Gilmer Mesa’s La cuadra as Narco Decameron

Abstract

Gilmer Mesa’s novel La cuadra (2016) constitutes a painful “insider” testimony into how working-class Medellín neighborhoods were transformed into breeding grounds for hitmen in the 1980s. The narrator’s older brother joined the gang of the infamous Prisco brothers, who served as lieutenants in Pablo Escobar’s armies of sicarios. It is his brief life and that of other teenage cuadra friends that inhabit Mesa’s violent narrative universe. This essay compares Mesa’s novel to Bocaccio’s The Decameron in that both texts present an intricate mosaic of a society in-the-making and un-making. Transitions to a new historical reality punctuate both texts, wherein La cuadra shocks both the readers and its very protagonists when teenage horseplay turns to rape and murder. Likewise, the Black Plague in The Decameron, the narrative frame for its one hundred tales, is replaced with a narco epidemic which contaminates and corrupts neighborhoods, families, and individuals alike, putting their morality and allegiances to test.