Tijuana scholar Sayak Valencia argues that being born a woman and poor in contemporary Mexico condemns girls to live in a precarious circle of violence. Similarly, the writer Fernanda Melchor believes that being a woman in contemporary Mexico carries the stigma of being ‘weak and stupid’ – ‘something like being born with a disability’. Both Sayak and Melchor address the precarious situation for the poor, the working class and migrants in the frame of ‘necropolitics’.

The concept of necropolitics was first proposed by the Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe to explain how the lack of governmental action in violent spaces leads to the emergence of private forces that exert control over the deaths (not the lives) of the inhabitants. Mbembe argues that necropolitics develops when the State hands over power to private forces, due to either incapacity or being immersed in corrupt dynamics. The right to kill is no longer an exclusive prerogative of the State. In this regard, both the State and private forces act as necropowers that compete to gain control over the territory and the people.

This chapter addresses the representation of Veracruz as a necropolitical scenario for poor women, girls and sexual minorities in Fernanda Melchor's novel Temporada de huracanes (2017). Melchor was born in 1982 in the Port of Veracruz. At present, she is widely recognised as one of Mexico's most promising and prominent writers. Temporada de huracanes sold more than 37,000 digital and printed copies in Mexico, and Random House had to reprint the book 11 times to continue supplying bookstores with it. The novel has been translated into dozens of languages, and the translations multiplied the success of the book internationally: in Germany, Melchor won the International Prize for Literature in 2019; in the US, the novel was one of five finalists for the pres-tigious International Man Booker Prize in 2020. She is also the author of Aquí no es Miami (2013), Falsa liebre (2013) and Páradais (2021).

In Temporada de huracanes, citizens live in a precarious circle of hostility, which manifests via specific mechanisms of disempowerment led by neighbours, drug dealers and local authorities, such as the police and the judicial system. In the novel, the lack of governmental support and the lack of education, work and social security exacerbate the despair, frustration and anguish and lead people to commit crimes.