Diablo Guardián

Xavier Velasco

3 ideas

1. Teenage runaway steals family dollars, hustles New York

   Violetta, a fifteen-year-old from a Mexico City family, steals the dollars her parents amassed through charity fraud and makes her way to New York, a journey that involves companions and an illegal border crossing. There she burns through the money pretending to be rich, then survives by hustling, conning men and selling sex, and later tells the saga in slangy first person to Pig, a failed writer in Mexico. She tells it as an adventure rather than as victimhood.

2. Stolen dollars and inherited American aspiration

   The parents' dollars, gathered through a charity fraud, tie the family's status to a foreign currency and an American dream. By stealing them, Violetta carries that aspiration forward and spends it in the country the currency points to. Her flight extends her family's values, including the hypocrisy behind their wealth.

3. Violetta's storytelling as seduction of Pig

   Violetta's fast, Spanglish, slang-heavy telling of her story is a large part of her power, and it captivates Pig, the failed writer who hears it. By narrating her degradation as a picaresque performance, she shapes how she is seen. Pig's role in turning her recorded account into writing, though, means control of the narrative and of their relationship is shared rather than hers alone.

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