image copyrightSarel Müün
More than once little Elma Áurea sneaked away to the other side of the border.
With a dollar in her pocket and without telling anyone, she would occasionally walk alone from Mexicali, in Mexico, to the American city of Caléxico, during those times when she was bored.
Since she knew that they were not going to give her permission, she looked for the right moment to go and come back as quickly as she could, after buying some trinket or sweets on the other side of the border that she secretly enjoyed.
That was an exciting adventure for her that now, as an adult, she remembers in the kitchen of her home in Mexicali, in the northwest of Mexico, during a video call.
Despite the harsh criticism he launches against misogyny, racism and exclusion in a violent society, he laughs a lot every time he answers a question, as if bullets were no longer coming in, as if, aware of the evils of the world, he faced the demons of the Earth with a huge smile.
"We have to laugh at all this, we're not going to start crying, right?" says Elma Correa, the writer who recently won the prestigious Biblioteca Breve 2026 Prize for her book "Where summer ends", a novel about two friends who live a traumatic experience and meet again 20 years later.
Along with the writer Elena Poniatowska, she is the second Mexican to receive this award.
Although it is a fictional story, the setting where the action of the novel takes place reflects the Mexicali where Correa grew up and where he continues to live.
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The same northern city in the state of Baja California where she coordinates an international meeting of writers and manages the @habitaciones_propos project, a virtual community where women from around the world share photos to show what the space where they work is like.
Doctor in Society, Space and Power, master in Sociocultural Studies and graduate in Latin American Language and Literature, Correa has published the short story books "Let it seem like an accident", "Mentiras que no te conté", "Llorar de fiesta", "Lo simple", "La novia del león", and the novel "Where summer ends".
The Mexican writer will participate in the twelfth edition of the Hay Festival Arequipa 2026, which will be held from November 5 to 8, 2026 in the city of Arequipa, Peru.
We talked with her about what it's like to live next to the border with the United States, her work, what inspires her, and how she manages to navigate the vicissitudes of life with such good humor.
Image source, Courtesy Elma Correa
Many years ago I was in Mexicali and I remember that there were parts of the wall where people could still meet to talk, something that is unthinkable today.
Of course, now it is electrified and it is not just one wall, it is several walls next to each other
You were born on the border with California, literally next to the wall.
Next door, my house was two blocks away, in the Los Alamitos neighborhood. I grew up seeing the wall and for us it was the most natural thing in the world. Later I learned that it was a super violent thing to have the landscape hurt in that way. And like any child, I thought that was the way the world was because I didn't know that I was a cross-border northerner in Mexico.
It was probably normal for you to cross the border from one side to the other.
Yes. When we were little, my mother, who had three jobs, sent me and my sisters to the House of Culture so that we wouldn't be alone in the house.
There I was in theater classes, in painting; My sisters went to dance, and we learned a little about everything. In that place there was a small library and I read a lot, a lot, because in Mexicali until recently there were no bookstores or anything.
From the Cultural Center to the border crossing it is just two blocks on foot. So, as a child I could cross alone.
Alone? And how did you do it?
Walking. I had a local passport - that's what it was called before the visa - with which you could enter and leave. So, when I was waiting for my sisters and I was bored, I would walk to the border crossing and get to the first or second street of Calexico, on the other side, where all the little Chinese and Korean stores were, and I would buy a candy or a toy for less than US$1.
It wasn't dangerous, it wasn't scary, not at all. On the contrary, it was exciting to escape without telling anyone what I was going to do.
Image source, AFP via Getty Images
So, you were four sisters and your mother was rarely at home because she worked a lot.
In the morning my mother taught classes, in the afternoon she studied to become a professional, and at night she went to a horrible shift at the hospital to work all night as a nurse.
My mom had dinner ready for us when we returned from the House of Culture every day and, to try to spend quality time with us, she would put us to bed and read to us a lot, she would read to us whatever she had on hand, anything.
For me the important thing was the moment... how his face moved, his micro-expressions, all of that gave me a lot of emotion and I learned to read at a very young age, before entering school.
What did you discover in the books?
A better life than mine. We grew up without class privileges. Right now I have three jobs to make ends meet. And at that time the books were better than what was around me and since my older sisters watched television, I immersed myself in books.
Let's talk about what it's like to live next to the border. Is it very different from living in other parts of Mexico?
I believe that geography determines us. We are a desert with heat that reaches more than 50 degrees in the summer and that makes us people be a certain way, for better or worse.
There are people who get angry all the time and fight a lot in the summer, but at the same time there is the idea that those who live here are determined people, people who dominate the wild nature. Look at Mexicali's motto: "The city that captured the sun"... There's something there, right?
We are also a tremendously multicultural place. Who were the first settlers here? The Chinese, Chinese migrants who came from the United States.
There is also a small group of native people, the Cucapá, and there are people from all parts of Mexico, from all the places you can imagine, plus all the Central American migration that has come here.
Including those deported.
And the deportees who end up here as a floating population. There is also a Japanese community and in certain parts of Baja California there are Russian people. Many Haitians have also arrived and recently, with the war in Ukraine, Ukrainians have also arrived. Imagine the sounds of this city, you hear a great diversity of accents, sounds, words... like a wonderful Babel.
And at the same time, we are a city with a tremendous colonial heritage - as in the rest of Mexico and Latin America - because we are deeply racist, classist and even xenophobic in some cases. It's tremendous how things coexist and coexist here, and it's very interesting to explore in literary terms.
Imagine that the typical food of Mexicali is Chinese food. Others have mole, pozole, aguachiles and we have Chinese food.
And how do you live it? What is it like to be in the middle of that coexistence of cultures in the same place?
At first you don't think about it, you simply embrace it because it is what it is. For some people it may be strange, but in reality, all places have their peculiarities. There are imaginaries about the north and the border that reinforce stereotypes and maintain many prejudices, but I tell you, we are common people.
There are probably many cross-border cultures in Mexico, not just one big cross-border culture, right?
Of course, it is not the same to be the northern border with the United States as the southern border in Chiapas with Guatemala, because they are two opposite poles, two very different universes.
And on the northern border, it is not the same to be a border with Texas, as it is with New Mexico or with California. There are many cross-border cultures and many ways of inhabiting the border and cross-border.
My childhood experience of going back and forth to buy a toy as if nothing had happened is a particular cross-border experience. Some academics say that for something or someone to be cross-border they must live on the other side.
I go from time to time, but I don't live in the United States, I don't make a life in the United States. The same thing happens to people who cross every day to school or cross every day to work. They come and go, but they don't live on the other side.
So, many times it is considered cross-border to make a life between both countries, but it seems to me that all our experiences are cross-border, just on different levels.
When did you start writing?
At the faculty. I wanted to read and I wanted to be left alone, and so, the closest thing I found to that was the School of Letters. It turns out that at school, there was a thing with manes. Who was the school poet? A man Who was the school narrator? A man Who was the editor of the magazine? A man Who coordinated the cultural event? A man and his friends.
And the girls were like those guys' girlfriends and everything seemed super normal. I had great teachers and everything, but there is a kind of historical debt, right? We read almost exclusively men and for me that was shocking.
Maybe because you lived on the border you had a different way of seeing things.
With my experience as a cross-border girl, I was much more accustomed to the gringo short story, that is, I read Carver first than Cortázar... I liked the "hemingweyllazo": subject, verb, predicate, subject, verb, predicate. And suddenly I came to these baroque constructions, full of subordinate clauses and I thought: how strange? Why do they like to write like that?
The first time I was at an event organized by the faculty, I listened to them and my jaw dropped because they were so bad. Then I knew I could do better than them. The thing is that I am not a good person, I am always moved by the lowest feelings, and that is how I started writing. I started writing simply because what they did seemed horrible to me.
Would you say that your books are related to what is known as northern literature or border literature?
When I started writing, northern literature or border literature made me uncomfortable, I couldn't stand it. I didn't want to be associated with that label. And then I became obsessed with making sure my texts were not from the border, even though I was from the north.
My first published texts - please let no one ever read them - were like narrators with a super neutral voice, a Spanish with neutral idiolects, that is to say, nothing that sounded like northern Mexican, no Spanglish, no "parquéate", no "wacha para siempre". And that was part of my normal life, that's how I talk, but I denied it because I aspired to something like a universality.
image source, Courtesy
Why couldn't you stand frontier literature?
Mexico is a centralized country, as if everything happened in the capital and the rest were places where there is no civilization, as if the further you get from Mexico City, the more bestial and savage you become.
So there is an imaginary about the Mexican north that has to do with people who are very angry, very brutal, which is associated with organized crime, drug trafficking, human trafficking and with a lot of stereotypes and prejudices. And much of the literature from the north and the border, which was a boom in the 90s and 2000s, talks about that.
All those who wrote were men of a certain age and I thought, what is this? No, I don't want to be associated with them, even though their books are perfectly written.
You wanted to do something different.
I did not identify in that literature my north, nor my desert, nor my border. There is a very great exoticization about what is northern and when I grew up I realized that I rejected that representation.
I wanted to read about the experience of being a young woman, I wanted to read about normal people who make a living like anyone else. And then I started writing about it, but I had to go through a process of understanding and understanding.
I had to think that exoticization and stereotyping exist and do not depend on me. So I said: 'I'm going to write what I want and do what I want and talk about my experience of being a cross-border northern morra in a country as prejudiced and centralized as Mexico.'
And let them burst, let them think what they want! And if they like it and if they don't like it, then no way.
In that sense you freed yourself
I freed myself, and when I freed myself from other people's opinions, I began to write much more naturally and honestly, and it turned out that I was interested in the north and that I was interested in the border and my stories began to be filled with references and scenarios that I know very well and that I was able to describe.
I don't write thinking about what my identity is or what the identity of my writing is. When I write, I just write and tell stories. Where those stories take place or what happens to the characters in those stories will have to do with the need of the story. It can happen in the north, on the border, or anywhere else.
In that process you also reconciled with your city, with Mexicali
I had, thanks to Diosita, my first deconstruction, which was feminist, which is like an eternal work in progress because you have to unlearn a lot of things. But I also had a kind of territorial, geographical deconstruction.
When I was a teenager, I hated Mexicali with all my soul, I abhorred this place. I had many hopes, but I was locked in this hole. And it is not a metaphor: we are I don't know how many meters below sea level in a desert in the middle of mountains.
Nothing happened here, it was like a kind of paved ranch. It was like a constant feeling of floating in the middle of dark nowhere. I thought that the stork had made a mistake, that I should have been born in Barcelona, New York, London.
And I had to go through a process in which I understood how geographies determine us and how my life in Mexicali is what makes me the person I am.
Accepting that and embracing it also changed my perspective. I reconciled with the city and I reconciled with my condition as a cross-border northerner in Mexico.
image copyrightBeatriz Limón
A cross-border northerner who likes to write about friendship in a hostile world. Why friendship?
I write about friendship because I am obsessed with my friends and because I believe in the idea of the collective, the community, and I believe that affection will save us in this cruel, bloody and hard world.
And I also write about friendship because I believe that there are other forms of affection that we should privilege, beyond romantic love. Being a girl, cis, straight, the more I get involved with men of my generation, the more I reject them, and the more I love my friends.
It seems to me that the idea of community is very important and I think it is present in my books. Friendship always appears in one way or another, as a hope in the midst of everything we have to go through.
It's kind of cheesy, if you want, right? Maybe it is, maybe it's naive, but I believe it! Friends are what sustains me. I think it's better to have fewer boyfriends and more friends. We must decentralize the masters of lives in general.
How has not being a white man, as you say, with class privileges affected you in your daily life?
In the material conditions of existence, in the worries of how to make ends meet, how to pay the bills. Plus, you want to write, so I think I've learned to navigate a survival strategy; I learned to face prejudice, misogyny, classism, racism. All of this has real effects in practical life.
If I were a man, my arrival in literature would have been different. Because? Well, because the world is theirs, because the canon is masculine, and because if I had class privileges, my life would be simpler, because living in capitalism is a horrible thing.
I hope things settle down financially so I have more time. What does money buy? Time to do what you want. Time is very important because my writing moments are very few.
image source, Pilar Álvarez
What do you do, besides writing?
I'm a teacher, I do freelance work - I receive everything I get; I give workshops, do revisions, corrections, develop content, whatever, and I have an office job.
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