Fernanda Melchor: this is not Veracruz
The story of the publication of Isto Não É Miami in Portugal is curious, since, in a certain sense, it reproduces and explains a pattern that we see repeated throughout the book. In 2017, Fernanda Melchor released her second novel, Temporada de Furacões (Elsinore, 2023) , which, among several other distinctions, would be a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, and would receive the PEN Prize in Mexico and, in Portugal, the Casino da Póvoa Literary Prize, within the scope of the 2024 edition of the Correntes D'Escritas festival.
Now, such a resounding success, especially coming from a writer who was still young, would lead to the publication by Elsinore of her later novel, Paradaise (written in 2023 and published in Portugal in 2024) , but also to a retrospective movement of excavation, which would result in the translation of her first book, an anthology of chronicles written between 2002 and 2011 in the magazine Replicante and originally published in book form in 2013. It is by no means new for the success of a book to lead to inquiries about its author's past, bringing to light books that may have already been forgotten. However, in this specific case, the recovery of lost time seems to constitute a metaliterary game with the content of the book, since, in its pages, Melchor seems to seek to look back in order to reconstruct the past and, thus, apparently find the right description of Veracruz, the Mexican state where she was born.
Melchor then seeks to capture the Veracruz of his childhood and youth, which immediately raises the difficulty of knowing how best to describe an organism that is simultaneously alive and dead, such as a city. An entity that, as Melchor explains, “is silent despite its hustle and bustle: it cannot tell itself, in fact it cannot tell anything” (p. 7).
Now, the solution that Melchor finds will therefore be to describe Veracruz based on its myths and legends, its rumors and superstitions, its heinous crimes, the specific model of organization of its popular justice, its blind spots, its blind corners, its most eccentric inhabitants and, above all, based on what Veracruz is not.
In the title story, Melchor tells the story of a group of illegal immigrants from the Dominican Republic who disembark at a port in the city, believing they have finally reached their desired destination: Miami. Now, the disenchantment and despair felt by the Dominicans upon realizing they are in Mexico and not the United States seems, to a certain extent, to be reproduced in the lives of the inhabitants of Veracruz who, not aspiring to be Americans, seem destined to live in a place that insists on placing itself in a position of absolute subordination in relation to its neighbor to the north.
From this point of view, the most instructive story is perhaps A Prison Like a Movie , which tells the story of the filming of Catch Me That Gringo (2012), written by and starring Mel Gibson. Melchor recounts that, in order to film the film, the state of Veracruz decided to empty Allende prison, which at the time had about a thousand inmates. The state government would assure that this was just a coincidence and that it had already been decided that, for health reasons, the prison would be closed. Even so, it seems indisputable that the process was at least accelerated to satisfy the demands of the Hollywood star, with the establishment being used to film a riot, followed by a prison escape. Now, the production of the film — which would not even premiere in theaters, going straight to streaming services — would recruit dozens of extras from among the prison and non-prison population of Veracruz, which certainly contributed to making the tension surrounding the riot quite real. The filming of this scene would take nine hours, at the end of which Lalo, one of the protagonists, “already had a red belly from rolling around on the floor” (p. 68). At three in the morning, after filming finished, “the crew turned on the lights and sent everyone home without paying them anything, until further notice” — a notice that would never come.
Without condescending to the reader, Melchor, always shielded by the narrative, goes on, chronicle by chronicle, describing Veracruz as a land with a red belly from rolling around on the ground, subjugated to the interests of the richest and most powerful, be they the gringos from the north, the drug barons or a political class too distant from the people they govern. A land that does not distinguish between thieves and the robbed and that does not mind reinforcing preconceived ideas about itself to allow the filming of a minor Hollywood film.
However, perhaps the most curious and interesting aspect of the chronicles that make up Isto Não É Miami is not the description that, like a kaleidoscope, is gradually made of Veracruz, but rather what we discover about the writer herself and the end of her illusions. From chronicle to chronicle, a new layer of Fernanda Melchor's story is subtly revealed. If in the first chronicle, about the sighting of lights in the sky, the family nucleus, made up of Fernanda, her parents and her brother, seems solid, as time goes by, this structure gradually withers away, until very little remains of it, which perhaps allows us to infer that the melancholic look that Melchor casts on the past does not necessarily owe its melancholy to the city supposedly described. In this sense, The House of Esteros is exemplary, by far the best chapter of the book, where the attempt to unravel the mysterious enigma surrounding a haunted house crudely covers up the true purpose of the story: to tearfully autopsy the end of the writer's first marriage.
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