Book Review: ‘Malas,’ by Marcela Fuentes

The title of the book, “Malas,” is a play on the pervasive “bad woman” stereotype, which Lulu tells us is her father’s great fear. “If he’s not watching out, I might become a mala,” she says. “And for a Mexican man, a mala is the worst.” Pilar has long been stigmatized as a mala, with rumors — including infanticide — circulating outside her secluded hilltop home. Even her vanity marks her as a bad woman, recalling an iconic mala of Pilar’s generation, the Mexican actress María Félix. Pilar, too, has the haughtiness of a diva who refuses to fade in her twilight years, her high-arched eyebrows ever alert to the trespasses of men.

Fuentes’s borderlands make up a heterogenous landscape where cultural, ethnic and national identities converge and new ones are forged. “There are names for everybody and rules for the names,” Lulu says, and proceeds to rattle off a roster: naco, fresa, Chicano, Mexican, Mexican American, Hispanic. Add to these labels punk, metal head, stoner, Goth, New Wave, skater, marijuano and heavy-metal Satanist. Lulu loves them all.

They are part of a gently historicized portrait of the border, which Fuentes reminds us is a fluid space, but was as porous as river sand in the 1990s: “It was narrow, but men and women slipped back and forth across the border, shoes in hand, and hardly more than wet trouser cuffs to show for it.” Today, those attempting to cross it face a militarized instrument of death.

“Malas” is an antidote for the hard-line essentialism that has made this world an intolerant, violent place. Fuentes humanizes seemingly insoluble conflicts, both generational and cultural, with imperfect characters who are just doing their best, even when they know they are screwing up. She gives them something that many of us nonfictional people living and messing up in the world could use, and give back — grace.

MALAS | By Marcela Fuentes | Viking | 373 pp. | $29