Medea me cantó un corrido de Dahlia de la Cerda: La politización de la rabia como redención feminista

Document Type

Journal Article

Role

Author

Published In

Latin American Literary Review

Volume

53

Issue

106

Publication Date

5-16-2026

Abstract

In her short story collection Medea me cantó un corrido (2024), Mexican writer Dahlia de la Cerda presents six characters who inhabit the fictional town of San Miguelito, in Aztlán, shaped by the spectacular violence of state and para-state narcopolitical power. In dialogue with contemporary debates within Latin American feminism—particularly between punitive and abolitionist feminisms—I propose a reading of these stories from the intersection of frameworks that advocate for community care in the face of state abandonment or failure (Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar; Luciana Cadahia), and the importance of such care-based alternatives to counteract the intersecting colonial, racist, and patriarchal forms of violence (Rita Segato).

If the characters in De la Cerda’s stories move through different embodiments of intersectional violence in border spaces—physical, legal, and narrative—what kinds of communities do they create to confront its relentless onslaught? Pushed toward solutions outside legality—since legality itself is complicit in their oppression—what affects and practices are recovered to rebuild the social fabric? Interwoven with the author’s own feminist theoretical positions, these stories explore alternatives that seek to denounce and dismantle patriarchal mandates. By taking refuge in the literary space, they exploit its mutability to propose diverse points of entry, whether through the mythological rewriting of Medea—who accompanies the characters’ dreams of autonomy—or through the specificity of the zulos’ language and practices as a territory that holds the potential for critique and transformation.

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