“Childhood is an ‘island’ where magic resides, and where dark, foreboding echoes of violence lurk,” she says. Tatiana, whose film is portrayed through the eyes of three young girls, speaks to this also, explaining that she wanted to “…see the world through the eyes of a child-try to understand how that gaze is transformed and eroded when we begin to grow up.” She helps to achieve this effect by placing the hand-held camera at the girls’ eye level-her camerawork the equivalent of my novel’s POV. When my protagonist sees her friend who has been covered with cigarette burns, she imagines her companion has walked through the Milky Way and that her skin has been turned into a constellation of stars. My novel is written from the perspective of a young girl, Ladydi, which allowed me to keep the innocence and enchantment of a childlike gaze, and it became a foil against the violence of the environment. This narrative approach has a long history: since the Mexican Revolution at the beginning of the 20th century, violence-as-spectacle was reproduced in photographic postcards and illustrated newspapers today, it appears in cheap magazines and some tabloids. While both Tatiana and I have chosen to bring light to the violence inflicted on women and girls in Mexico, we’ve diverged from the popular genre of narco cinema and literature, which tend to be male-driven stories about Mexican drug culture, with graphic violence as a primary part of the aesthetic. It was this information that led to the book: I imagined a rabbit warren of little girls and the act of being buried alive at age six or seven.
A woman who had left Guerrero to work in Mexico City told me how the women in her community dug holes in the ground where they could hide their daughters while men drove around the countryside looking for girls to steal. Guerrero is a prominent area of Mexico for the cultivation of poppies that are processed into heroin for US drug consumption, and where thousands of poor, marginalized, and often indigenous Mexicans are employed.
In 2014, after ten years of interviewing women in Mexico, many of whom were the wives and girlfriends of drug traffickers, I published Prayers for the Stolen, which deals with the stealing and trafficking of girls in the state of Guerrero. Tatiana takes part one of my three-part book and creates a complete world, keeping the story in the rural community and creating a new ending, while my narrative branches off to Acapulco and Santa Martha Acatitla, Mexico City’s women’s prison. Also known as Noche de Fuego, Tatiana’s movie-now streaming on Netflix-has garnered many accolades and is Mexico’s official entry for the Academy Awards. At the Cannes Film Festival in July, Tatiana Huezo premiered the feature film Prayers for the Stolen, loosely based on my novel of the same name.
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