I think no one really chooses their tastes or their modes of expression: One day a language appears, and finding a language is a lot like finding a h… - Mariana Enriquez

When I’m asked who I am, I say, “I am a Latin American.” The experience of being born and living in my country shaped me as a person — often a problematic one — and as a writer. I am a Latin American woman, which also implies a number of challenges: growing up without laws that allowed us to make decisions about our bodies (those laws exist now, but I am 50 years old) and fighting in a labor market that, in addition to being sexist, is scant and limited. Not only are jobs given to men because they are men, but because there is a lot of unemployment in general, and the chain breaks at its weakest link.

One issue is that we’re used to reading in translation and other countries aren’t. We know more about your history than you know about ours. There’s two ways to deal with that. Get angry at the inequality. Or try to explain what’s going on.

I understand the [notion of] respect but I don’t want to be complicit in any kind of silence; to be timid about horrifying things is dangerous too. Maybe I turn up the volume to 11 because of the genre I like to work in, but the genre puts a light on the real horror that gets lost in [a phrase like] “political violence”.