This group of chapters begins with Louie’s cousin Marin and ends with Alicia. Although Marin will all but disappear from the book after our introduction to her, she and Alicia—and Rosa Vargas—are important in that they are all older than Esperanza, all potential “role models” because they are women she knows, female participants in her culture, at a time when she has begun to turn away from her own mother and female relatives and to look elsewhere for clues about who she will be. Marin, although in fact still a child in many ways, has entered the world of womanhood before Esperanza and has become one of the younger girl’s guides. As such, although Esperanza’s parents would certainly do their best to discourage such a development, Marin represents a very real possibility for Esperanza’s future.
Before the 1970s, many working-class girls, urban and rural, stopped attending school after the eighth grade. Abortion was illegal, bearing a child out of wedlock was considered shameful, and young women frequently married at 14 or 15; a 13-year-old bride was not unheard of, especially in communities where many parents and grandparents were immigrants to the U.S. from places where an educated woman was something of a curiosity in any but the wealthiest classes. Given this, Marin must be very young indeed to want to conceal her marriage plans from her family: perhaps a year older than Esperanza, 12-going-on-13 and physically mature for her age; or perhaps two years older than Esperanza and emotionally younger than her age-mates. In any case, Marin’s family in Puerto Rico has sent her to live with an aunt in the U.S. for some reason, and now the aunt’s family says she’s “too much trouble”—despite the fact that she baby-sits while her aunt works—and wants to send her back. That trouble sounds like boy trouble, probably the same kind of boy trouble that got Marin sent to live with her aunt in the first place. Her family, fearing an unwanted pregnancy, separated her from her jobless boyfriend; now her aunt would like to get Marin off her hands in the same condition she arrived in. And Marin is a boy-crazy girl.
Readers born after 1960 or so can probably not appreciate the deft accuracy with which Cisneros has sketched Marin’s character and the rueful poignancy of the sketch nearly so well as those who grew up when Marin was growing up. The so-called “sexual revolution” was, in the mid-1960s, still a phrase rather than a reality, especially for Catholic girls in Latino families. An unmarried girl who became pregnant (“got in trouble” was the phrase in English) and could not be married immediately was, if possible, sent to far-off relatives to have her baby. Young women were expected to be virgins on their wedding day, and many of them were. A great many young teenage girls who knew how babies were born—frequently because their mothers and married sisters gave birth at home—had only the haziest notion of how they were conceived. Marin, whatever the level or accuracy of her knowledge in this regard, has at least shared it with Esperanza and Lucy, who at 11 or so have probably been entirely ignorant. And Marin herself is likely to be almost as ignorant. Although she presents herself as a sexual object, it is not really sex Marin is interested in—it is love. She dreams of romance, of a stranger met, perhaps on a train, who will “take [her] to live in a big house far away.”
Readers who have grown up seeing sex presented frankly as sex on television and movie screens, who find nothing remarkable, much less shameful, in the fact of never-married mothers raising their children alone, who have always lived in a culture with easy access to effective contraceptives and legal abortion, are apt to misunderstand or misinterpret Marin’s combination of brazen (for her time) sexual invitation and innocent romanticism. Marin is neither stupid nor perverse, only naïve. In her culture (especially in her Latino culture, but in a larger sense simply in the United States of the 1950s and 1960s), girls were protected from sexual knowledge.
In the lyrics of popular songs, in movies and on television, sex was presented as “love,” and love was, in most cases, inseparable from marriage. Young men were expected to be more knowing than young women, and one of the things they knew was to couch their sexual overtures in terms both non-specific and romantic. Thus, when boys say absurd things about loving her eyes, Marin knows that they are talking about sex, and she is curious about it, but the subject itself remains disguised and hazy. She is free to fantasize about a handsome stranger who will buy her nice things and pay her incessant compliments, carry her away to a lovely house with furniture just as she wants it, everything her own. In the evening, he will come home and kiss her passionately, and it will all be like a movie scene with rapturous music playing as the couple embraces and the screen fades out.
A handsome stranger, 15 or 16 years earlier, carried away Rosa Vargas; instead of fading out, however, her screen went to diaper pails and one baby a year until her husband left her with no money and no explanation. Rosa’s situation is not unusual. Given the ingredients of early marriage, unreasonable (and conflicting) expectations, strict religious laws against contraception, and never enough money, the wonder is that her situation was not even more common (as indeed it was to become in subsequent decades). Thus Rosa’s children grow up without parental or cultural guidance, without the care even of the neighborhood, whose concerned adults they spit upon, and “without respect for all things living, including themselves,” as Esperanza wisely says. Thus “Rosa’s Eddie V.” stands with his pals, looking threatening to strangers (people of “another color” who venture into the neighborhood, usually by mistake, Esperanza thinks), while her Angel dives off roofs. And thus Esperanza sees, along with the interesting and exciting example of young womanhood presented by Marin and her admirers, the other side of the same coin as presented by Rosa Vargas. Marin sees it too, of course, but has not yet understood it, perhaps because she doesn’t want to.
There is another alternative—one that is for Esperanza in the middle 1960s still daring and unusual. Her neighbor Alicia has a difficult life, not of course as hard (because not hopeless) as Rosa’s, but nowhere near as glamorous from a young girl’s point of view as the life Marin expects and dreams about. Alicia is trying to span two worlds: the traditional one her mother inhabited, where a woman’s place is in the kitchen making tortillas, and the world of education, infrequently inhabited by working-class Latino women in the 1960s.
Every day, Alicia takes a long commute to a university where, even if she is studying a traditionally “female” subject like nursing or elementary education, she is likely to face prejudice from teachers and classmates on account of her ethnicity; if she is studying anything else, she must battle sexism as well. Every evening—after she has shopped and prepared an evening meal and done the laundry and other housework—she must study in an atmosphere dominated by the father who thinks she is foolish or worse to want to go to college. Then she must get up early to fix breakfast and lunch for her father before starting all over again. Esperanza sees Alicia’s difficulties; are the rewards of her life as apparent? This is part of the tension that Esperanza will feel throughout the period of this book. And while it is easy for an adult to say that Esperanza’s choice is obvious, we should remember that—to a young girl entering adolescence—Marin’s imaginary rewards seem much simpler, more exciting, and more immediate than Alicia’s distant and uncertain ones.
A note is in order on Esperanza’s assessment of her neighborhood in “Those Who Don’t.” Some readers might infer that Cisneros is painting too rosy a picture of these urban streets, when she has Esperanza say that those who live there are not afraid of what might happen to them in their own neighborhood. In fact, Esperanza seems to see most of what goes on around her and knows there is safety for children in numbers. Her perception of her neighborhood as a basically safe place for its inhabitants is correct: In the mid-1960s, guns are relatively scarce, and the high-powered weapons that will appear in later decades are still far in the future. There is indeed drug use: Alcohol and marijuana are relatively common, heroin less so (and heroin users are dangerous mostly to themselves), but cocaine in powder form is only beginning to reappear as a street drug after many decades, and crack cocaine is still unheard of. There are indeed street gangs, but these are not as dominant as they will become in later years. The Vargas kids, who respect nothing and no one, are still in training for their lives of crime, should they survive so long; the rest of the people in the neighborhood—whose Latino culture includes a strong, traditional code of honor and respect for family—look out for each other. Esperanza is probably sheltered by her family (as Sandra Cisneros has said she was sheltered by hers), but basically she is right: Stifling as her neighborhood can be to a young woman’s potential, she is about as safe there as any girl in any neighborhood has ever been.
