The Madonnas of Echo Park

“Everyone in this book insisted he or she was a proud American first, an American who happened to be Mexican, not the other way around. No one emphasized this more than Aurora. I am a Mexican, she said when I caught up with her, but a Mexican is not all that I am.”

Here, Aurora speaks to the complexity of her identity as a Mexican-American. Though she hears stories from her mother that connect her with her Mexican identity—such as tales of her mother’s former neighborhood, Chavez Ravine—she most strongly identifies, as many second-generation immigrants do, with the American environment she has seen and known. As a second-generation immigrant, Aurora feels a sense of loss, knowing that there are many aspects of her mother’s experience she does not have access to, having grown up both literally and metaphorically speaking a different language. She projects this sense of loss into the “white” MTV culture of her generation. Her appreciation of this “white” culture is multilayered and complex, a co-mingling of Mexican and American identity. Thus, when Aurora says, “a Mexican is not all that I am,” she not only expresses that she is also American, she also suggests the convoluted feeling of being both American and Mexican.

“We slipped into this country like thieves, onto the land that once was ours.”

Here, Hector describes his imagination of his own illegal immigration as a child (which he does not clearly remember). He speaks to the irony that in order to pursue American opportunities, illegal Mexican immigrants must sneak “like thieves” across the border onto land that was stolen from Mexico. With this passage, he suggests the deep sense of loss that has become his family legacy.

“I measure the land not by what I have but by what I have lost, because the more you lose, the more American you can become.”

Hector’s reflection carries two meanings. The first is a literal loss of land (and material prosperity); the second is a loss—or, perhaps more precisely, a surrender—of ethnic identity to American cultural ideals of prosperity and opportunity, the supplanting of his Mexican heritage with the American dream.

“When is the last time you got something for telling the truth?”

These lines are spoken to Hector by his friend, a fellow day laborer named Diego, after he remarks that “honest bosses are bullies” (5) and discusses the merits of lying about age in order to gain employment. As undocumented immigrants working in an unregulated system, they acknowledge that they are highly exploitable by their bosses. Therefore, the only way to fight back is to lie and cheat their bosses in the same manner they are cheated and lied to. 

“Bad joke. You wouldn’t understand.” 

After Hector witnesses his boss’s son, Adam, murdering Diego, he is entrusted with disposing of the murder weapon. Hector feels morally conflicted. He wants his employers to be held responsible for their actions—knowing how easily he could be murdered and disappeared himself—but he knows that if he tells the police, he could easily be deported. As his boss and his son wrap the murder weapon (a sledgehammer) in a tarp, Hector overhears them whispering, looking at him, and laughing, to which they respond, “Bad joke. You wouldn’t understand” (21). This interaction recalls an incident years earlier on the closing night of a restaurant, The Option, Hector worked in for eighteen years. Hector’s daughter, Aurora, reacted with anger when she overheard two upper-level restaurant workers whispering about her father’s nickname. When she challenges them, they tell her it’s only a joke: “You wouldn’t understand” (18). This moment establishes a pattern of exploitative managers who casually—even jokingly—diminish the humanity of workers such as Hector.

“Everything I have earned in this life by lying, I have lost. By lying.”

When confronted by the police while trying to dispose of the murder weapon at the Lotus Festival, Hector must decide whether to lie or tell the truth about what he’s doing. Fully conscious of the situation, Hector thinks through the set of pre-rehearsed lies he must tell the police—lies he has already presumably had to use repeatedly—to prevent himself from being deported. He recognizes, however, that he is losing track of who he is and what he values amidst the accumulating lies he must keep up to maintain his day-to-day existence, including the lies he told his wife while cheating on her, the lies he told himself about the discrimination at his restaurant, and the lies he must tell to procure each day-laborer job. Thus, he decides to reveal the truth and accept the consequences. 

“My abuelita heard me crying and without asking where the water had come from told me that a drowning flower moves toward the water, not away from it. Its stem may be strong enough to stand on its own, but when its petals grow wet and heavy, they drag the flower back into the water and that causes it to die. Aurora Salazar, the last woman evicted from Chavez Ravine, learned this lesson when she was dragged by her wrists and ankles like a shackled butterfly off her land. And I would learn this lesson many years later working for Mrs. Calhoun. This is what women do, when they have an ocean of dreams but no water to put them in.” 

Felicia, who is Aurora Esperanza’s mother, describes her childhood attempt to prevent her grandmother’s home from being demolished in the wake of Dodger Stadium’s construction. With a child’s magical thinking, Felicia hopes that growing a strong jacaranda tree in her room will protect their home. She discovers, however, that the jacaranda’s blossoms have drowned in the water. Looking back on her grandmother’s words, Felicia applies them to the experiences of Aurora Salazar, a woman who resisted her eviction from Chavez Ravine, and her own experience witnessing the suicide of her employer, Mrs. Calhoun, who drowned herself in her pool. She reflects that this drowning of the self—the experience of being weighed down by one’s unfulfillable dreams and desires—is especially pertinent to the experience of being a woman.

“‘No,’ I said, and again, the English words failed me. In Spanish, I could make a man tremble, force a woman to bite her tongue. But not in English. Ingles Ahora didn’t have those kinds of exercises.” 

Though Felicia grew up in Los Angeles, she always lived in Spanish-speaking communities, and thus never managed to learn English. Her wealthy employer’s wife, Mrs. Calhoun, provides Felicia with a set of English-language tapes called Ingles Ahora, hoping to improve Felicia’s prospects and help her express herself. Felicia finds, however, that even as her English improves, she is unable to connect with Mrs. Calhoun. Attempting to bridge the many cultural, racial, and economic gaps between them, Felicia is made increasingly aware of the inadequacy of her English (and the greater inadequacy of language) to communicate their mutual loss as women.

“A chorus line of Mexican Madonna daughters nest in front of their mothers wearing fierce, take-no-shit smiles, except Aurora, who resented being there and resented kneeling in front of me. The idea to come had been mine, to get her out of her room on her spring break and stop her sulking about something that had happened at school, something about a young boy calling her a dirty Mexican and refusing to dance with her at a party. Come with me, I said. I’ll dance with you. There’s this place where all the girls dance like Madonna, I said. Dance on a street corner, Aurora scoffed. Oh Momma, you don’t understand, she said.”

Here, Felicia recalls the drive-by shooting at the mercado in Echo Park where Madonna’s “Borderline” video was filmed. Inspired by the video’s message of being true to where you came from, Felicia organizes a day of dancing at the bodega with young girls and mothers dressed like Madonna. Felicia hopes that this blended celebration of mothers and daughters, MTV, and Echo Park will help bridge the figurative borderline between her Mexican-American experience and her daughter’s. Aurora, however, feels this dancing celebration is a farce, that her mother and that “[doesn’t] understand” her experience any more than she understands her mother’s. This disagreement escalates into an argument that contributes to a shoving altercation, which may or may not be the cause of Alma Guerrero’s death. 

“My sisters had fought with tears and cries out to God to stop. Did they not stand tall enough for God to hear them? Perhaps a woman asking God for help needed a stronger voice. But how could I stand up lying on my back?”

Beatriz Esperanza, who is the grandmother of Aurora and the mother of Felicia, describes a transformative experience in her childhood. As a child, she lived with her sisters, her mother, and her grandmother in the house of her Uncle Archie, who molested her sisters in their beds at night. Beatriz’s grandmother tells her that she has the spirit of a wolf, empowering her with a fable wherein a wolf stuck in a fence escapes by “standing up.” Establishing her fierce personality even at an early age, Beatriz vows to fight back by “standing up” to her Uncle Archie. Rather than cry for help, she must independently take charge of her own destiny. While this independent spirit serves Beatriz well when defending herself, it establishes a lifelong thought pattern that alienates her from her family.

“When his father died, Gabriel kept up the vigil, leaving enough of a parcel for his own estate, then selling much of the land to the city at a handsome profit. The land became Angelino Heights, the first suburb in the City of Angels. Can you imagine that? A Mexican created our first suburbia, a place built on the fundamental notion of keeping people out you think aren’t as good as you believe yourself to be—out.”

Here, Beatriz illustrates the irony that a Mexican created the first suburb (when suburbs are traditionally thought of as white developments designed to enforce racial segregation). In so doing, Beatriz implies a comparison between herself and the suburb her husband created, as she has fortified a personality that keeps others—including her own family—out.

“I smelled roses everywhere on my way back to my house—in the garbage, by Echo Park Lake, and in the dust bin kicked up by small children running home. I fell into a deep sleep at four in the afternoon, not waking for fourteen hours. In my dreams I wandered through a field of burning weeds wearing a coat made of rain. The coat enveloped me with the sensation of both drowning and breathing, its chill grading off the incredible heat around me. I was searching for my daughter, now a grown woman, who was sitting on an island of blooming jacaranda trees surrounded by a brimstone lake. Her adult face, which I’ve never seen but knew intimately in the dream, floated out of reach.”

After seeing a vision of the Virgin Mary, Beatriz slowly begins to realize that the vision was instigated by her own guilt over turning away her family, especially her daughter, Felicia. In her dream, Beatriz cannot see the adult face of Felicia because she entrusted her own mother with raising her, and she has not seen her daughter since she was a child. The jacaranda trees reference Felicia’s earlier conversation with her grandmother, wherein she learned that “a drowning flower moves toward the water, not away from it. Its stem may be strong enough to stand on its own, but when its petals grow wet and heavy, they drag the flower back into the water and that causes it to die” (26). In Beatriz’s dream, she wears a “coat made of rain” (a possible gesture to the “drowning” flowers) that prevents her from becoming warm, even though her daughter is surrounded by fire. As the Virgin later explains, Beatriz cannot become warm because “without love, [she is] cold” (68). 

“Bus routes are not drawn up with any particular attention to where the different races live. It’s impossible for a bus operator in Los Angeles to drive a route that doesn’t cross at least two, if not more, ethnic parts of the city. Thus, it is up to the operators to keep their passengers aware of their surroundings.” 

In this passage, bus driver Efren Mendoza recounts a racially-driven conflict that occurred on his bus. He illuminates the background tensions of this incident, explaining that he observes animosity between African-American and Mexican-American passengers on a daily basis, and takes responsibility to mitigate conflict by encouraging passengers to disembark in their own ethnic neighborhoods.

“I tried to recapture his ‘courage’ when I was in the gang, but I kept seeing that dead girl lying out on the sidewalk—in my head, on that big-ass mural near the 101 […] What kind of man shoots a girl, even by accident, then doesn’t turn himself in? And what kind of men protect that man?”

Here, Manny Jr. explains that he felt friction with his father—and his role in the Mexican gang they were both part of—ever since he learned that his father shot 3-year-old Alma Guerrero. This knowledge led him to question the efficacy of their gang activities, knowing that innocent people could be hurt by them. Manny’s troubled relationship with his father also illuminates his own struggle to connect with his son, Juan.

“In my mind, I was apologizing […] for being such a worthless father, for not loving Ofelia with the proper amount of respect, the drug scores, the anonymous dick-sucking tricks in men’s rooms for money, the untold number of late nights I stumbled home drunk and punched Juan in bed at three in the morning to teach him to always be prepared to be attacked—here was my plea for forgiveness, for him not to leave me alone in a neighborhood that was being stripped away one memory at a time and replaced with something foreign, cancerous, and final.” 

In this moment, Manny Jr. struggles—and fails—to find the words that will keep Juan from leaving Echo Park to join the army. Here, he hints at both the depths of his dishonesty and the desperate, damaging performativity of his masculinity, including drunken acts of violence against his own son that attempt to negate his drunken forays into homosexuality. Indeed, Manny Jr.’s acts of violence against Juan, purportedly designed to “teach him to always be prepared to be attacked,” may be a strong influence in his self-destructive decision to join the army, thus leaving his father alone in a much-changed gentrified neighborhood that now feels “foreign.”

“Cons make the best letter writers because every man is a poet. You just have to throw him in jail to find it.” 

In Chapter 6, hustler and thief Freddy Blas describes the beautiful letters of longing he wrote to his wife, Cristina. He theorizes that being in prison and feeling the accompanying sense of loss helps men to appreciate their lives and the human condition. This theme of discovering what matters resonates with Hector’s earlier reflections: “I measure the land not by what I have but by what I have lost, because the more you lose, the more American you can become” (1), and "Everything I have earned in this life by lying, I have lost. By lying” (23).

“It’s yours! […] This street, this shitty neighborhood! It’s all yours!” 

Freddy Blas returns to Echo Park after many years in prison to find that gentrification has greatly changed it, to the point where his old haunts are now unrecognizable. All of his old friends and lovers, including Cristina, have passed away or moved out, unable to afford the rising cost of living. He finds himself unable to make money through hustling, incapable of smooth-talking the new upper-class white residents of Echo Park. When a man beats Freddy up at a bar after an attempted swindle, he tells Freddy not to come back. Exasperated and infuriated, Freddy replies, “It’s yours!,” implying that Mexican immigrants no longer have a place in this neighborhood.

“A jacaranda blossom landed in her hair, its pulpy white tip sticking out from a wavy curl. She put down her pencil. ‘I’m your shadow. And you’re my sun.’”

In this scene, a romantic tension between best friends Angie and Duchess momentarily rises to the surface. Here, Duchess draws a picture of a beautiful young woman in a red dress (which Angie believes is a self-portrait) when a jacaranda blossom lands in her hair. This jacaranda blossom hints at the inter-generational feminine connection and lost dreams embodied by previous references to jacaranda blossoms in Felicia and Beatriz’s chapters. The blossom is also a suggestive symbol of the connection between these two young Mexican-American women. This connection is affirmed in a later scene when Angie looks at Duchess’s drawings after both she and her husband, Juan, have passed away. Examining Duchess’s drawing of the woman in the red dress, Angie recognizes traces of her own facial features, realizing that the picture is effectively a portrait of them both.

“‘Rita Hayworth,’ she said. ‘She was a Mexican movie star who was discovered at a bus stop. Her skin was so light she could pass for white. How lucky she was.’”

After visiting The Option, the restaurant where Hector worked for eighteen years, Cristina speaks toward the conflicted longing that drives her to collect images of movie stars—whom she refers to as her “saints” (11)— on her wall at home. These “saints” are totems of who she longs to be and the life she longs to live. This is especially resonant with Mexican-American immigrants who struggle through life in Los Angeles, living in the immediate shadow of glamorous white (or white-passing) celebrities. In this moment, Cristina sits at a bus stop with her daughter, Angie, who snaps her picture (in lieu of the photograph they’d planned to take of Rita Hayworth’s caricature at The Option). Their brief conversation highlights the vast disparity between Rita Hayworth’s fortunate discovery and Cristina’s Mexican experience: a once beautiful woman who labored for many years at a supermarket, eventually gained weight, and lost her cultivated good looks over time. As Cristina reflects on this disparity, she recognizes that the fantasy of movie-star beauty embodied by her “saints” will never be accessible to her.

“Because ‘why chase a bus when another one’s right around the corner?’ You know, what you used to say? Back in high school?”

When Angie graduates from college at UCLA, she is saddled with debt and desperate for a job. Angie reconnects with her high-school friend, Duchess, with whom she had a falling out in high school (over her desire to move beyond the Mexican-American neighborhood of Echo Park to a more “white” suburban lifestyle, which conflicted with Duchess’s loyalty to her Mexican-American identity). Duchess still works at the same neighborhood bank where she worked after high school, and she offers to help Angie get a supervisor’s job there. Reluctant to become Duchess’s boss, Angie puts off plans for a future meeting, pretending they will have plenty of opportunities to meet up when she works at the bank. Angie references a saying Duchess frequently used in high school— “why chase a bus when another one’s right around the corner?”—but Duchess does not remember saying this, suggesting that the experiences of both women have effectively removed them from their former youthful confidence and hopes for their futures. Duchess confirms this transition when she calls out to Angie that she missed her bus.

“She holds out her hands as she speaks and sculpts the land Aurora walked—and was dragged across—with fierce, swift strokes. Mother believes it was the land, those hills, that made Aurora so passionate, those rich, brown, curvaceous mounds and valleys that she’d tell me, stroking her hips, resembled her own body in her youth.”

In this moment, Felicia tries to imbue her daughter, Aurora, with a sense of her feminine legacy as a Mexican-American. She speaks of Aurora’s namesake, Aurora Salazar, the last woman evicted from Chavez Ravine referenced in Chapter 2 as “dragged by her wrists and ankles like a shackled butterfly” (27). With her physical gesture, Felicia suggests that the land was in many ways an embodiment of the hopes, dreams, and struggles particular to Mexican-American women. The slightly uncomfortable sexual tone of the gesture speaks to Aurora’s own uneasiness as a second-generation immigrant who does not share her mother’s connection to the land.

“I didn’t know those hills; I didn’t know that woman. What I knew were tunneled-out highways that unfurled like streamers tossed off a balcony atop Dodger Stadium and endless days of riding my bicycle through its saucer-tiered parking lots, flat and featureless, my mother said, like that light-skinned, hair-dyed telenovela guerita my father left us for. That was when my mother took back her last name, Esperanza, which means ‘hope.’ Put these two names together. You get me.” 

Aurora explains the distance she feels from her mother’s perspective on her former Chavez Ravine home (and, by extension, her neighborhood of Echo Park). As a second-generation immigrant, she never saw the landscape of Los Angeles pre-Dodger Stadium. As Felicia insinuates with her pointed jab at Hector’s “light-skinned” mistress, the Los Angeles that Aurora knows is largely whitewashed, and the ideals she’s identified with are also associated with whiteness. Aurora acknowledges, however, that this sense of loss—this inability to access her own Mexican-American legacy—is an essential part of who she is.

“If second-generation Mexicans could canonize a living saint in Los Angeles, it would be Morrissey […] White girls who could tell what kind of music I listened to by the way I dressed would come up to me and say, ‘You like Morrissey, too? Why? He’s not Mexican.’ I’d say, Then why do you love Prince? Or hip-hop? I never understood why when a white person likes a musician who’s not white, they’re cool, but if a person who isn’t white likes a musician who is, they’re a freak, or, worse, a sellout.”

Here, Aurora details her connection to the musician Morrissey, suggesting that for second-generation Mexican-American immigrants, their experiences and ideals are blended with the performances of white pop culture stars. Aurora’s identification with Morrissey is complex—to the degree that she replaces her father’s image with Morrissey in family photographs—and impossible to reduce to the label of “freak” or “sellout.” She openly connects Morrissey with a “saint,” recalling Cristina’s wall of Hollywood “saints” (including Rita Hayworth). In short, Skyhorse uses this juxtaposition of Aurora and Cristina’s “saints” to raise the question, what is the difference between first-generation immigrant saints and those of the second-generation?