I first heard of “Las Malas,” a novel by the Argentinean writer Camila Sosa Villada (to be published in English as “Bad Girls” by Other Press, in May), when a friend told me that the book had made him think of me, because it’s set in the nineteen-nineties, in the city of Córdoba, where I spent my adolescence, and where most of my family still lives. The novel, a work of autofiction, is a first-person coming-of-age story told by Camila, who is born poor and a boy in a town in the hills of Córdoba Province, and whose parents violently reject her when, as a teen-ager, she starts dressing as a girl. At the age of eighteen, she moves to the city to attend the public National University (in Argentina, public universities are free and open to all) and where by night, to support herself, she becomes a sex worker. Her story unfolds as she finds a group of more experienced travestis (more on this word later) who teach and protect her, and with whom she shares daily doses of cruelty, pain, and humiliation but also of solidarity and joy.
The novel begins and ends in Sarmiento Park, where the travestis work. My grandparents lived near the park, and I have been to the zoo and the amusement park there many times, but I’ve never been there at night nor seen travestis awaiting clients by the statue of Dante. I attended the same university as Camila does in the novel, but her Córdoba is a marginal, nocturnal city of a soul and a body who survive the scorn of neighbors, clients’ beatings, and police brutality. Mine is a suburban, aspirational, upper-middle-class city of a dutiful student who has her parents’ support. Still, after I finished reading Camila’s story, it kept growing in me, its images of Córdoba blending with my own memories of a machista society that rolled over anyone trying to escape the control of men. A “good” man, Camila’s father tells her, “must pray every night, form a family, get a job. You’re going to find it pretty hard to find a job in that little skirt.”
As a story of gender oppression, “Bad Girls” (beautifully translated by Kit Maude) would sound familiar almost everywhere—particularly, these days, in the United States, as Texas seeks to punish trans families and other Republican-led states are restricting abortion rights. But Sosa Villada is not looking for ideological sympathy. In fact, the first defiant message in the English translation of her book is an author’s note addressed not to trans people’s perceived enemies but to their allies. She presents a combative defense of the word travesti, which literally means transvestite but is not translated in the novel, compared with terms such as “trans women,” “transsexual,” and “transgender” that Sosa Villada considers “completely alien to us”—that is, to the Latin American travestis who lived in poverty and worked in the streets. “I don’t use the term trans women, I don’t use surgical vocabulary, cold as a scalpel, because the terminology doesn’t reflect our experience as travestis in these regions, from indigenous times to this nonsense of a civilization,” she writes.
