Book title: Cada Mar Desierto, Hachette Editorial 2025, 216 pg. Original Language: Spanish.
Filmmaker and writer Iliana Pichardo Urrutia has written an exquisite, dream-like story where you can get lost in the waves of loss, grief, migration, and motherhood. Cada Mar Desierto is as surreal as it is visceral, with the lush, gorgeous, lyrical language of a spell that tells the myths we inherit through bloodlines. The book continuously reminds us it is filling in the silences of what wasn’t. “I’ve come to split words open like one splits a body in half so something can be born,” the book opens up in its introduction. This is the best release in the Spanish language of 2025 I read. Images flooded me as I read–I found myself submerged in its quiet magic, like the recurring symbol of the octopus: “It was a baby octopus dragging its eight tentacles up the staircase that led to my classroom. It was tiny, the size of my hand. It climbed slowly under the midday sun, gliding leg by leg through the concrete. I saw it.”
Throughout the book, the speaker masterfully asserts themselves with sublime authority on memory “There is no memory. Only sensations in the body…” Though there are few narrative “in-scenes” the text is brimming with electricity, and, as the excerpt states, each word is felt in the body. According to Pichardo Urrutia, the project, started during her MFA at UTEP, began as a collection of personal essays but quickly deconstructed into a hybrid form. On numerous occasions, the speaker addresses this dissolution of genre: “This book is humidity, minor thermal sensation…a monologue of voices inhabiting a desert. A map to intervene. Form.”
The throughline in the collection is the passing of the speaker’s brother, and the histories of grief tying her to her mother and grandmother, the maternal lineage that shapes the pain of a family. The grounding moments are spent in descriptions of the Abuela, or the mother, and their own narratives, which Pichardo Urrutia admits are not stories she can tell, though she does tell her own experience of them vividly and lovingly.
Since the artist had to immigrate to El Paso from Mexico City for her studies, the border and its disfiguration of human lives is acknowledged: “Bodies defined not for their place and origin, but for their displacement. Broken geography, always in transit.” Her observation is poignant and ethereal, though grounded by speaking of the systems’ cruelty: “This zone is a liminal place between silence and death. How many mothers walk, their children on their back…I think about the implications of crossing under and not through a bridge. The implication of extending a trajectory toward the outside, flag, after flag, the same desert with a division: You can cross | You can’t.” In this same section, we are told about a mother whose daughter drowns in the Rio Bravo during their attempt to cross into the U.S.; the passage offers a tender bow to the grief of a mother, not unlike the grief of the narrator’s own mother, “I think of the next day without her daughter…Did she cross to the other side. Without her. What sense does a territory have if the future is denied, shut down in the water. Wrath. Inhabiting this same silence knowing these things happen one day and the next.” This book is thoughtful, quiet, and an offering to women who’ve suffered loss.
There is a magnificent and hypnotic reverence toward the biosphere, particularly, as the name alludes, to the ocean and the Chihuahuan desert, which we’re told used to be entirely buried under the sea. Many sections are filled with dreams of drowning, of being ravaged by a majestic and terrifying vastness of the ocean, serving as a symbol of the immensity and infiniteness women experience when they lose a child, a brother, a grandmother, or a concept of home after migrating. The speaker recognizes her limits as a witness, “What can I do other than naming them. A mother. A daughter. Separated in the same place where the wall refuses them.” Likewise, the desert reminds the reader of what once was, reveals the trace of what was erased, as is the case with the tragedy of a mother and daughter forever torn apart and forgotten–another story of the type of brutality we’re bombarded with daily–“El desierto lleno de sus huellas, de sus nombres, de sus historias.” Pichardo Urrutia has taken the art of the memoir to a depth as immeasurable as the ocean that fills its pages.
