We Lived Inside Sadness Itself

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.”