The Mixquiahuala Letters

Teresa moves in with a gay poet in Chicago. She has a dream in which she’s in a rural Mexican village and goes to a familiar house. There she’s greeted by an old woman she feels a kinship with, though the old woman is not her real-life mother. Teresa drinks a cup of coffee in the house then walks through the village streets, passing a group engaged in intellectual discussions and encountering an adolescent boy. She has a premonition that war or some other disaster is approaching, and that the boy doesn’t have long to live. She wants to have sex with him so that he can experience it before he dies, and they begin to undress. Teresa realizes that a young girl has followed her and will witness the encounter if they continue. The intellectuals interrupt them, and Teresa is angry. She heads back to the old woman’s house but finds that troops are approaching the village. She tells the villagers to take shelter and hide, and quickly finds two unnamed weapons hidden away underneath a shelf. She’s familiar with them, and the weapon “fit into [her] hand like that of a faithful lover” (103). The dream ends as she approaches a cloudy window and points her weapon at it.