, I thought of a quotation from a 1944 essay by writer Alfonso Reyes, reflecting on literacy and anti-hunger campaigns in Mexico at the time. “[T]here’s a skeleton in our closet,” he writes. “When we think about our country, our subconscious vaguely conjures immense swaths of populations that drag out an infrahuman existence. What will become of that people, once all of them have had access to Man? Then and only then will we know what our people have to offer.”

By “access to Man,” Reyes means something like an intellectual life—access to contemplation and art that is only possible once one’s basic subsistence and educational needs have been met. Times have changed. The women of de la Cerda’s stories are literate, are mostly digital natives, and in some cases are college-educated. They have access to ideas, yet they continue to live in a kind of infraworld: one of 21st-century poverty and its attendant violence and truncated possibilities. They have a combination of material circumstances and inner lives that thinkers like Reyes never contemplated. Knowing their perspectives, then, is crucial for ensuring that our understanding of the contemporary world does justice to its complexity.

I hope that Reservoir Bitches offers a foundation on which working-class, provincial, and otherwise marginalized writers in Mexico and elsewhere can add the detail necessary to transform tales into nuanced stories that reflect the richness of the world of their protagonists. Such writing has the potential to deepen the characters’ reflections about the realities around them into profound insights—and to cultivate new forms of intellectual life in the process.