Malena, Flaca, Romina, Paz, and Anita are the five queer women whose personal revolutions intermingle with the dictatorship of 1970s Uruguay on the pages of Carolina de Robertis’s Cantoras. Set in the remote beach town of Cabo Polonio where the protagonists are vacationing together, they find themselves feeling at home in each other company and letting their guard’s down away from the harsh government control in Montevideo where they reside.
The book spans more than three decades, following the women as they continue to go back and forth between Montevideo and Cabo Polonio, where they eventually pool their money to buy a small beach shack. While the dictatorship eventually falls, their haven on the beach continues to stand — a metaphor for their enduring, familial love for one another. Although each character suffers great losses (Warning: There are descriptions of sexual violence in this book), de Robertis expertly makes space for both tragedy and empowering joy as the women learn to lead their most authentic lives under difficult — and sometimes nearly impossible — conditions.
The novel’s title, Cantoras (meaning a woman who sings), is a reference to the only language the women had to express their sexual orientation at the time, as our modern vocabulary did not yet exist for them. Even before the dictatorship took hold of Uruguay in 1973, the country shunned people who did not conform to heteronormative life paths. Although the five characters in this novel are fictional, de Robertis interviewed queer women who lived at the time to create the stories and personalities that she skillfully weaves together. De Robertis’s writing flows elegantly in and out of each woman’s narrative and feels a bit like a song sung in commemoration.