The Mixquiahuala Letters

Alicia visits Teresa in Mexico, where Alvaro Pérez Pérez has invited them and some other friends to visit his family’s ranch. Alvaro is in love with Teresa, but she doesn’t know it at the time. He shows her the town on the day of her arrival, then takes her to his brother’s house and leaves her with his sister-in-law, who assumes Teresa is Alvaro’s lover. She tells Teresa that Alvaro is the only heir to a large fortune. Alvaro visits Teresa’s room that night to bring her a mango but leaves soon after. She meets his parents after they attend church the following morning. Alvaro’s father is indifferent to her, but his mother is hostile, assuming that Teresa wants to marry her son for his fortune, despite Teresa’s assurances that she’s just there with a group of Alvaro’s friends. Teresa, Alvaro, and two other friends go to the town square to wait for Alicia to arrive.

Alicia is late, so the other three drink heavily in a nearby café. Alicia finally shows up, and when the two women meet up with Alvaro and his friends, Alvaro is drunk and unhappy that Alicia showed up after all. When the group returns to Alvaro’s brother’s house, Alvaro tries to send Alicia up to the room he had slept in the night before, so that he can sleep with Teresa. He reveals his feelings, asks Teresa to stay in Mexico, and demands to spend the night with her. Teresa refuses, and the two argue. Alvaro and his friends depart to resume drinking, and Alicia and Teresa go to bed together, barring the door of their room. In the middle of the night Alvaro pushes past their barricade and gets into bed with the two of them. They can’t sleep, so they go downstairs and try to rest in the courtyard until morning. They leave the house the next day.

Alicia and Teresa go and stay with a young man Teresa met on their study abroad trip, a medical student who lives with his parents. He had fallen in love with Teresa that summer and told her how he felt. He’s coddled by his family because they believe he will be a doctor someday, but he tearfully tells Teresa that he’s failing his studies. His mother dislikes both Alicia and Teresa and their presence in her house. The family goes to a party one night, and the medical student comes home drunk. He talks to a woman on the phone outside the room where Alicia and Teresa are sleeping, and Teresa gets up to confront him about his involvement with someone else. Teresa says she goes to back to bed after that, but a poem at the end of the letter describes the pair having sex and then returning to his mother’s house.

Alicia and Teresa visit ruins in Oaxaca, where a local man named Wolfgang approaches them, seemingly attracted to Alicia. He praises her sketching and offers to take her and Teresa back to town. The three eat dinner together, and Alicia is charmed by Wolfgang’s interest in her, since she considers herself unattractive. Wolfgang is also an artist, and the three go to his studio to look at his work. He soon makes it clear that he’s actually interested in Teresa, not Alicia. Teresa doesn’t reciprocate, and he drops them off at their hotel. Wolfgang says he’ll give them a ride to the bus depot the next day. Teresa tries to smooth things over with Alicia by showing her pictures of her honeymoon with Libra and saying how tired she is of men. Alicia won’t be consoled, however, because attention from men means more to her than it does to Teresa. Teresa tries to point out Wolfgang’s flaws, including the fact that he is an inferior artist to Alicia and that he took a drawing from her without reciprocating as he had promised. Wolfgang shows up to take them to the bus the next day, bringing his mother with him. He asks if he can cut a lock of Teresa’s hair, and she lets him, despite her belief that such tokens can bring bad luck to the person who gives them. The two women get on the bus and ride away.

Alicia and Teresa go to a hotel on the Yucatan Peninsula owned by a wealthy man named Sergio Samora, who pursues Teresa. He proposes that they sleep together, and Teresa reveals that she came to Mexico to force an end to her current marriage. He’s unhappy that she’s already married but promises to arrange a divorce for her, followed by a quiet wedding. Teresa’s mother is thrilled by the news. Teresa reflects that her children will grow up in the Yucatan, where their race and appearance won’t be out of the ordinary or cause for discrimination, unlike her experience growing up in Chicago. She writes that she never really loved Sergio but will marry him out of convenience (in contrast to her marriage to Libra, which was for love).

Teresa muses Americans’ distance from and apathy toward the violence of political unrest that they hear reported on the news. She recounts that she and Alicia arrived in a coastal Mexican town and were harassed as they waited for a bus by two nearby men. Three other men, who had been circling through the area in a car, tell the two women to get in to escape from the harassers. Once in the car, the women see weapons and feel vulnerable. The men question where they’re from, and Teresa says they’re from South America, sensing that they could be in danger if she reveals that they’re Americans. The men say two women are wanted for an attempted assassination of the president. The women insist they’re expected downtown, hoping to convince the men that they would be missed if they were kidnapped. Evidently believing their story, the men drive Alicia and Teresa a few blocks away and let them out. Shaken, they walk to their hotel.

Teresa and Alicia take a ferry to a Mexican island and arrive at a hotel. They spend a night, then are told that their traveler’s checks cannot be cashed because of political unrest affecting the value of the peso. The banker assures them that the issue will be resolved soon and tells them to enjoy themselves. The women are effectively stuck on the island until their checks can be cashed. A boat captain takes them out to fish for red snapper, repeatedly telling them that their credit is good with him. Later the women learn that he got drunk and told everyone in the vicinity that he and the men on his boat had sex with them. Teresa and Alicia, powerless without money, can’t do anything but retreat to their hotel room. They sleep outside in hammocks on subsequent nights.

On their way back to Mexico City from the Yucatan, Teresa and Alicia stop in Veracruz, a city on the Gulf of Mexico. They sit in a café to write postcards; Teresa wants to assure Sergio that she is in fact coming back to him. A young man at the next table named Ponce approaches them on the pretense of having the two settle a dispute between him and his friend as to where the women are from—South America or the United States. Teresa and Alicia end up joining the two men, who tell the women about their house, where they’ve witnessed various supernatural events. The four then go back to the house to observe a séance performed by the men’s friend. While they wait for the séance to begin, Alicia dances with one of the men, and Teresa banters with Ponce. He wants to sleep with her and tries to determine whether she’s “liberal,” or sexually eager. She refuses him, and she and Alicia leave when the séance leader starts the ritual by lighting a marijuana joint. Ponce lets them leave without protest and tells them to come back if they need a place to stay.

Teresa and Alicia attend a drag show, after which two gay men threaten Alicia with rape at gunpoint. Later the two go to a university auditorium with a man they’ve met, and Alicia dances with various men up on the auditorium stage. Teresa has previously noted that dancing acts as an intoxicant for Alicia, and she’s powerless to resist when the men drag her offstage to rape her. Teresa intervenes, the group disperses, and the two women leave the auditorium.

Teresa and Alicia go back to Ponce’s house to stay. That evening he leaves to go out with a woman. The rest of the group passes the time playing with a Ouija board before going to bed. The Ouija board spells out an ambiguous message about Alicia, one that could be interpreted as an omen of her death. Alicia dismisses the message, but the more superstitious Teresa is rattled. The two women go to bed but sleep uneasily. A storm wakes them up in the middle of the night, and their locked bedroom door somehow swings open, scaring them both—which is remarkable because Alicia is usually more skeptical of so-called supernatural events. They sense a spirit, “a massive rolling of energy blacker than the darkness in the room” (88). Ponce checks to see if they’re all right, and Teresa and Alicia retreat to his bedroom, which is supposedly the only one in the house that’s not haunted. The two women settle into his bed, and Alicia quickly falls asleep. Ponce stays for a while and prepositions Teresa again as soon as Alicia is asleep. Teresa laughingly refuses, treating the idea as a joke, and Ponce leaves to sleep in the women’s abandoned room.

The next day the women buy bus tickets back to Mexico City, then return to Ponce’s house for much of the day. They leave the house in the evening to eat, to avoid spending much time in Ponce’s house, which they are convinced is haunted. They discuss seeing a movie to pass the time but instead return to the house. Rather than staying out late as they’d indicated, the men of the house have returned with their bosses to celebrate Mexico’s Independence Day. Their two bosses are also going to Mexico City and offer Teresa and Alicia a ride. They take the women in a limousine, thinking Teresa and Alicia are promiscuous and will sleep with them. Teresa and Alicia devise false, conservative personas to deter the men, and they stop at a hotel to rest for a few hours before continuing to Mexico City. The men give Teresa and Alicia their own room, and the women marvel that they’ve managed to dissuade them. They meet the men in the hotel lobby the next morning dressed as modest, serious students to further discourage the men.

When they arrive in Mexico City, the women stay with a friend’s family for a few days. Sergio sends a telegram to Teresa, breaking off their engagement. Alicia tries to console Teresa, but Teresa knows she supported the engagement to begin with. Teresa returns home to Chicago, where her mother chastises her for believing Sergio would marry her. Teresa leaves her mother some souvenirs from Mexico and unceremoniously moves out.