![]() ![]() ![]() 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. ![]() The novel begins and ends in Sarmiento Park, where the travestis work. 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. 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. 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. 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. ![]()
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