Lost Children Archive I: What should I say about this book? It has so many things …

I am really enjoying reading this book. I find it very interesting, and the story captured me since the beginning. However, while I like the book and the story it tells, I have not decided what to write about in this blog. There are so many topics inside this book, that I don’t really know how to organize them into a coherent blogpost.

One obvious topic that the book mentions is the political environment of the US and the terribly sad stories of the thousands of children who try to cross the Mexico-US border illegally. These stories are well-known for many of us. Yet, the perception that the book offers, is maybe, more humane than the political commercialized version we are used to see at the TV. The wife, who is the one that tells the story, has herself a particular concern on how to document the realities of these forgotten children who are in search of a refuge in the US. She does not want to use these children’s testimonies as a political flag or a commodity to sell in the media in order to create the audience’s pity.

Other topic I found recurrent is the problems that the marriage faces during their travel from New York to Arizona. It is kind of curious how the wife found different circumstances and events in order to compare what is happening to her and to her marriage. For instance, we found her making connections between her marital crisis and the sentences she reads in her strange books. She compares her marriage with songs, dance choreographies, and I would even say with landscapes. It’s interesting but also sad how the story changes from being a ‘happy’ couple to a more ‘frustrated marriage’. She is lost, captive in his husband’s project, and while she ended fighting for her own project, she is still complying with her husband in the decision to travel with him. She is really in love, I would say, but she is also very encabronada about the situation. I like her character. She is both, strong and weak. I like the way she tells her own story, how she manages for going from very sophisticated literature ideas to simple and random events about her children. I like her prose.

Other fascinating topic of this book is childhood, and the particular way in which the mother represents this stage of life for her own children. I felt bad for myself, at the beginning, when I saw that these two siblings have more adventurous lives that I had when I was a child. There a variety of books that these children have read, or maybe know about. They seem to have a very interesting and unique musical taste. Their comments and arguments are sometimes more accurate or compelling of what I admit thinking in my head. Are these children real? I mean, are there really children that can express their ideas, dreams and opinions in the way these children can?  Anyway, I really admire these two little characters and I think this is something that caught my attention because of the way in which childhood is represented here in comparison with the childhood of Antonio in Bless Me, Ultima; or of Esperanza in The House on Mango Streets; even of Piri in Down These Mean Streets. I don’t know, maybe the difference relies in the fact that, in this book, we are told about the children since their mother’s perspective; while the other stories are told by the children themselves.

Random fact: I found that the title of the book is Lost Children Archive in the English version. However, in the Spanish version, the title is Desierto Sonoro. Why would you think that the author decided to change the title for the two versions? What does the title mean for each version?  Is this a kink?

Lost Children Archive I

lost-children-archiveHow to write about the migrant experience today? More particularly, how to write about the current crisis at the US/Mexico border? The multiple forms of violence compelling continued migration north, especially from Central America; the deliberate collapse of the asylum system and the rule of law; the separation of children from families amid the institution of a system of what are effectively concentration camps operated by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. As the Covid-19 pandemic grips us, these stories may be fading from consciousness, but immigration to the USA has long been denounced via the rhetoric of disease and contamination. And Trump is fond of referring to immigrants and people of color in terms of “infestation”, just as he wants to insist that Covid-19, “the Chinese virus,” comes from beyond US borders.

Earlier this year, this question of who and how to write about migration and the borderlands flared into a brief but intense controversy around Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt, a novel that was harshly criticized on the grounds that it commodified and exoticized migrant trauma for an Anglo audience. One text repeatedly put forward by that book’s critics as offering a better approach to representing the border crisis and its ramifications was Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, which in fact puts the problem at center stage.

Luiselli’s novel is in some ways the inverse to Cummins’s. Though its narrative focuses similarly on a mother and her child, a fractured family making its way to the border, here the journey starts in the north, rather than the south, and the fracture is psychological or affective, rather than the very literal rupture with which American Dirt spectacularly opens. Here the family are (so far, at least) physically together: a husband and wife, with a child each that they bring from previous relationships. And together they are embarked on a trip from New York to the US Southwest. But whether they will remain together once the trip is over is uncertain, perhaps unlikely. Though the parents are both engaged in recording sounds (as either documentarians or documentarists; the difference seems both ineffable and yet somehow absolute), each has their own project, their own goal in mind. He is in search of the traces of the last Native Americans to surrender to the US state, the Apache band led by the semi-mythical Geronimo. She has taken on a vaguely journalistic mission to investigate the plight of children detained on the border, specifically the two children of a woman with whose legal case she has become involved. And however much the narrator (the first half of the novel is written almost entirely from the mother’s point of view) can reflect on the ways in which these two obsessions overlap, interact, and resonate with each other, she and her husband are barely able to communicate except indirectly, as they try to keep their two young children, aged ten and five, amused and more or less oblivious of the cracks opening up in the cramped atmosphere of the family car. At the same time, she also increasingly realizes that the children, too, are in many ways “strangers, especially when we add them together” (74). Indeed, the entire novel is a meditation on the many possible forms of alienation, the ways in which “the other can suddenly become a stranger” (21), as even those with whom we are most intimately connected become alien to us.

The husband seems to be much more sure of himself and what he is doing, though this may be a consequence of the fact that we have much less access to whatever thoughts and concerns may be preoccupying him. He tells the kids stories about the Apache, confidently if not necessarily reliably (“I don’t know if what my husband is telling them is true” [74]). When they stop somewhere, as they often do, he gets out his recording equipment to capture a soundscape of ambient noise, “collect[ing] sounds that are usually not noticed [. . .]. Maybe the rain falling on this tin roof, some birds if we can, or maybe just insects buzzing” (96). At other times, the four of them listen to the news on the radio, to music, or to audiobooks, notably William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. But for all the assurance with which these narratives are presented, his wife notes that the children “combine the stories, confuse them. They come up with possible endings and counterfactual histories” (75). And, much more (apparently) than her husband, she is led to meditate therefore on the uncertain fate of any story, including (it is implied) the one that is told by Lost Children Archive itself.

When the mother tells us of her worries about her own project, these are surely then indications of concerns about any attempt, including Luiselli’s own, to have some kind of social impact through art. As the narrator says: “How can a radio documentary be useful in helping more undocumented children find asylum?” This she terms a “political concern.” But she goes on, as the narration continues in something like stream of consciousness, to itemize other problems with what we could “politically-committed” art, including the “Aesthetic problem: On the other hand, why should a sound piece, or any other form of storytelling, for that matter, be a means to a specific end? I should know by now that instrumentalism, applied to any art form, is a way of guaranteeing really shitty results.” This then leads her to consider the perhaps even more significant

Ethical problem: And why would I even think that I can or should make art with someone else’s suffering? [. . .] Constant concerns: Cultural appropriation, pissing all over someone else’s toilet seat, who am I to tell this story, micromanaging identity politics, heavy-handedness, am I too angry [. . .]. (79)

Luiselli’s novel steadfastly keeps these issues in view, as if by raising them (and not simply confining them to an “Author’s Note” tacked on at the end, as does Cummins) she may not quite ward them off, but at least warn the reader and invite us to think about our own complicity in the kinds of stories that are told about migration and their effects on others (and surely also ourselves). Hence too, no doubt, the obliqueness of Luiselli’s portrayal of the refugee crisis: we are halfway through what is not a short book, and still a long way from the border.

But we already realize that the borderlands stretch a long way. Space and time in this novel both expand and contract. Just as the narrator’s husband is convinced that the echoes of the nineteenth-century history can be almost materially registered by his recording devices, so Luiselli suggests that the injustice and violence of asylum and immigration policy can and should resonate far beyond their specific geographical limits. As we have been forcefully reminded of the current pandemic: this affects us all.

The lost children archives – Who are the lost children?

I am ending the first part of the Lost Children Archives, but I am still wondering who are the lost children in this book. As far as I am concerned all the characters in this book are kind of “lost children”.

Naturally, she notes that they refer to refugee children, many of whom are missing, as “lost children”. She explains: “These are children who have lost the right to a childhood”. Part of the book is devoted to the story of these missing voices, or more precisely how she can tell the story of these thousands or millions of forgotten voices in order to give sense to this human tragedy. A crucial question that runs through the book is about the legitimacy of telling such a story. Indeed, the narrator, who is a journalist by training, criticizes this “fashion” of sensationalism that is de rigueur in journalism, portraying immigrants as aliens and insisting on the urgency of this crisis. Another question is about who should be the main subjects of her sound documentary. Indeed, at the beginning of the book she starts with the idea of recording the voices of these children in the courtrooms but changes her mind in the will to tell the story of these children who are forgotten because they are lost or missing.

However, this is only an almost minority part of the book, which makes me think that the lost children are not just those refugee children. The children in this peculiar family are also the lost children. Through their questions, their imagination, their maps, the Polaroid camera, the children are trying to make sense of both their family’s crisis and the larger story of thousands of children trying to cross the southwest border of the United States. Although the children’s lives seem to depend on the outcome of their parents’ marriage, they seem to express their agency through a particular understanding of their surroundings. These children are lost in the complexity of the world and their uncertain place in the future of this family on the point of breaking up, even as their parents try to hide this tragedy from them.

Last but not least, as far as the parents are concerned, it is also about lost children. Lost Children Archive begins with the journey not of a refugee child, but of an unhappily married couple. It is difficult to understand the reasons for their love because of the permanent “silence” that reigns in this couple. The parents are also lost children because they seem more concerned about their own feelings and plans than about the fate of their family. The father looked into this Apache project without even telling his wife and without evaluating the concrete possibility of carrying it out. Moreover, throughout the book, the mother is very cold with all the members of the family as if she were disconnected from this reality. It is as if the parents were dreaming of being able to rewrite their whole life again, forgetting that they themselves had forged this reality. Parents are lost, but they are also children because they are locked in their own reality, imagination and dreams.

Lost Child Archive (part i)

So while I haven’t quite finished the first half of Lost Children Archive, I think I am far enough into it that I want to start my blog now. A few things strike me as peculiar about this novel, but I have to say, so far I am thoroughly enjoying it; it may even be my favourite of the term.

The first thing I find peculiar is the fact that none of the main characters are named. We know of Manuela, the woman whose children migrated from Mexico (I think?) but that’s it. The
first-person narrator is the main character in the story. We know her as Mama or Ma. She refers to her children coldly as ‘the boy’ and ‘the girl’—sometimes out the determiner. Only twice does she stray from this: the first time on page 5 to tell us that she refers to her son (stepson) and daughter as ‘boy’ and ‘girl’; the second time on page 16, when she says “…I had a conversation with the mother of one of my daughter’s classmates”. Even then, the narrator isn’t referring to her daughter; she is merely a point of reference for the mother of the classmate. It stuck out like a sore thumb to me and I am waiting to see if at any other point in the narrative this comes to light…and what this means. Is it foregrounding? Is it simply a slip in style?

The other thing I find interesting about this book is the first-person narration. We don’t get to see exactly what the characters are thinking, only the narrator’s opinion or interpretation of their thoughts. We also only see things unfold from the narrator’s point of view and through her participation in the events she describes. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book written in this manner, which is perhaps why I like it so much. In my youth, before computers, I used to write letters—pages upon pages—to my best friend after I moved away. To this day, she has seven
2-inch binders filled with my letters and I too have about the same from her. From time to time I revisit these letters and I get a snapshot, in detail, of what we were doing back then. This novel provides us with sequential snapshots of the events as they unfold, almost like the scenes in a movie. Each scene is titled as if the camera angle changes, giving a slight different perspective of the surroundings, whether it is the children playing ‘Apache games’ with their father, the next chapter is the narrator/ mother, in the same scene, reading up on how to use Boy’s polaroid camera (which for you iGeneration folks was a camera that developed it’s own film…back before photos turned up instantly on a cellphone… ???? ).

No song specifically comes to mind so far in reading this book, except that they are on a road trip which seems to never end. I love road trips and I usually revert back to my high school days, when I used to write all my letters, and make playlists which provide us for hours (or days) of endless music. One of the best road trip songs, in my opinion, is Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On A Prayer”. The words almost apply to what our world is going through. So I am making it my blog song. I hope everyone is well and staying healthy.

 

The House on Mango Street

mango-streetDozens of characters flit through the pages of Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street. Alicia, for instance, who “is young and smart and studies for the first time at the university”; but her mother has died and so she has “inherited her mama’s rolling pin and sleepiness” as she has to get up early and look after the family, before taking “two trains and a bus” to study because “she doesn’t want to spend her whole life in a factory or behind a rolling pin” (30-1). Or Elenita, “witch woman,” who earns a few extra dollars by telling fortunes in her kitchen where “the top of the refrigerator [is] busy with holy candles” (62, 63). Interrupted by her kids, who she has shunted out to a living room where the sofa is covered in plastic, she “gets up to hit and then hug them. She really does love them, only sometimes they are rude” (64). Or there is Sire, a boy who hangs out on his bike with his friends and watches as the narrator, Esperanza, passes and crosses the street: “It made your blood freeze to have somebody look at you like that” (73).

Many of these characters disappear in the wake of these quick but arresting pen portraits. It is as though the book can hardly settle long enough on any of them for us to come to know where they come from or where they are going to. Yet almost always we are left with a startling detail, revealing perhaps more than the child narrator knows or intends to tell, a detail that indicates that there is much more still to be said. In Alicia’s case, this is when we are told that she is afraid of nothing except the mice she sees (or imagines she sees) late at night as she burns the candle at both ends. “And fathers” (32). Then the narrative swiftly moves on–to a tale of “Darius & the Clouds”–leaving the suggestion of some unmentionable violence hanging in the air. Mango Street is as vibrant and colorful as the tropical fruit that gives it its name, but it is also permeated by shadow, not least the shadow of gendered violence and the expectations that young women above all find it nearly impossible to shake off.

In fact, Alicia returns almost at the end of the book, in one of its final vignettes. Not that we hear much more about her fears. She and Esperanza are talking, and “she is listening to my sadness because I don’t have a house” (106). But Esperanza does, Alicia points out, have the house that gives this very book its title:

You live right here, 4006 Mango, Alicia says and points to the house I am ashamed of.
No, this isn’t my house I say and shake my head as if shaking could undo the year I’ve lived here. I don’t belong. I don’t ever want to come from here. (106)

Shame is a recurrent feature of Esperanza’s experience in this Chicago neighborhood: she is made to feel (and internalizes) shame for being female, poor, and Hispanic. In some ways, indeed, shame is the book’s dominant affect, if it weren’t for the humor and quick-witted observation that also pervade almost all these brief stories. And Alicia, perhaps the one (other) possibly upwardly mobile figure we meet, already knows that Esperanza will not so easily be able to deny her origins, for to do so would be to try to erase something that is by now integral to her very self: “No, Alicia says. Like it or not you are Mango Street, and one day you’ll come back too” (107). This may sound like a prediction (or projection) of failure: that every attempt Esperanza makes to escape will be doomed.

But Cisneros suggests that Esperanza (or Cisneros herself, in so far as this book is broadly autobiographical) will be able to negotiate the tension between escape and acknowledgement, between shame and pride, though writing itself. “You just remember to keep writing, Esperanza,” her Aunt Lupe tells her, “It will keep you free” (61). At the time the young girl “didn’t know what she meant”–and in fact she and her friends treat her aunt shamefully, imitating her, mocking her blindness and incapacity, “with our heads thrown back, our arms limp and useless, dangling like the dead” (61). But by the end of the story, Esperanza has realized that the stories she is telling are a means to take her distance from Mango Street: “I write it down and Mango says goodbye sometimes” (110). But they are also, of course, a way to return, to render homage to those who stayed, to those, “las mujeres” to whom the book is dedicated, who were unable to leave and had to live in the shadows. Without exactly shining a light on that darkness, without pretending to give us anything like a full representation of these lives at the margins, Cisneros’s book at least offers a glimpse of a myriad of stories that would otherwise go untold, stories that if told in full should shame us all.

Lost Children Archive: How to Shape a World View

While reading the first half of Lost Children Archive, I was struck by the constant idea of how Valeria and her partner’s parenting and interests shape their own kids’ perceptions about the world around them. This concept of developing a world view, of course, is paralleled throughout the book with the constant discussion about refugees’ struggles to reach the haven known as the United States. Though there are many major themes in the book (because Luiselli asks a ton of thought-provoking, philosophical questions), I want to discuss how children’s minds are blank slates; and whether having a comfortable life or being a refuge in search of a better life, one’s world view is malleable especially in childhood.

The two perspectives in the book are one of the American child, with a good upbringing and parents to guide them in their lives, and the refugee child, often having to brave the treacherous journey of making it North of the Rio Grande by themselves.

The American child, in this case, is represented in both “the boy” and “the girl”. Their odd names were given to them preventing a hyphenated relationship between non-biological relatives. This “family lexicon”, however, does not inhibit the children from having the best relationship with one another, always making sure the other is taken care of. Furthermore, as the kids have an intimate connection, they also share similar world views simply because they have lived essentially the same lives and have received identical parenting in recent memory. Through their parents’ shared work, recording and archiving sounds of daily city life, the pleasure of capturing the world around them is passed on to their kids; especially their “boy”. It’s also interesting that through the father’s love of the Apaches, telling them seemingly magical stories of the long-ago, and the mother’s interest in helping recover the stories of “lost children” at the borders, those two worlds are amalgamated into one by the two siblings. Through skits, stories, and songs between the kids, they combine these two passions of their parents into a passion of their own. These are the major scenes that stuck out to me. However, the minute interactions reveal the same idea as well. By asking who “Jesus Fucking Christ” is by “the girl” or prodding about what’s the point of archiving by “the boy”, these two kids, with a safe and secure upbringing, are learning their parents’ beliefs and mannerisms and reproducing them page after page. However, we learn that not all children can be so lucky to have extensive and caring conversations with their parents.

The travel of the refuge child to the USA, revealed slowly through small snippets, is one that the child has to endure alone. In the case of Manuela and her two girls, they were left to find their way to the United States and reunite with their mother. However, as Border Patrol found the kids, they were detained and their whereabouts soon became unknown. I want to unpack how a traumatic journey and detainment to and in the US border could have detrimental psychological implications for mental growth and maturation. Braving the travel to the USA, usually by taking “La Bestia” (a railroad that is commonly used to take hopeful refugees to the border) is a route where children could become sick, injured, or even dead. If one manages to avoid those challenges, the effects of being detained, being captured and ultimately criminalized, could ruin a child’s perspective of the world around them. Wanting to be with their family or live in a place free from violence, the trauma experienced by children seeking refuge could lead to long term depression or other illnesses; not even including the potential to inhibit healthy mental maturation. Also, the heartache of being deported back to a dangerous place and erasing your chances at seeing a loved one in the USA is not only mentally damaging but physically dangerous as well.

Lost Children Archive tackles many issues regarding philosophical dilemmas of love, loss, deportation, identity, etc. However, through her juxtaposition of the life of children in America, safe and having parental guidance, to the life of a refugee, fending for their life and suffering through a dangerous journey, it’s apparent that the mentalities of a child are formed by the world they experience. This book not only speaks to how the refugee “crisis” of people seeking asylum in the United States is a threat to one’s security, but mental well-being and growth too

-Curtis HR.

The House on Mango Street

This book let me a little confused when I finished reading it. I’m not quite sure as to what angle I have to take in analyzing it. It is definitely not like the other books we have read in class. The chapters are shorter and there is no linear story to follow. I noticed that there weren’t quotation marks whenever someone other than Esperanza was speaking. Since I’m not a book fanatic, I’m not sure how to look at this book. To be quite honest, I consider this book boring because there’s no “climax” and even the ending confused me.

I would describe Esperanza as a typical person coming from an immigrant family. It helps that the whole book is from her point of view. In this way, we are able to see her emotions and uncertainties. She wants to be able to process things on her own. Not just things in general but those that come as a girl turns into a woman. I believe that even if this book were to be written from a non-Chicano point of view then it can still carry out the same message, which I’m struggling with right now.

This whole time I was trying to find a significance as to why the street is named Mango. Maybe it was just a random name, maybe not. I think one thing that I got out of this book though, is for some reason I thought of the house on Mango Street as being composed of the different people we see in every chapter. There was a point that I just forgot how many people there were because of their similarities and the stories specific to one that weren’t very lengthy. Perhaps that was the whole point all along. There is this stereotype, this culture, that exists in the neighborhood of Mango Street. Esperanza is able to pinpoint those who are living a life “expected” of them and she wants to find another way to do things, to approach things a different way. Towards the end, Esperanza expresses a feeling of discontent about having lived in a house on Mango Street. She expresses that among their other places of residence, the Mango Street house is merely just another house that is part of the list. It is a house that she “belong[s] to but do not belong to.”

The House on Mango Street

I must say that The House on Mango Street was one of the books that I was most looking forward to in this course. As I first started reading this book, I found myself a bit confused and wasn’t quite sure how to understand the structure in which the book is written. As I continued reading, I soon found myself quite interested in Esperanza and the way she shares the stories of the people that surround her and her own life on Mango Street. This book offers the reader a compilation of stories of different stages or different events and people in Esperanza’s life. What makes this book unique is that you don’t have to read the book from beginning to end to understand it, the reader can open any chapter and start reading. Each chapter offers us a distinct story.

I would say that one of the main takeaways for me after reading this book would be Esperanza’s desire to become her own self and not one of the many women found on Mango Street. The ones that sit by the window looking outside, the women who do not have a way out. Esperanza observes the women in her family and in her neighbourhood as her only role models, women who have been unable to break from the traditional roles imposed on them. These women are trapped in a culture that promotes and enforces patriarchal control and oppression. Esperanza is witness of this from a young age and she puts it on herself to not become one of these many women stuck in a life that denies them freedom in becoming their own self. These women are trapped either by their fathers, husbands, children or their regrets of not rejecting these traditional roles that keep them locked up, unable to escape. As Sandra Cisneros puts it at the beginning of the book: A las Mujeres, To the Women. I believe that this book is for those women that feel stuck and chained up to a life that has been unfair and that has seen them withstand mistreatment from traditional patriarchal roles. Esperanza sheds light on these women and on her culture that continuously disregards the independence of women and incessantly promotes their codependence on a male figure. Esperanza is determined to escape and aspires to be much more as she does not want to become just another woman sitting by the window.

The House on Mango Street

I must say that The House on Mango Street was one of the books that I was most looking forward to in this course. As I first started reading this book, I found myself a bit confused and wasn’t quite sure how to understand the structure in which the book is written. As I continued reading, I soon found myself quite interested in Esperanza and the way she shares the stories of the people that surround her and her own life on Mango Street. This book offers the reader a compilation of stories of different stages or different events and people in Esperanza’s life. What makes this book unique is that you don’t have to read the book from beginning to end to understand it, the reader can open any chapter and start reading. Each chapter offers us a distinct story.

I would say that one of the main takeaways for me after reading this book would be Esperanza’s desire to become her own self and not one of the many women found on Mango Street. The ones that sit by the window looking outside, the women who do not have a way out. Esperanza observes the women in her family and in her neighbourhood as her only role models, women who have been unable to break from the traditional roles imposed on them. These women are trapped in a culture that promotes and enforces patriarchal control and oppression. Esperanza is witness of this from a young age and she puts it on herself to not become one of these many women stuck in a life that denies them freedom in becoming their own self. These women are trapped either by their fathers, husbands, children or their regrets of not rejecting these traditional roles that keep them locked up, unable to escape. As Sandra Cisneros puts it at the beginning of the book: A las Mujeres, To the Women. I believe that this book is for those women that feel stuck and chained up to a life that has been unfair and that has seen them withstand mistreatment from traditional patriarchal roles. Esperanza sheds light on these women and on her culture that continuously disregards the independence of women and incessantly promotes their codependence on a male figure. Esperanza is determined to escape and aspires to be much more as she does not want to become just another woman sitting by the window.

The House on Mango Street: A Tale of Sexual Assault

The House on Mango Street! Wow. This book has so many themes and major ideas that it discusses in such a short format. Every page offers so much insight and such profoundness that I was blown away. One theme in particular that kept reoccuring was that of sexual assault and the subordination of women. This book contains a ton of uncomfortable topics, however with themes like sexism, it puts them into easily digestible concepts that read like a children’s story book.

In the book, there are characters that have multiple unwanted sexual encounters; Esperanza and Sally. Through Esperanza’s three experiences, she uncovers that sexual aggression is all too common for a young girl of her age. In “Chanclas,” Esperanza dances at a wedding, and is creepily stalked by a “boy who is a man [watching her] dance.” He is claimed to be her “cousin by first communion,” but through the progression of the night, he seems to prey on Esperanza the entire night; violating her with his eyes. This reveals that even though Esperanza thought she knew and trusted an almost family member, anyone has the potential to be a sexual aggressor. “The First Job” was one of the first chapters I’ve read THIS YEAR where I’ve had to put the book down and pause. As Esperanza gets her first job and realizes she doesn’t really fit in, she “befriends” an Oriental man who talks to her during her lunch breaks. They get along, but then claiming it is his birthday, asks for a birthday kiss and “grabs [her] face with both hands and kisses [her] hard on the mouth and doesn’t let go.” Utterly disgusting. An old man, seemingly mild and friendly, becomes a monster, a predator, in the blink of an eye. With this scene, we see Esperanza get used for a man’s pleasure yet again. Also, the book carries a message of not letting your guard down and not wholeheartedly trusting people; fearing they have a secret agenda or desire. Finally, in “Red Clowns,” Esperanza experiences physical sexual assault by an unknown man who repeatedly says, “I love you, Spanish girl.” Esperanza begs him to stop, but he continues to have his way with her. A soul-wrenching scene that I am lost for words to even describe. Through the progression of the book, sexual assault is brought to light while also an idea of apprehensiveness about unknown men is constantly reinforced; begging readers to take precautions and not endure the same trauma she has in the past.

The other character, Sally, is the character of choice for Cisneros to display the devastating consequences of both parental assault and being taken advantage of. Sally, whose traumas stem from an abusive father, is often talked about by the boys; thinking she is the most beautiful girl they have ever laid eyes on. Sally’s one wish is “to love and to love and to love,” but as she cannot get that from her father, becomes eye candy for boys around the school, frequently hooking up with them. When Sally and some boys are fooling around in the back of a pickup truck, Sally told Esperanza to “go home” and give her and the boys time alone. Such a sad life Sally is living, obtaining the attention she needs to survive by having casual sex with boys who only care for her looks all because of the mental and physical abuse brought onto her by her neglectful father.

This book, deceptively quaint and colorful, really made me feel strong emotions (it almost made me tear up). From themes of identity, mental illness, tradition, language, and even sexual assault, this book tackles it all. I’m eager to discuss this with all of you tomorrow; attempting to scratch the surface of the book’s profound messages.

-Curtis HR