Readings are available on the Readings page.
Lorna Dee Cervantes’s “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway”
Helena Maria Viramontes “The Moths”
Marta E. Sanchez “The Chicana as Scribe: Harmonizing Gender and Culture in Lorna Dee Cervantes’ “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway””.
Reading assignment for Monday, October 8. Your reply (under Comments) is due before class. You do not need to answer these specific questions, but response should demonstrate you’ve done the reading and thought about the text.
Be sure to check and make sure your response posts.
Would you consider these to be coming of age stories? How so? What connections can you draw with The House on Mango Street? With other readings?
What do you make of the image of a freeway? What do freeways represent?
How does the narrator in “The Moths” come of age? What would she make of the quinceañera?
How do these readings deal with issues of sexuality?
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I do believe these are coming of age stories. We have a young lady in “The Moths” who stands out because she does not like to go to Church. Her entire family, with my doubts of her father going, goes to church. Her father then digs his nails into her skin; she later heads to church when assalted by her sisters and hears her father blaming her mother for her personal choices.
I connect her fanning hands to Esperanza’s trees from House on Mango Street. They are both there, but they are different. Esperanza thought she did not belong, however her roots were huge. With the girl in The Moths, her hands make her different from the rest (her siblings). I believe the grandmother is her roots. She normalized after her grandmother makes and rubs the balm on her hands.
When readers are initially introduced to the narrator of “The Moths,” we are immediately able to recognize her as disrespectful, irresponsible, and immature. The narrator even highlights these same characteristics by providing examples – she seems rather critical of herself, even more than what her grandfather, mother, and sisters are.
We can immediately sense the difference in the relationship between the narrator and her grandmother. The narrator says, “[n]ot that I was her favorite granddaughter or anything special (Viramontes 27),” but the way she describes things makes it seems as if their relationship was indeed special. For example, “Abuelita had pulled me through the rages of scarlet fever…; she had seen me through several whippings, and arm broken by a dare-jump off Tio Enrique’s toolshed, puberty, and my first lie (Viramontes 27).” Although these are things grandmothers typically do for their granddaughters, the narrator highlights it in such a way that makes it seem even more special than what the grandmother shared with her other grandchildren.
There is an instance when the narrator is described as selfish, as if she didn’t think of anybody other than herself – this demonstrates immaturity. However, just the fact that she is willing to look after her grandmother demonstrates otherwise. These are the beginning traces that suggest a transformation in the narrator.
Even when the narrator realizes that her grandmother has passed away, she still decides to towel her and bathe her – this isn’t necessary; it’s the narrator’s final act of kindness towards a person she loved dearly. My favorite part of this story is when the narrator is with her grandmother and begins to describe all of the things she wanted right then: “I wanted my Amá (Viramontes 32).” Now that the narrator can no longer seek comfort in her grandmother, she realizes she has to turn to her mother. The central theme of this story is rebirth – as the relationship between the narrator and her grandmother fades, a relationship between the narrator and her mother blooms. The narrator can no longer be described as disrespectful, irresponsible, and immature.
In Viramontes’ “The Moths,” the speaker is forced to come of age due to external factors; the death of her grandmother calls her to grow up and take on a huge load of responsibility. Even though she is the youngest girl in the family and only 14 years old, the enormous emotional and physical task of caring for the dying grandmother is bestowed upon her. We see that this situation matures her in the contrast between her talking back to her grandmother about her unconventional healing practices in the past, and how she treats her in the present. She is patient and gentle, recounting, “I toweled her face frequently and held her hand for hours” (28). She buys her grandmother’s groceries, makes her food, and cleans up after her and never once do we hear her complain. This shows thats she has maturely accepted her new role as an adult in the family, even though she has to do it alone and at such a young age. Another coming of age moment for her is when she walks into her grandmothers kitchen to find her mother crying. Seeing one’s mother cry is always a difficult and emotional thing for a child, and it shows that child the imperfection of life. To see a parent vulnerable and weak goes against everything a child grows up believing. The comfort of the naive notion that their parents will always be there to protect them and make everything bad go away is shattered. It is an introduction into the dark reality of life’s complications and difficulties. For the speaker to have to comfort her mother is a coming of age moment where the roles are reversed. The daughter is the one caring for the grandmother and calmly reporting her status to the mother. Parents don’t have that kind of talk and show that kind of vulnerability to children, and this scene demonstrates another way in which the speaker is forced to come of age in her new role. In the beginning of the story we get the sense that the speaker is the rebellious, ungrateful, complacent baby of the family, but by the end, we see her maturity, and her love and appreciation for her family.
I think that the image of the freeways has multiple meanings. I first thought of Manuel Muñoz’s book What You See in the Dark. The story takes place in 1950s Bakersfield, CA, which Muñoz describes as this rural, dusty cowboy town, in complete contrast to Los Angles, which is just over an hour away. The only way into Bakersfield during that time was to take Highway 99, which led you directly into the town, but the construction of the 5 changed that. One character was affected by this modernization because she owned a motel right off of the 99 where truck drivers could easily stop at, but because of the new freeway she would loose nearly all of her business.
Freeways then come to represent modernity. From the poem “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” by Cervantes, I think this sense of modernity is apparent. Cervantes writes that “everyday at dusk/ as Grandma watered geraniums/ the shadow of the freeway lengthened.” They seem to be left in the shadows as the world around them is changing as they continue leading their own lives. Also freeways tend to show structural inequality. Freeways cut through neighborhoods and act as dividing lines between areas with different socio-economic factors. The narrator describes the neighborhood as one where you would “hear glass bottles shattering.” This tends to sound like an inner-city neighborhood. The freeways then could possibly act as a barrier to other different, maybe wealthier neighborhoods, or they could be the way to get to the suburbs, which are typically more upper middle class. The freeway then ends up being this image of modernity and a barrier to those that are neglected under its shadow.
The poem is tricky though. If I understood the freeway in that way, it almost seems like this would be the type of neighborhood you would want to move away from. But the end of the poem shows that the narrator came full circle and is picking up her grandmother’s traits. Maybe the narrator is a bit like Esperanza and she had the opportunity to leave, but she came back for all of those that didn’t get the chance to.
In Viramontes’ “The Moths and Other Stories,” the young girl is very different. She says she was not pretty or nice and she had big hands. A big factor in her coming of age was her Grandma. When her abuelita helps shape her hands, I believe that it is a metaphor for how she shaped her into a woman. “Abuelita made a balm out of dried moth wings and Vicks and rubbed my hands, shaping them back to size.” The death of her abuelita was her coming of age moment. “Endings are inevitable, they are necessary for rebirths.” (Viramontes 31) As she notices scars on her abuelita’s back she realizes how little she actually knew. In the end, it illustrates the importance of the mother and grandma in a Latinas’ coming of age. “For the first time in a long time I cried, rocking us, crying for her, for me, and for Ama’.” (Viramontes 32)
In “Beneath the shadow of the freeway,” the narrator talks about the importance of her mother and grandmother. It was interesting how she said, “ mama, the swift knight, fearless warrior. Mama wanted to be Princess instead. I know that. Even now she dreams of taffeta and foot-high tiaras.” Many Latina women do not have that opportunity to feel like a princess. Having to slave for a family, working so hard to make money, cook, clean, and be a wife and mother. Many of these women have abusive husbands and never get treated as a princess. Maybe this is one reason why it is very important to the Latina women that their 15 year olds have quinceaneras.
The narrator also had to act as a “scribe” interpreting, translating, and paying the bills. Similar to Esperanza in “House on Mango St.” Her mother and Grandmother’s opposing philosophies played a huge role in her coming of age. By the end of the poem she comes to take the contrast and form her own views. She is aware from her mother to not accept a man mistreating you, but still becomes more like her Grandma in believing you can still have a great relationship with a man. “Every night I sleep with a gentle man to the hymn of mockingbirds.”
In both of these stories we read about girls who don’t quite fit in with their families. In “The Moths” we read about the black sheep of the family with her bull hands and her disbelief in religion who must overcome her selfishness to care for her dying grandmother. In Cervantes’s “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway”, we are introduced to the next generation of woman who is trying to find her place between her grandmother’s and mother’s ways. Both stories are coming of age stories in which the girls discover new facets to themselves.
In Cervantes’s story we see some major connections to Cisneros’s House on Mango Street. Throughout the poem we are told of two women’s ways. The easily manipulated and controlled “soft woman” and the harsh, perhaps lonely “hard woman”. The girl in the poem finds benefits in both of these types however, finds it difficult to reconcile the two. This reminds me of Esperanza who does not want to sit and wait around for her man on her sad elbow, but is naive to the way men and women work together. Another connection between the two works, is the theme of modernity and the American Dream. In the poem, the freeway indicates the difference between her life in a simple barrio where her grandmother planted geraniums and wore her hair in braids and the rest of society; the other America. Both Esperanza and the girl in the poem are caught between traditional ways of doing things as seen in their communities and families and the other America’s way.
In “The Moths”, the young narrator comes of age, as Christina put it, through external forces. She is asked to take care of her dying grandmother, though she enjoys doing it because her grandmother had taken care of her too. She is portrayed as less “traditional” as she admits she is selfish and perhaps a bit more masculine by the way she plays with her sister. She is also less obedient to her parents than the others. I think that this character would run from the idea of having a quince. She doesn’t strike me as the type to care about any of the rituals or beliefs that go into having one of these ceremonies. Both stories redefine what it is to be a woman especially in the mexican context.