This Is Not Miami

Fernanda Melchor, known above all as a novelist (including the award-winning Hurricane Season), returns in this collection of literary reportages to her home city of Veracruz — a port city on the Gulf of Mexico that for years was terrorised by drug cartels, particularly Los Zetas.

This Is Not Miami is a cycle of texts based on factual stories gathered by the author between 1990 and 2011. Melchor writes about killers, social outcasts, and people pushed to the margins — but instead of condemning, she forces the reader to try to understand what drives a person towards evil. Among the reportages are an account of an exorcism performed in the belief of diabolical possession, a story of merciless executions ordered by a cartel, accounts of women living in the shadow of violence, and portraits of officials and institutions entangled in corruption.

Melchor writes in precise, stark language — without cheap sensation, but also without anaesthetic. Her reportages expose the face of a Mexico that front-page newspapers cannot access: a world in which poverty, lawlessness, and violence are everyday reality, and the line between victim and perpetrator can be fluid.

The title refers to the idea that Veracruz — once a city of promise and international glamour — is emphatically not Miami: not a place of possibility and arrival, but a place of entrapment and departure, real and imagined.