Elma Correa believes literature begins with a persistent question about women’s experience in a world that, at times, seems to reject their existence. From that seed, her book “Donde Termina el Verano” explores relationships between women, how they face hostility, and whether, in the process, they manage to weave networks of care and community.
“I’m interested in women’s experience in a world that seems to hate us all the time, that seems not to like that we exist,” Correa says in Spanish. “I’m interested in exploring the relationships we have among ourselves.”
One afternoon in April, the writer from Mexicali speaks at a panel about her award-winning novel, recipient of the 2026 Premio Biblioteca Breve. She spoke to an audience of more than 200 people at the Feria Internacional del Libro of the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California
The literary award recognizes unpublished novels in Spanish and seeks to support emerging authors. Throughout its history, it has become a key platform for contemporary Spanish-language literature and a cultural bridge between Spain and Latin America.
Credit: Monserrat Gaytán
Correa’s book explores friendship, guilt and pain along the border between México and the United States, where the childhood of two girls is marked forever.
“It’s a story I love. It’s a story that runs through me,” Correa says, with a smile that reveals two dimples on her tan face. Her abundant hair contrasts with her small, incisive, and bright eyes. She then clarifies: “It’s not my life. Nothing I write has to do with me directly.”
Correa lets out a sharp laugh before speaking frankly about her stories: “I’m a professional liar. It’s one of my favorite activities: to trick and deceive.”
She insists that the themes in her writing matter deeply to her: “The things I’m most interested in in the world are women, girls, my friends.”
Correa strings together her thoughts with the force of a machine gun: “Do we really weave networks and build community and take care of each other? Or not?
When does that happen? How does it happen?
Why does it happen? And why is it so great when it does?
And when it doesn’t happen, why doesn’t it happen?
Why is it so tragic and terrible when it doesn’t happen?”
Then, without breaking the thread, she adds: “That’s what interests me. It torments me. It haunts me and obsesses me. Many of my short stories before this novel were about that, and now this novel simply extends it and expands it through the form of the novel.”
Correa spoke with Arizona Luminaria and says the most important thing about “Donde Termina el Verano” is the novel itself.
The author has no reservations about speaking about her life, as she considers herself “very talkative,” though she wants readers to understand her novel is not autobiographical.
Correa falls silent, as if arranging her thoughts, then says, “I think there are many things wrong in the world and there are structures that prevent all of us who are not white heterosexual men from moving forward even a square in the monopoly (the game) of life.”
“I believe that women and dissidents and racialized people, and in border/transborder contexts, migrants — all of us who fall into those categories — have historically been subordinated. All of that is always part of my discourse because I truly believe it.”
Credit: Monserrat Gaytán
Correa is fascinated by the fact that the setting of her novel is the Alamitos neighborhood, the place where she grew up, a working-class, dusty neighborhood on the outskirts of Mexicali.
“Pure ‘ABC Barrio Cadáver,’ that’s my zip code,” she says with a laugh, referring to the cultural slang of neighborhood cholos. She recalls the graffiti with those phrases on the walls of her childhood.
“I love that Alamitos has reached so far, I never would have imagined it, but I also find it beautiful that people are now reading about that neighborhood in Spain or Argentina, or even in other parts of México,” she says.
The novel unfolds in that neighborhood of workers and farm laborers who cross the border every day for jobs and return with money to pay their bills. It is a place of hunger, where Romani families, American preachers and volunteer nurses coexist as they try to help their communities.
The story follows Aimé, but also Elisa, her best friend. Two 12-year-old girls growing up.
“It’s a novel that talks about friendship between girls, about how we face this terrible world we’ve been given, and it talks about the North, it talks about the border,” Correa says.
The novel, she says, carries an “interwoven soundtrack” of corridos by men, those of “old potbellied men who used to go out to drink beer in the neighborhood.” The music she heard as a child.
“I hated it, because I thought I was very special, I thought I had to have been born in London or Barcelona,” she recalls with a laugh. “But when I grew up and matured and understood, now no one can make me stop listening to those corridos belonging to Mr. Potbelly.”
With a blend of conviction and lightness, she says: “I think it’s a story that, if people give themselves the chance to read it, resonates beyond being a purely local story, because it speaks to human things about how we relate to each other or react to certain things.”
She says that “at some point” the book will be translated into English. And she adds, laughing: “Also, it’s a novel that has kittens.”
Why kittens?
“Well, you’ll have to read it — if I tell you, it’s a big spoiler.”
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