Mandinga

A young woman travels to Rivera—a border city—to reconnect with her fugitive uncle and confront the abject memory that has defined her family's exile. Survival shapes the destiny of her kin amidst precarity, double lives, and the paranoid shadow of a murky political persecution. Necessity also intersects with the complex web of child sexual abuse, paving the way for an exploration of impossible emotions, such as love between victim and perpetrator. This story probes the limits—of language, identity, and bonds—and examines what fractures when those boundaries blur. De Mello’s characters are marked by poverty and turbulent family ties, haunted by the lingering shadow of Southern Cone dictatorships, displacement, and the tensions of an identity that is both split and multiplied across borders. The text breaks away from monolingualism, experimenting formally with Portuguese and Portuñol phrasing to craft a hybrid language; this serves as both a narrative and aesthetic strategy, reflecting the book's kaleidoscopic nature.