Genocide stains all corners of human history, defiling victims, perpetrators, and witnesses, but there was not a word for it until 1944. Leopoldo Gout’s novel Piñata shows there does not need to be a name for the sin for it to harm history and culture.

Piñata is the story of Carmen Sanchez, her two daughters, Izel and Luna, and a disastrous work trip to Carmen’s home country of Mexico. Carmen is back in her ancestral home of Tulancino, in the Mexican state of Hildalgo, where she oversees a project to convert an ancient Catholic abbey to a modern, glittering hotel for the summer. The abbey goes back to the pre-Columbia residents of the region, the Nahua, and was taken over by the church to supplant the native religion.

This oppression of the Nahua’s culture is the backbone of the novel. Gout takes the reader through a history of blood, with the titular Piñata being a symbol of the violence committed against the Nahua by priests and soldiers to extinguish their religion and bring them into the Lord’s fold. The piñata of today comes in any number of shapes, from the traditional seven-pointed star to Minecraft characters, but the roots of the tradition started in Europe, with possible Chinese influences, and was carried over to the New World where the indigenous of Mexico used the practice, blindfold and all, as a form of offering at the feet of their gods. In Gout’s novel, the desecration of these piñatas centuries past has consequences in the modern day.

There are many themes running through this work that serve to enrich the experience and bring to the surface the horror being described. Gout explores how misogyny is seemingly built into the culture of rural Mexico as established by the disrespect Carmen experiences as a woman in charge of a construction site to the missing posters littering the city, all showing the face of a woman made victim to the femicide rampant in the nation. Juxtaposition plays a large role, with Carmen’s daughters portraying the difference between embracing your cultural background, as the younger Luna displays by learning the language, speaking to all she can from market vendors to strangers on the street, while the older Izel, a typical if somewhat cliché American teenager, simply stares at her phone and wishes she were back with her friends for the summer.

Described as A Head Full of Ghosts meets Mexican Gothic, Piñata does a fantastic job of digging into the Aztec religion to display the horrors of colonialism, racism, cultural extermination, and a specifically gruesome form of possession. If there were a drawback, the ending rushes quicker than it should, but the experience is still very much worthwhile.