PART 1 In San Miguel el Alto, Jalisco, everyone knew Diego Arriaga, but no one wanted to face his misfortune. At 39, the man who once rode a horse with a straight back and a booming laugh now walked as if he were carrying stones on his chest. His wife, Lucía, had died three years…
PART 1 Doña Remedios lived at the end of a dirt road in San Jacinto del Mezquite, a small town in Jalisco where everyone knew who owed money, who drank too much, and who pretended not to see. Her house was humble, painted faded blue, with pots of basil at the entrance and an altar…
PART 1 In San Miguel del Monte, a town lost among the hills of Puebla, everyone knew Don Eusebio Hernández. Not because he was rich. Not because he owned large lands. They knew him because for 10 years he climbed the same hill carrying his son Mateo on his back to take him to school….
PART 1 Doña Refugio Salas had her first wall thrown down at 7 in the morning, when she still had the coffee boiling on the stove and her shawl over her shoulders. He lived in San Pedro del Tule, a dry town in Jalisco where everyone knew each other, everyone greeted each other, and everyone…
PART 1 Elena Rubio thought someone had broken into the ranch when she saw the barn door open and two shadows moving among the sacks of corn. It was 4:47 in the morning at La Noria, a small ranch on the outskirts of Pátzcuaro, Michoacán. The cold bit to the bone and the fog descended…
PART 1 Emiliano Duarte was 36 years old and had a life that many in Guadalajara envied. He owned an avocado export chain, lived in Puerta de Hierro, drove a newly purchased German truck, and his business dinners always ended with bills of more than 12,000 pesos. But before the tailored suits, the expensive watches,…
PART 1 Mariana Ríos was 33 years old, 6 months pregnant, and had a tired look when Andrés Castañeda placed a folder on the dining room table. She didn’t arrive with flowers. He didn’t arrive feeling guilty. He arrived wearing expensive perfume, an ironed shirt, and a coldness that seemed rehearsed in front of the…
PART 1 In 1986, in a humid neighborhood of the Morelos colony, Rosa sent her son Diego to ask for 1 cup of rice at his uncle Tomás’s house. It wasn’t on a whim. It was because that night there were neither hard tortillas, nor reheated beans, nor a single peso hidden under the plastic…
PART 1 Don Julián Barragán dropped his coffee mug when he heard a voice behind the corral. It wasn’t a scream. It was something worse. A small, muffled voice, like that of a child who has already learned not to bother anyone. —Sir… will you give us what’s left over for the animals? Julián stood…
PART 1 —Sir, I’m sorry… but your mother isn’t dead. I saw her yesterday looking for food behind some containers. The boy’s voice shattered the silence of the French Pantheon like a stone thrown against glass. The priest had just finished speaking about eternal rest in front of the closed coffin of Doña Mercedes Villarreal,…
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