The invisible is as much a part of the Mexican world as the visible, so to write about these matters means to engage with fiction less than it might elsewhere. As with many aspects of its culture, Mexican spirituality is a combination of Catholic faith, pre-Columbian rituals, and, on the eastern coast, the heritage of African slaves. People go for amarres (love spells) as much as they go for vengeance.īelief in the existence of evil spirits has long flourished in Mexico. Although many patrons still request limpias, or cleansings of evil spirits, most have become more interested in spells concerning sex and love-or, rather, sex and hate. Ever since, the town by the lake-also named Catemaco-has been known for the black magic practiced by Aguirre Pech’s apprentices. Though most brujos until then were sought for “white” services, mainly herbal healing, Aguirre Pech claimed to have ascended Cerro Mono Blanco, a hill near Lake Catemaco, and bartered his soul with the devil for dark powers. The brujo’s success was partly the result of a shift in the trade itself.

Veracruz is also the center of Mexico’s witchcraft industry, which peaked in the 1950s when a local warlock, Gonzalo Aguirre Pech, became famous enough to add politicians and film stars to his usual clientele of farmers. But to read the story in this way would be to ignore the presence of magic in Mexican life. Veracruz, Melchor’s home state, on the eastern coast of Mexico, has the highest number of femicides in the country. There were 1,006 registered murders of women in 2019, a 137 percent increase since 2014. Male violence against women is rampant in Mexico. It would be easy to read the story as an allegory.

During the process, the spirit-clearly a male force-claims he is entitled to the woman’s body because she chose to enter the house herself: “She sought me, she went looking for me!” it says through her transformed voice. Her friends take her to a healer for an exorcism, which doesn’t work. Her eyes go blank, she hits her friends with astonishing strength, and she speaks in tongues. Toward the end of the night, one of the women in the group appears to succumb to a demonic possession. In Fernanda Melchor’s story “La Casa del Estero,” from her collection Aquí no es Miami (2018), a group of friends spend the night in “la casa del diablo” (the devil’s house), an abandoned property near their hometown in the state of Veracruz that the locals believe to be haunted.

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