Night at the Fiestas

Nemecia is the titular character in the collection’s first story. The cousin to the story’s narrator, Maria, Nemecia was sent to live with Maria’s family at the age of five after witnessing her father murder her grandfather and brutally beat her mother. As an adult, Maria recalls Nemecia’s dramatic and self-consciously mysterious behavior. Maria also remembers that as Nemecia grew into adolescence, she became increasingly emotionally volatile and violent. Maria remembers Nemecia as being “fierce with her love and her hate” (8), and the two were often at odds as girls.

However,, Nemecia’s troubled behavior is rooted in childhood trauma. Her father was serially abusive, and the narrative suggests that she witnessed more than one act of violence against her mother. Nemecia’s false claim that she killed her grandfather and put her mother into a coma is actually meant to be a sad reflection of her own confusion rather than a brazen lie, as Maria originally thought. As a child, Nemecia was too young to truly understood the nature of the crime she had witnessed, and as a result, she fabricated a story to mitigate the shame she felt about her fractured family.