Vanessa Angélica Villarreal Selected Works

In Magical/Realism, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal offers us an intimate mosaic of migration, violence, and colonial erasure through the lens of her marriage and her experiences navigating American monoculture. As she attempts to recover the truth from the absences and silences within her life, her relationships, and those of her ancestors, Vanessa pieces together her story from the fragments of music, memory, and fantasy that have helped her make sense of it all. 

Beast Meridian narrates the experiences of a first-generation Mexican-American girl, tracking cultural displacement, generational trauma, sexist and racist violence, sexual assault, economic struggle, and institutional racism that disproportionately punishes brown girls in crisis. Narrated by a speaker who is expelled and sent to an alternative school for adolescents with behavioral issues, and eventually, a psychiatric hospital, it survives the school to prison pipeline, the immigrant working class condition, grueling low-pay service jobs, conservative classism against Latinxs in Texas, queerness, assimilation, and life wrapped up in frivolous citations, fines, and penalties.

Opening with the death of a beloved young grandmother from preventable cervical cancer, and moving into dissociative states, Beast Meridian challenges American notions of “healing” from trauma, and rather acknowledges sadness, mourning, and memory as a necessary state of constant awareness to forge a way back toward a broader healing of earth, time, body, and history.