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A Note from the Author

I have lived between Mexico and the United States for most of my life, countries characterized by rigid gender hierarchies and femicides along post-NAFTA borders. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why I took to writing a novel delving into the fluid nature of gender dis/identifications. I chose writings by Amparo Dávila, a marginalized Mexican woman writer of the so-called Midcentury Generation, to be the center of the novel’s enigma, set in a time in which disappearance has become a plague.

Borders are a subtle but pervasive force in this book. I was born on the eastern tip of the US-Mexico border and lived between San Diego (California) and Tijuana (Baja California) when I wrote The Iliac Crest. There are questions you cannot escape when approaching immigration: Who are you? Where do you come from? Anything to declare? Awareness of geopolitical borders soon leads to questions about the many lines we cross—or don’t, or aren’t allowed to—as we go about our daily lives. Our bodies are keys that open only certain doors. Our bodies speak indeed, and our bones are our ultimate testimony. Will we be betrayed by our bones?

While women’s voices throughout the world continue to be silenced and those in power still argue for the irrelevance of gender equality, characters in this book understand that gender—and what is done in the name of gender—can be lethal. When disappearing becomes an epidemic, especially among women, this book reminds readers that there is always a trace left: a manuscript, a footprint, a dent, an echo worthy of our full attention and our inquiries. When women disappear from our factories and our history—from our lives—we have to reexamine what is normal. Reality may have become inexplicable or impenetrable, and therefore maddening, but questioning such circumstances lies at the core of this novel.

—CRISTINA RIVERA GARZA

Houston, Texas, 2017