Mexican author Dahlia de la Cerda reunites with translators Heather Cleary and Julia Sanches after her debut, Reservoir Bitches, was longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize. In Medea Sang Me a Corrido, she connects six chapters for a disturbing, illuminating novel-in-stories, interlinked through repeated appearances of Medea--yes, the mythical Medea who, betrayed by Jason of the Argonauts, murdered their children as punishment.
This novel's sorceress is an avenging feminist enabler in Aztlán, the mythic Aztec homeland that's not unlike the Mexico in which de la Cerda resides. She assists two young women with abortions--the first because her gangster boyfriend goes missing, the second because she needs to break free from her "golden cage." De la Cerda reveals the backstory of the missing gangster, Jordán, while Medea greets him in the afterlife. Medea next helps a would-be mother save her unborn child after surviving a cartel shoot-out. Jordán's mother confesses her decades of distant motherhood but, aided by Medea, she's determined to find Jordán's remains. Medea gets the last words, lamenting her own tragic story but admitting the "horrors" she's witnessed in Aztlán are "horrors that no Greek tragedy could turn into metaphor," as she exposes abused mothers and lost children, addiction and murders, and so much death and destruction--but also dancing, tenderness, laughter, and survival.
Combining both rage and empathy, de la Cerda bears unfiltered witness to man-made suffering while highlighting impossible choices and challenging paths of women's endurance and escape. As founder of Morras Help Morras, a feminist collective empowering women on the fringe, de la Cerda transforms real-life experiences into raw, memorable, don't-look-away fiction. --Terry Hong