Fierce, street smart, and laced with dark humour, Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda is a literary adrenaline shot; thirteen blistering and brilliant tales of contemporary Mexican womanhood, from an activist and debut writer whose theme here is women who live with violence. With a cast of characters spanning the social scale (aging seamstress ‘spinsters’ traumatised by the degradation of their once nice neighbourhood, an impoverished young woman contemplating a lonely abortion, a wealthy narco heiress running her father’s empire), De la Cerda shows us the lengths these women will go to to survive.
The stories ride on a wave of authorial urgency,
‘Mexico is a monster that devours women, Mexico is a desert of pulverized bone. Mexico is a graveyard full of pink crosses. Mexico is a country that hates women.’
Several of the stories include murder, rape and violence and yet Reservoir Bitches is galvanising rather from bleak. De La Cerda’s women are filled with humour, resilience and zest, no mere roll call of victims and peacekeepers.
Four stories cleverly interconnect, exploring the perspectives and backstories of other characters. The first of these is Yuliana, a gripping tale of drug trafficking, high living and doomed friendship. It’s related by Yuliana herself, who tells of her upbringing as the daughter of a Mexican drug lord, sequestered in a gated community with armed guards and forbidden from mixing with the locals. Trapped and friendless, at least she lives in luxury as a sheltered ‘narco junior,’ a role that is upended when fate delivers her a best friend and swift succession to her father’s role as cartel leader.
What follows is a foreseeable but seemingly inescapable cycle of brutality and revenge. As Yuliana tells us in the first paragraph of her story, ‘What starts rough ends rough. That’s my song, fam. My philosophy.’
Three later stories revisit ‘Yuliana’, from the perspective of the other female characters and their notably extreme strategies for survival in a Mexican society that’s rife with machismo and misogyny. This quartet forms the core of the collection, with a handful of outstanding stories continuing De la Cerda’s theme.
Also a pro-choice activist (abortion is now legal in Mexico but not always easy to obtain), De la Cerda gives us ‘Parsley and Coca-Cola’, the story of a young woman unable to afford to get to the clinics in Mexico City and considering more homespun options. Parsley and Coca Cola are both actual ingredients in ‘shady’ home abortions, other methods may be used, various teas, ‘stabbing your uterus with a coat hanger’, a gastric flu prescription drug. Whichever she chooses, she must administer alone.
An exhilarating array of women’s voices fill this audacious collection, even some from the afterlife, after having been murdered by men. In other hands, this could be a mawkish affair, but here it’s electrifying, particularly in ‘Sequins’, a story of transfemicide with a final, beautiful scene that calls to solidarity.
As a debut collection, this is an amazing achievement, longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025 and winner of a PEN Translates Award for Heather Cleary and Julia Sanches. We can’t wait to see what De La Cerda does next.
If you’re interested in South American stories, we can also recommend Good and Evil and Other Stories, A Sunny Place for Shady People, and Things We Lost in the Fire.
Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda is translated by Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary, and published by Scribe, 192 pages.
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