Sara Campos

What would life be like if you lived in a city where people your age and gender were preyed upon, mutilated, and left for dead? What if you were a sensitive, thirteen-year-old girl? Alessandra’s Narvaez Varela’s debut YA novel, Thirty Talks Weird Love,” inhabits the body of such a girl, not in the latest dystopian apocalypse, but in the gritty reality of Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican border town where unsolved femicides made national headlines in the 1990s. Thirty Talks Weird Love’s protagonist, Anamaria, is a seventh grader in a strict Catholic school. Driven by grades and striving for perfection, she hopes to become a doctor, but she is so stressed with school and the corpses of girls and women who are “found” and left “kissing the dirt” that she contemplates taking her life. Such is her plight that her thirty-year-old self shows up to guide and protect her, a phenomenon that Anamaria initially resists. 

The book captures working class life in the border town. It also aptly depicts the shenanigans of middle-school life, along with mean girls competing for friends and the honor roll. Yet death looms like a constant undertow—the girls are never allowed to travel freely on their own, not to the grocery store, not to the movies. These girls live in a kind of prison. One wonders if the protagonist contemplates suicide because taking one’s life is a way of taking back control. 

Thirty Talks Weird Love is written in prose poems, couplets, and dialogue, sometimes delivered in various shapes---hopscotch squares, an acrostic daisy, the female symbol over a cross, and other figures. They are whimsical and experimental, calling to mind a teenager’s large-looped handwriting in a marble-covered composition notebook. The poems connote a young girl’s self-discovery and attempts to make sense of the horrors around her, including the fact that race and class are part of the equation that leads to death. If these themes sound dark, they are, but they are rendered with sensitivity and lightness that nevertheless pack a punch. Ultimately, the book is a poem for the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of women and girls who disappeared in Ciudad Juarez, and a prayer that they will not be forgotten. 

This spring, I interviewed Alessandra over email about her debut novel. Below are her answers.

Sara: The Ciudad Juárez femicides have been widely written about in fiction and nonfiction and you could have engaged the subject matter in many ways. Why did you choose the YA genre to write about this issue?

Alessandra: When I started drafting this story, I was not entirely aware of the YA literary canon or what it really meant to write for this audience. I only knew Anamaria and Thirty’s story was meant for teenagers because of the mental health component that was so important for me to communicate to young readers. While revising, I did my research and read books like The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, credited with starting this genre, The Surrender Tree by Margarita Engle and The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo. In all these works, the subject matter was not unlike fiction meant for adults; what changed was the “feel” of it, the delivery. Thus, in discussing the femicides, I could not back down, and I certainly couldn’t condescend to my character or to young readers. I drew inspiration from my work as a high school tutor in Anthony, Texas, where, for five years, I witnessed how able and willing teenagers are to discuss tough topics, if only we engage them in conversation. I admired their honesty and the emotional hyperbole they live in. Sometimes adults mock that hyperbole, but I dare say, we might be slightly jealous when we witness the way teenagers feel everything “a flor de piel,” passionately and with an utter abandon of logic. 

Sara: What was it like for you to return to the mindset of a 13-year-old girl faced with so many deaths around her? 

Alessandra: It was interesting, to say the least. Growing up, I was not as aware of the femicides because I was overly focused on my studies. Without a doubt, however, I was conscious of feeling scared.

In the beginning, this realization made connecting to Anamaria’s voice challenging, especially when she thought about the femicides. Then, I realized I had an opportunity to acknowledge Anamaria’s shielded experience and dramatize the rude awakening she endures while channeling all the emotional intensity of adolescence: I could shed the armor society asks me to wear and feel all of it—the loss, the frustration, the anger, the fear— to the nth degree. That’s how we should all feel about the femicides. YA afforded me that naked vulnerability.

Sara: In Thirty Talks Weird Love, Anamaria discovers that poverty isn’t the only factor that renders girls susceptible to femicide; it is a combination of class and race. Poor, darker girls are more likely to die. Can you conjecture as to why that was so? 

Alessandra: At the root, as I understand it through various sources—from the "Forgotten: The Women of Juarez” podcast and Molly Molloy’s Frontera List, to engaging in conversation with my parents and other Juarenses—there’s misogyny, the vulnerability created by poverty, and the lack of city, state, and federal action. There’s also collusion and corruption that scholars and journalists can discuss much better than I can. 

In examining my own experiences, I think of how lucky I was that I did not need to work from an early age to help provide for my family and to have parents or trusted adults who always picked me up from school.  I allude to these protections through Anamaria’s experience: she’s from a lower-middle social class, which allows her to just go to school, and not worry about getting a job to support her family, thus protecting her from waiting for and riding the maquiladora ruteras at dawn, which was a common experience for many victims in the 90s.

Colorism also plays an important role. As a fair-skinned Mexican girl, Anamaria’s disappearance would have been met with greater media attention and resources. When I consider the protection afforded by whiteness on a small scale, I think of crossing the international bridges by foot. Because I can pass for white, I rarely experience the blatant disrespect some of my darker-skinned paisanos often receive. This calls to mind the word “conjecture.” My lived experiences, my access to information through professors and research, and the rates at which women of color are killed and then forgotten, amount to “fact.” I had to face this reality, as did Anamaria; I can only hope readers do as well because we need to talk about this issue openly and with a sense of moral urgency.

Sara: Your affection for Ciudad Juarez is palpable in the pages of the novel, even despite the femicides. You call the city a “red cruel beautiful mother beast.” Do you blame the city for what has befallen in it? If so, why?

Alessandra: This question puzzled me for the longest time. Like many people, I kept equating the femicides with the city. Doing so meant blindly blaming the very same people whose lives are disrupted by the levels of violence and crime that affected the city then and now. Thus, it was a mental exercise for me to separate the blame—the actual blame—from the place and the Juarenses who have nothing to do with the murders. I brought this up in one of the final poems, “A Different Kind of Love,” where Mr. Yeyé clarifies for Anamaria that it’s not the city murdering women, it’s someone else. 

Sara: Has the city changed since you grew up there? If so, how?

Alessandra: Yes. The most obvious change in Ciudad Juárez since I moved to El Paso in 2007 is the increased drug-related violence that wounded Juarenses starting in 2008. That violence affected the way we made a wide range of decisions—from the essential, like buying groceries and going to the doctor, to the trivial, like going to a restaurant. Anxiety and fear always loomed. As expected, tourism dwindled, severely affecting the city’s economy. If they could afford it, many people moved to El Paso. Unsurprisingly, the energy of the city changed; however, Ciudad Juárez is always in flux, regardless of violent waves. 

Being in la frontera, at the mercy of two country’s limitations and desires, Ciudad Juárez has learned to adapt at a rate that would give other cities and their people whiplash. If it’s not U.S. anti-immigrant views or outdated, punishing migratory laws, it’s the corruption and impunity at all levels of the México government that allow narco violence to continue. Of course, it is intimately connected to American demand for drugs. Despite it all, Ciudad Juárez and Juarenses have necks of steel and will continue to thrive. That’s something that will never change, and I’m proud to come from a place and people like that.

Sara: Anamaria, the protagonist in the novel, experiments with poetic forms. Did this experimentation flow from the character? 

Alessandra: Yes, absolutely. Even the form in which her story is told—through poems—stems from who she is. Anamaria is a “closeted,” passionate poet, so it made perfect sense that she’d narrate her story in poems while also exploring her poeta identity in her composition notebook. This relationship between form and character is not strict; other factors might guide a writer to write in verse. However, in my case, the way I write often reflects my character’s personality. 

In presenting different poetic forms, I kept in mind how Anamaria would say things, even where she would enjamb a line. This was a very pleasant process overall, but I enjoyed writing concrete poems the most. I added these in June 2020 because my editor, Lee Byrd, told me Anamaria needed to “have more fun.” So, I had to ask myself: how does Anamaria have fun? Certainly not by playing in her room or calling her friends for playdates; Anamaria’s concept of fun is a bit more cerebral and tortured, if you will, so writing poems that follow the margins dictated by a shape felt right to me. 

Sara: What are your hopes for this novel? What do you want your readers to come away with after reading?

Alessandra: For a long time, I never allowed myself to be vulnerable. Not as a person, a writer or as a teacher. This stems from my rigorous schooling in Ciudad Juárez, but also from a false belief that to be open is to be weak. My parents never encouraged that kind of impenetrability. That said, I blame that line of thinking for not speaking up when I attempted suicide at 17 years old: I believed asking for help or talking about what I had done would taint the image of the driven, can-do-it-all girl I thought my family and friends loved. I loved that image too; I still grapple with it. So that’s one of my biggest hopes for readers of Thirty: that they find comfort and pride in vulnerability, and that they ask for help if they’re dealing with mental illness, suicidal ideation or a suicide attempt. 

I’ve been pleased to hear the book is often perceived as a love letter to a younger self and to a city, so I hope readers write their own letters, in whatever form that might take. I would especially hope for Latinx readers who are also writers to be inspired to start, continue, or finish that story sitting on their desks or accumulating pixel dust on their computers. Our stories matter and who better to tell them than us?