The life of young Antonio Márez, like our own lives, is a multidimensional, booming, buzzing world — laced with constraints and opportunities, absolutes and relativisms, structures and freedoms, harmonies and conflicts, unities and divisions, consistencies and traditions, love and hate, good and evil. The primary structural feature of the novel is conflict — in the form of competing modes of understanding between farmers and cowboys, priests and healers, children and adults. War, too, is prominent in the novel. World War II is a distant ogre to whom U.S. citizens sacrifice their sons, and even if some of these sons returned, they were often poisoned with ''war sickness.'' Indeed, there are tiny wars going on throughout the novel. One rages within Antonio, another among the students at school, and still another between the students and their teacher.
Antonio is caught between the competing lifestyles of his paternal and maternal families, and this conflict is embedded in the broader tension between Chicano/a and American cultures. His quest to understand takes him from a naive, innocent view of the world to one of increased knowledge and self-understanding. In the end, he learns that new outcomes can be formed from one's past and that one should accept and gain strength from life rather than succumb to despair. Anaya seems to be saying that adversity and suffering can be productive and beautiful by making us stronger, wiser, and more sympathetic persons.
Anaya uses dream sequences to highlight the inner conflicts that push Antonio to understand the world around him. The dreams emphasize Antonio's acute intuitive sense, the conflictive understandings he has of the world around him, and his own deep fears. They are windows into Antonio's unconscious world as he matures and deepens his understanding. The dreams foreshadow many of the major events in Antonio's life.
