Every day in Mexico, seven women are murdered. Whether or not it is a question of feminicide (“Murder of a woman, of a girl because of her sex”, tells us The Robert), or even from declared feminicides, women die more than elsewhere in this country where the homicide rate remains one of the highest in Latin America.
“Mexico is a huge monster that devours women. Mexico is a desert made of bone meal. Mexico is a cemetery of pink crosses. Mexico is a country that hates women,” says Dahlia de la Cerda to one of the protagonists of Watchdogshis first book.
In thirteen slightly punk short stories, all narrated in the first person and which often have a link between them, the Mexican writer paints an unvarnished portrait of the female condition in this country of nearly 130 million inhabitants. Far, far from a postcard Mexico.
A student at an Opus Dei university tells us the story of her misoprostol and ibuprofen (“Parsley and Coca-Cola”) abortion. Yuliana, the 22-year-old daughter of a rich drug trafficker, tells how she succeeded her “daron”. “My father is not a murderer. He’s never shot anyone, he has more than enough money to pay people to do it for him. » (Yuliana) Neither does she. To take revenge on the man who killed her best friend, she asks La China, her bodyguard, to take care of him.
Three “brown-skinned” sisters, seamstresses who live in an “irregular settlement” without water and without electricity on the edge of the city, chased out years ago from their house in the ancestral neighborhood, celebrate with a thief who is trying to break into their homes (“May God forgive us”).
Daughter and granddaughter of politicians, Constanza dreams of being “the wife of a man of power” and will do anything to achieve it, associating herself with a man, she thinks, who has the potential, before developing “a super-strategy so that he becomes the Mexican Justin Trudeau”. To appear more “popular”, she will go so far as to wear contact lenses and dye her hair brown to no longer look like the “typical blonde of the Mexican elite” (Constanza).
Here, China recounts her journey as a killer in the service of a drug cartel. There, it is Regina, 17 years old, daughter of a corrupt deputy, best friend of Yuliana and sister of Constanza, who recounts, beyond her own death, the violence that her boyfriend inflicted on her. Then: a 13-year-old unmarried mother, a murdered trans prostitute, a worker from the city of Juárez who disappeared like so many others. A witch who writes a letter to her murdered friend.
Racism, violence, poverty and machismo. The observation is unshakeable: “Being a woman is a state of emergency. »
Author and activist born in 1985 in Aguascalientes, in central Mexico, in a raw language steeped in orality, Dahlia de la Cerda delivers with Watchdogs a huge cry of anger. She reminds us in a moan that “every three hours twenty-five, in Mexico, a woman dies dismembered, asphyxiated, raped, beaten, burned alive, mutilated, torn by knife wounds, broken bones and skin. covered in bruises. A punch.