The Winds of Maracaibo

by María Elena Morán

Genres: General Fiction; Hispanic & Latino

Synopsis

A propulsive multigenerational family drama about three women struggling to hold one another together across borders as Chávez’s Venezuela collapses around them—the extraordinary English-language debut of an award-winning and bestselling author

"A searing portrait of Venezuela’s migrant crisis and the ferocity of a mother’s love. Through her dazzling English-language debut, María Elena Morán provides a type of antidote for the broad generalizations that breed indifference. A powerful story of survival, displacement, and the relentless search for home." —Kali Fajardo-Anstine, bestselling author of Woman of Light

It was too late now, y la ternura no basta—now that she’d tasted the gunpowder, and the gunpowder was bolivariano, revolutionary. And that unthinkable traitor Camilo was using it to blow up her life.

“Elisa left with Camilo.” “Camilo took her out of the country.”

These are the text messages Nina receives while living in the storage room of a university in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where she’s cleaning houses to make money to send back home.  

Home is 4,500 miles away, in Maracaibo, Venezuela, where the water never runs on Mondays and there’s yet another blackout. Where a trip to the grocery store costs 220 times the minimum wage.  

Home is Elisa, her thirteen-year-old daughter, who loves to run around the house and belt out Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now.” Who should be growing, when instead her waist is shrinking. Home is Graciela, Nina's mother, who lately stays shut up in her room all day talking with her dead, most urgently her beloved husband, Raúl (who’s just as eager to talk back from the grave). 

And what the hell does Camilo think he’s doing now, stealing off with their daughter to the United States of America—the one place Nina most assuredly never wants to call home? 

Narrated through the voices of Nina and her family, and through the voice of her treacherous ex, Camilo, The Winds of Maracaibo is the heart-racing tale of a mother fighting to get her daughter back across the border, at any cost—a brave and furious reversal of the American Dream and an ode to the Venezuelan women who gave their blood, sweat, and tears to a nation dismantled by the egos of men.

Release date: July 28, 2026

Publisher: Knopf

Print pages: 208

Sample

Part I

The thing is, your daughter doesn’t want to speak to you, and that’s it, Graciela finally said, tired of sugarcoating and hand-wringing, though just a few minutes earlier her excuse had been that the kid couldn’t come to the phone because she was playing on the computer—which Nina knew had to be a lie, because before that she’d said the power was out, and before that lie she’d made up another, saying the girl was in the shower, because, who could have guessed, there was water coming out of the showerhead, a total improbability on a Monday, there was never water on Mondays—and it had been two months since the water ran from anywhere, any day of the week, and at least six since that showerhead had seen a drop. So finally, out of excuses, Graciela cracked: Elisa is rebelling and doesn’t want to talk to you, and I’m not going to make her. And when Nina insisted her daughter pick up the phone—I’m her mother and she’s not in charge—Graciela rebuffed her with cutting indifference: You’ll have to work it out with her later, I don’t know what else to tell you, because she says mothers don’t abandon their children, and what can I say if that’s the truth. And it was in the middle of this rant that, on the other end of the line, in a little corner of Brazil called Pacaraima, Nina started to smell something burning and heard screams, coño, they’re burning us down! They’re burning us down! And she saw people batting at flames rising in the distance out of the Coleman tents, which for the past two days had been her room, her house, her hotel. Now the camp was starting to look more like an oven. I’ll call you back, Mami. And she ran, making her way through the desperate mass of people frantically gathering up the few charred bundles that were left of their baggage—their
whole existence—for the coming days or months or years.

Chama, I’m getting out of this mess, I’m not staying where I’m not wanted, Nina’s tent neighbor, a woman from Valencia, said to her as she moved to join the stampede crossing the border back into Venezuela, where the inferno was an inferno but at least it was theirs, constitutionally granted. Where they had the right to complain—though even that was running short lately, among so many shortages, covered over with government excuses, and a whiff of the military’s involvement in everything. Nina tried to convince her that this was just a small setback, that the other hundreds of people who had helped them counted for much more than the five fucking heartless bastards who would set fire to a camp full of kids and teenagers waiting for asylum. She watched them, still standing there admiring their act of vigilante justice, as she tried to reassure her, but not that hard, because Nina didn’t think she could take on the weight of convincing someone else of this venture that was already starting to look more like a tragedy.

She had seen the hate in those eyes, isso aqui não é Venezuela, porra!, she had heard them and understood because hate, taca fogo, taca fogo em tudo!, doesn’t need translation, vão embora, seus filhos da puta!, the hate of those who say they’re defending the city from a horde of delinquents all because one or two assholes—when is there not at least one or two around?—among thousands of immigrants had to go and do something stupid, and probably most of the attackers and those cheering them on didn’t even know what the supposed crime had been. She had seen their eyes. They were so, so few, these arsonists, compared to the other locals who’d brought water and lanchinho and blankets, but their voices were so filled with malice and fear-turned-malice, and they looked so proud, recording their history-making moment with their phones, shouting in her ears, that all she could say to her neighbor was, Well, take care of yourself, Mamita. And she stood there, with her treasures rescued from the fire—the rescue had cost her her sneakers, the soles now melted from all the stomping, stomping, stomping on the flames until her backpack stopped smoking.

She took stock of her life-in-a-backpack and saw that, apart from the plastic bags and the three little rolls of toilet paper that the flames had targeted, the rest of her stuff seemed to have survived. Her sandals were still ugly but intact. The three pairs of jeans, one jumpsuit, five T-shirts, five pairs of tights, three bras, and the only dress, her favorite, one that had seen her through a ridiculous number of nights salsa dancing, all smelled horribly of kerosene; but at least her fifteen pairs of underwear had made it. She had brought so many because one thing she could not stand was walking around with dirty underwear, and with the same compulsion she’d put them in a Ziploc bag, so at least they’d been protected from the smell. The plastic folder where she kept the most expensive, the most labor-intensive items, like her clean background check and birth certificate, had melted a bit at the corners, and pulling them out would require tweezers. Her Boy Scout kit, with a lantern, knife, tinderbox, matches, cell phone charger, and tiny dish and utensils set, was still in perfect shape, like her toiletry bag at the bottom of her backpack, where the bath soap, shampoo, pads, razors, a bit of makeup, and even condoms, just in case, were unharmed. She checked the side pockets and saw that her sunglasses that Elisa had saved up to buy for her a few birthdays ago were still there, solid, probably just a few degrees away from turning into a mass of melted plastic; her kit with cuticle clippers and a nail file, psychologically indispensable for any nail-biter; a retractable pen and matching notebook of important bits of information, addresses and phone numbers, though she’d memorized everything like it was still the nineties; the keys to the house that, more out of sentimentality than reason, Nina stubbornly insisted on keeping with the other necessities: a small thing that one could live without but that made her feel like herself and not just a line on a UN Refugee Agency spreadsheet.

Watching the smoke, the flames still alight, as beautiful and all-powerful and angry as fire always is, she had never felt so orphaned, clutching her father’s handwriting, the word hija that always hung around her neck, frozen in the little resin amulet, but the more she thought about it, and the more she saw of that landscape of human devastation and let herself feel the tremor coming from her hand or her chest or maybe her pendant, her aloneness gave way to a warm suspicion that she was protected, as if a blade edged with life and death had managed to cut down the flames before they could touch her—those flames that didn’t just destroy but disfigured, that turned everything into formless ash. Everything, cherished or not, important or not, citizen or not, ended up transformed into bits of carbon and soot, and she wondered how it could be that this contempt had the same smell as the burning lots back home in Maracaibo, those abandoned private lands surrounded by ever-diminishing cinder-block fences, because there was always someone around to steal cinder blocks to build a little house so their family wouldn’t have to put up with the smell. The smell of all the garbage that people would toss over the failing walls, to burn it on the rich people’s lots when the trash collection stopped. But soggy or burnt, in the end garbage all smelled the same, whether it came from poor people or rich people or the corner restaurant or the party headquarters of the PSUV or the bathroom of the university Humanities Department—garbage is garbage, Nina thought, and like the stinking lots back in Maracaibo, the Roraima camp was up in flames now, but Roraima wasn’t garbage and they weren’t garbage, they weren’t garbage, they weren’t garbage. Yet even as she thought this, for a few seconds she let herself be carried away by the horrible idea that the charred, foul-smelling air was simply their own wake, that they’d brought some penetrating odor with them, now intrinsic to their sweaty bodies, which had arrived, hungry and scared, without invitation; and maybe, by lighting up their improvised camp at the mouth of the border, the people who wanted them gone could incinerate the rot, this rot that they—this improbable throng of people to which she now belonged, a diseased horde that cried out in Spanish for food and shelter and the UN and Operação Acolhida—had brought with them.


***


Time has grown hazy for Raúl, ruin that he’s become, among the ruins of his city. If days still exist, he doesn’t notice them going by anymore. He pursues night, looking for a darkness that’s never complete. A story in the margins of the story, he lives in an elastic present, a dictatorship of the gerund. If it weren’t for Vicente, his roommate, or cellmate, bringing the news, he would have already lost his mind, though he doesn’t know if that’s possible: to go insane is the privilege of those who still have time.

He knows he’s still called Raúl, though in this new lexicon of his, the name sounds like someone else’s, like the words yesterday, tomorrow, before, or after—now that everything is a still, a during, a meanwhile. Despite it all, he can’t say he minds this new place. He has the patience of someone who knows one ought to make the effort to adjust to new laws, however different they are; to those nebulous moral codes; to the condescension they imply, always reminding him how few his options are. He’s felt lost since the first second he set foot in this strange land that is death, but he knows that’s how all journeys like this are—untimely and with no return ticket.

And Vicente is here, a now-familiar face in his new world. The guy showed up early one morning, drenched in sweat, despair, and rum, with a dirty plastic bag for a suitcase. No questions, no asks, no explanations. He just forced open the door of the tomb and made himself comfortable in a little corner so naturally that Raúl thought maybe this young man called Vicente Namías—as he would learn after peeking into his bag to see the twenty-six-year-old face smiling up from his ID card—was the real owner of this patch of earth in the cemetery. Maybe Raúl was the intruder, and he’d just stopped here at some point, who knew when, since it was after he’d lost time.

When Vicente woke up, with a hangover and the daylight stinging his eyes, he started to see Raúl sitting there, studying him.

“I didn’t think anyone was here.”

And Raúl, whom nobody saw anymore, whether because they didn’t want to or because they couldn’t, looked at this newcomer and let him look back—a tether that, because Raúl was in need of time and because Vicente wasn’t easy to shock, could only be instantaneous.

“Don’t worry. I think we can help each other. You can stay here, we’ll work it out.”

In Vicente, Raúl glimpsed the possibility of conversation, news, favors. Maybe even a watch.

“You’re not going to ask for something in return?”

Vicente had the face of a good person who’d surely had to do some bad things—a kind of face Raúl knew well. Someone to be pitied rather than feared, because you could see their guilt deepening the telltale trench between their brows.

“A little conversation and we’re even.”

“Cheap.”

Now that they’ve gotten used to each other, Vicente has gone back to being a drunk war correspondent, but a methodical one, who moves through life and brings back the news of the nearly one thousand days that Raúl, though he didn’t feel them passing, has lost to being trapped in the now. Vicente is a veteran of the out-there, coarse and beautiful as a frightened horse, who always ends up with a plate of food because his kind eyes and his ingenuity locate fat wallets, move hearts, and seduce everyone.

Raúl had retired from teaching Spanish literature in the public schools, and from 2003 to 2008 he taught classes at the government-sponsored Misión Robinson. In less dark times, Vicente had learned to read and write there, like so many others, when he was still working as a mechanic and had a boyfriend, who eventually left him because he couldn’t stand always having to sneak around, so now Vicente was left with no boyfriend and no job, because the breakup was so nasty that everyone found out. And fags and mechanics don’t go together, go find a hair salon, they’d said, and don’t come back.

“But I don’t want to think about that now, Prof. You tell me something about you.”

Vicente treats Raúl with a sincere reverence that only truly good teachers get to experience. Raúl tries to explain that he’s lost time, that memory and dreams have merged, that he can’t decipher anything in this foggy mass that surrounds him.

“My yesterdays and tomorrows are all mixed together, everything right here around me.”

“You’re probably just not used to it yet. The same thing happened to my abuela when she crossed over. And she already knew a lot about this side, too. She’s the one who taught me.”

“You don’t see them? You don’t hear this swarm?”

And his good student Vicente says no.

Raúl would like to explain the incredible juxtaposition he’s in, but the only image he can think of is a layered labyrinth, full of people he knows and so many strangers, an overpopulation of mouths yammering at him, and there’s nothing he can do because there’s so much noise and so many faces, pleading, demanding, questioning, that they blur into a formless mass, this terrible buzz that keeps getting louder until he feels like he’s going deaf.

Until now, his strategy has been to push through the knot of people and stay in the static whiteness beyond. A luminous, quiet void where he’s at the mercy of the meanwhile.

“Prof, you know when you’re playing marbles? And you have to focus real hard on the marble because if you don’t, you won’t hit it.”

“Sure.”

“I think you’re missing the marble.”

“And how would you like to play marbles in the pitch black like this?”

“No, no, I’m saying, it’s about getting these people harassing you off your ass.”

“What does one have to do with the other?”

“You have to concentrate on one person, someone you miss. A marble, okay. Do you have kids?”

Raúl doesn’t want to talk about the poor girls. He’s still afraid to think about the ruin he’s already brought upon them. But Vicente has a gift, and before Raúl even notices, he’s already recovering the past tense and telling Vicente about those three generations of women who wear his last name, those laments in three pitches that call him and call him—but he can’t bring himself to reply, because there is no possible answer for his absence.