Woman of the Old Roads

Short stories about the people who lived in the town of Tocache, Peru, when the cocaine cartels set up camp and the Peruvian government, under foreign pressure, set out to stop them.

The women in Juan Rodriguez Perez’s narrative–mothers, wise old women, neighbors, and subjects of love and desire–must face the two biggest problems that plagued the San Martín Region in Peru: armed subversion and drug trafficking. Set in a small town in the jungle, a Peruvian version of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, these are authentic stories that submerge the reader in nostalgia, developing sometimes bloodily and other times as if by destiny. There is no happy ending, only development within a period of history still hard to understand.