"To what lengths is this group of women willing to go to get some sort of control": A Conversation with Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro on Bochica
- Brittany Torres Rivera
- Sep 5
- 9 min read
Bochica by Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro | ISBN: 9781668062579 | Atria/Primero Sueño Press | May 2025
“Antonia was surprised to feel an odd flash of excitement washing over her. Could she reinstate the equilibrium and fulfill the destiny Estela was too weak to realize? Finally have a role in this town besides babysitting girls at the escuela? . . . But what would I owe the house in exchange for my freedom?”
—Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro, Bochica
Journalist Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro’s debut novel Bochica follows Antonia, a young woman whose parents built a house on sacred land to protect it, as she investigates the hauntings of her past: her mother’s death, the house now transformed into a hotel, and the spirits that bind them together and bind Antonia to a fate she didn’t know was hers. Rife with commentary about colonialism, women, ambition, and power, this debut novel draws from Colombian history to tell a story whose themes are ever relevant today.
Brittany Torres Rivera (BTR): Can you talk about how you approached the editorial process with Bochica and how similar or different that was from working on a piece of journalism? Are there things that you brought from your professional experience into this new genre?
Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro (CFC): As a journalist, I have to research a lot and read a lot. That’s the skill that I used the most for Bochica because it's not a historical fiction novel, but I did have to do a lot of research so the reader has a backdrop of what was going on in Colombia in the 1930s.
When you go to journalism school, you also have really tight deadlines. You have to create things overnight and you have to be used to working under pressure, which is something that really helps in publishing We authors, have deadlines, but sometimes we don't know how to manage our time because they tell us, You can turn this in in two months and you're like, This is great, of course I'm gonna have time, but then the day comes and you're like, Oh my god, I still I have, a hundred pages left. So being able to work under that pressure of looming deadlines and knowing how to balance my time doing other things, that's something that I brought from my experience as a journalist.
Being able to handle critique is also a key one. Writing is such a personal thing and you put so much of yourself on the page, whether that's intentional or not. It's hard because you want to be the kind of person who gets things right the first time around. But even established writers and people who are super successful are still getting feedback, they still have to do edits, they still have to improve. I allow myself to feel whatever it is that I'm feeling and then I move on. It's hard getting feedback, but at the end of the day it's for the best and it's still a negotiation. It's not like the editor is telling you, You have to do this, or else we won't publish the book. It's more of a dialogue; Maybe what you're telling me is right, there's something wrong with the book. But maybe the thing that you're suggesting is not the way that I want to go about it. And then we start a conversation.
BTR: I appreciate that perspective. Sometimes the solution the editor is offering is not the right one for the book. Could you talk about a big piece of feedback that you had to process or some suggestion that ended up not being the right suggestion for this book?
CFC: A big one was Antonia's mother’s journals. They weren't there when we sold the book, and we were on the last round of developmental edits and there were things we still wanted to address, but we didn't know how to go about it. I think we had like a month left to do line edits and then it was up to production. I came up with the idea and then I was like, Maybe I shot myself in the foot, because my editor was like, Yes, that's a great idea, but you're going to have to do it in like five days. So it was really hard. I want to do this, I know it's the best thing that I can do for the book right now, but I only have a month to come up with these journal entries, and not only come up with them, but integrate them into the story. It was a different voice, a different style, and it was hard, but in hindsight, those are my favorite parts in the book.
BTR: Speaking of those journals, Antonia has a reputation as the daughter of Estela and as an educated and unmarried woman, which is frowned upon in the story. People like Madre Asuncion make her aware that her reputation needs to be saved. On the other side of that, Estela is motivated by her own power; She tried to have someone else inherit the role of Lideresa when she questioned her daughter's ability to take that on. Can you talk a little bit about the complex relationships here between reputation, legacy, and power in this novel?
CFC: Whenever people talk about Bochica, it's a Gothic horror book. But at its core, I think it's more about women trying to navigate the world a hundred years ago, and in a very Catholic and conservative society like Colombia.
Antonia doesn't really grow up Catholic. Her mom has these views about the world that may or may not resonate with everyone else. And her father goes with whatever her mom does, he’s sort of worshiping her. So Antonia gets kicked out of Catholic school because of her mother's beliefs, and then she is reluctantly drawn back into this world because she needs a job that helps her pay bills because her dad is sick. She's navigating these spaces as a woman who's ahead of her time and has a different view of the world. She’s also resentful of any form of religion, whether that is the cult her mom was part of or religion and how it treats women. She’s navigating these spaces while trying to gain some sort of control over herself and her life. And of course, that's not an easy thing. We not only see that through Antonia, but also through her mother and through Doña Pereira, who is one of the antagonists of the story. But Doña Pereira is also a victim of this same system, she's also trying to find control of herself and of her life, trying to gain some sort of power, which is how the cult came to be in the first place: To what lengths is this group of women willing to go to get some sort of control when women had everything but control and autonomy? I wanted to explore that and how horrific it is to not have control over yourself, over your life, which is the most basic thing a person can have.
BTR: That definitely comes across, even in the way that Antonia thinks about her life; Her perspective is disenfranchised, but she has this desire to move up. Antonia, Alejandro, and León all bear the weight of their mother's actions to strikingly different outcomes. This implies a matriarchal structure, but Antonia is constantly railing against the limitations imposed upon her by a patriarchal society. So, can you describe the hard and soft power of men and women in 1930s Colombia and the different spheres, whether legal, social, or spiritual, in which these powers are wielded?
CFC: Women’s power was pretty much nonnonexistent, at least in Colombia. We didn't have any women in any sort of position of power in politics or in society. Women weren't even allowed to go to university. Antonia complains about it a lot throughout the book. It's like you were meant to be a daughter, a wife, and if you weren't lucky enough to secure your husband, then maybe you became a nun and that was it. You were an object that people would use. So women were trying to find this basis where they could gain some sort of control and that's where the cult came. In El salto del Tequendama, there was a lot of talk about witchcraft, and I found a lot of registries of people saying that there were women that came in the witching hours and locals tried to get rid of them because it was really bad for the hotel’s reputation. The hotel was gaining a lot of importance around the country. So that's how the cult came to be for me; there needed to be a device for me to start this conversation about women trying to find these spaces where they could feel some sort of control over anything.
With men in the book, I feel like they are victims. We see it with León, with how the book ends especially, and I didn't do it intentionally. With Alejandro, I wanted Antonia to have someone she could trust and someone who knew more than she did. Because you really don't know if she's seeing things, remembering things, if it's all in her head. Doña Pereira was the woman in power in that family. But that was not really something that happened in Colombia. It was always a man taking charge of everything, so I needed León to be her puppet. Everyone knew she was in control, but he was the face of the family. I think the men are a response to what I needed for these women, and telling their story more than it was me trying to make them the victims.
BTR: I was really intrigued by the colonial overtones in Estela and Ricardo’s treatment of the Muiscas’ land. Antonia’s parents have this combination of good intentions and ambition (because Estela admits that she wanted that power) that leads them to take land that does not belong to them. In the end, Antonia has to destroy the symbol of that action, the house, to restore order. We often see the Spanish or the English depicted as colonizers. Can you talk about the decision to make Colombians themselves the perpetrators of colonialism within their country?
CFC: In Latin America, we believe that we've been colonized, but that we're not necessarily colonizers. I feel like colonialism is very much a modern thing, it still happens with us, and it happens with these places that are not meant to be protected, invaded, or saved in some sort of way. The house is very much real. I made the story up, but a lot of the things are real. There was this architect who wanted to build a house for his wife, and they ended up not living there. Then it became a hotel, this very touristic place and a place for aristocrats in Colombia in the 1940s and 1950s until it was shut down and abandoned in the late 1950s.
People want to live outside of cities and take land that has some sort of significance for indigenous cultures. And people don't acknowledge that, they just see it as a beautiful place. But what is that beautiful place? Is it hiding a legacy of bloodshed? There's a point in the book where I say something like, The beauty is a good disguise for bad things. And it is. We make up excuses like, This place needs saving or restoring or it needs to be taken care of. Which is why the book ends the way it ends. People read the ending and they're like, But the house is still there! And I’m like, Maybe it shouldn't be.
Antonia realizes that, even though Estela wanted to protect the place, it was almost like an altar to herself, so it's disrespectful. That’s something I want people to take away from the book. It's not that the place itself was haunted necessarily. It was us who haunted the place and who have been haunting places that should have been left alone. When she burns down the house, you see this thing that's forming in the flames like a monster being killed off. That's the monster of colonization. That's what I wanted the book to end on.
Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro is a Colombian author of genre bending speculative fiction based in Bogotá, Colombia. She is the author of Bochica, a Latin American gothic horror novel pitched as Mexican Gothic meets The Shining. She’s always been passionate about stories, whether her own, fictional or not, or those that belong to others. Her work is fueled by curiosity, her love of history and the supernatural, and the desire to give voice to traditionally marginalized perspectives. When she’s not writing, she can be found sipping black coffee, puzzling, and listening to audiobooks. Find out more at CarolinaFlorezAuthor.com.
Brittany Torres Rivera is a bilingual, Puerto Rican writer. She graduated from Florida International University with a BA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. Brittany is an alumna of the Fulbright Program and currently works as an Editorial and Administrative Assistant at Graywolf Press.