La estación del pantano

This book invents a hypothesis: what happened during the year and a half in which Benito Juárez, who would end up being the first indigenous president of Mexico, lived in exile in New Orleans? It is in that "hole marked by the full stop" in Juárez's autobiography where the narration begins. Accompanied by a small group of political exiles, Juárez disembarks in 1853 in that stinking city that, located on the banks of a swamp, absorbs them like a sponge. In it they surrender to the mud, to the jasmine flowers, to the music, to the strangeness of the language and to the unbearable summer, but, above all, they come face to face with the stark reality of the trade in human beings, a market that never it stops. They will discover that New Orleans is a beehive of heterogeneous identities where imprisoned women are sold on the streets and where capitalism shows its most grotesque primitive drive.