Bad Girls

DEBUT In 1990s Córdoba, Argentina, a group of trans sex workers are doing their nightly rounds in Sarmiento Park when 178-year-old leader Auntie Encarna discovers a barely alive baby boy and persuades the others to take him in. Soon, he’s a part of the vibrant surrogate family gathering at Auntie’s Pink House. Through deft portraiture, family member Camila conveys the story of this tough, tightly bound group in language at once grittily realistic, lushly fantastical, and entirely moving. There’s a Deaf and mute woman, who’s gradually becoming a bird; an authoritative healer; the remarkable Auntie Ecarna; the Headless Man, a refugee from war and her one true love; and Camila herself, the anchor of the narrative, who’s a college student by day after having escaped an abusive family and her hometown’s driving poverty. Jointly, their lives tell the story of violence against trans women.