This Is Not Miami
Twelve accounts from Veracruz move between reportage, testimony and rumour, where the version of an event decides what happens next.
Essays · 160 pages · Paperback · 2023 · Fitzcarraldo Editions
What a version permits
Playa del Muerto in Boca del Río, 1991. Nine-year-old Fernanda Melchor saw five lights over the water and decided they were a spacecraft. A later remark from her mother pointed to a narco plane. It still took Melchor ten years to connect the lights with the cocaine traffic around Veracruz. This Is Not Miami begins in that gap between witnessing an event and knowing what has happened.
In the author's note, Melchor separates pieces that belong to the Latin American crónica from others she prefers to call relatos. What changes is where the event survives. Some can be checked against records and several witnesses. Elsewhere one person's telling carries almost everything. She says the incidents matter less than their impact on those who saw them. The collection earns that claim.
In "Queen, Slave, Woman", Evangelina Tejera Bosada, Carnival queen of Veracruz six years before she killed her two sons, draws every motive the crowd can produce. Melchor sides with Foucault on Pierre Rivière and distrusts the single monstrous cause. It contains the violence in one person and leaves the surrounding arrangements untouched. The title piece reverses the error. Dominican stowaways climb out of the winter sea at the port and beg the dockers, "Please, tell us we're in Miami." The plea asks for something else. The men have their answer. They need somebody to confirm it.
In Tatahuicapa an explanation hardens fast. Officials come for Rodolfo Soler, accused of raping and murdering a neighbour. The town refuses to hand him over. A crowd beats him and burns him alive. A corrido outlives the killing and carries it forward as an account of justice done. The song settles it.
"The House on El Estero" turns inward. A young woman requires an exorcism once the people around her have named what is in her. Melchor hears the story from Jorge, later her first husband, on their first date. "It took me several years to work out that, in reality, I'd fallen in love with his stories." The realisation runs on a delay. So did the lights.
The later pieces treat organised crime as the conditions under which Veracruz functions. In "A Good Asset", El Fito, laid off from a customs agency, watches his roof cave in with the rains until an old friend recruits him for "the company". The reliability his old boss prized is what Los Zetas now pay for. Melchor restores choice to its economic setting without absolving the man who makes it.
In "Life's Not Worth a Thing" the official version itself does the violence. Fabricated evidence sends Andrés, framed as a dealer, to prison for seven years. Los Zetas run the Ignacio Allende prison, and once they learn what Andrés is in for they beat him, then train him up. His wife's confession could free him. She is the one paying his lawyers, and freeing Andrés would jail her, so the lawyers abandon the case.
The form carries the argument. It runs as one unbroken block, the shape Hurricane Season uses throughout, and the speaker changes mid-breath. Andrés's wife confesses "bawling her eyes out like Mary fuckin' Magdalene", in the words of the lawyer who tells Melchor the story, and the prose has moved on before the insult lands. Sophie Hughes's translation holds that velocity.
The last piece is "Veracruz with a Zee for Zeta". It speaks in the second person. A young woman lies in hospital with a bullet hole in her back, eight days after the same rounds killed her mother in a taxi on Calle La Fragua. The survivor blames herself for choosing the car. The explanation is false. It is the only one on offer. Personal responsibility stands in for a system no passenger controls.
Some testimony reaches past what Melchor can verify. In "The Vice Belt", the retired docker El Ojón names operators who helped themselves to entire containers. Then he stops. Five beers in, the interview closes. The allegation is consequential. The piece can take it no further than the man making it. On moonless nights, locals say, coloured lights still cross the sky and disappear in the direction of Viper's Plain.