The two major speakers in these stories (and there may be only two; the speaker in “Bread” may be Clemencia, who also narrates “Never Marry a Mexican”), although they exist in very dissimilar settings, are alike in several ways. Both see themselves as independent women, having to work to support themselves and rather happier than otherwise to be able to do so. Both see themselves as powerful, specifically within their relationships with the men in their lives, and the power of each consists of a kind of magic: Clemencia is a painter who can “make” and “remake” her art and her subjects; Inés is a witch who can see past and future as well as present. Yet both, at least in the monologues that make up the stories, seem to define themselves and their lives by their relationships to men. Each is bitter that she is not the central woman in the man’s life, yet neither seems willing (or perhaps able) to end her relationship. Clemencia, especially, seems tied to her ex-lover to the point that she “circles around” him obsessively. Perhaps the reader finds this obsession less understandable in her case only because she has no children from the relationship, whereas Inés does have children with Zapata; Clemencia reveals that she has had affairs with other men, while Inés has not, but for each of these women her relationship with the man she addresses (Drew, Zapata) is obviously the central and only serious romantic relationship of her life.
Both women seem to define their relationships as love, and to both of them this seems to mean, among other things, holding power over their men. Each woman seems to compare and contrast her relationship with her lover to her relationship with her father. In each story, too, the narrator seems to emphasize a class difference between her and her lover—Clemencia is introduced to her lover’s wife at an exhibition where the wife is a patron and the artist has brought her students; Inés remarks her father’s dislike for Zapata who dresses in a flashy “charro” (cowboy) style in contrast to the peasant dress of the farmers. These contrasts are underlined in “Bread,” where the non-Latino lover remarks upon the “charm” of a section of the city where the speaker’s small cousin died from eating rat poison.
In each story, a central image is the gaze of the woman; she looks at the sleeping man and thus possesses him. In “Never Marry a Mexican,” this is reinforced by the narrator’s similar possession of her lover’s son and by her use of one or both men as models in her painting, whereby others see them through her eyes.
In their structure, the two stories are very similar. Neither is a traditional linear narrative, and both deliberately blur the usual concept of time—past, present, and future. Inés, in her out-of-body travel, can see all times and places, and her “circling” over Zapata and their lives is, she says, literal. The artist also “circles,” reliving past times, addressing Drew and his son alternately in a way that suggests they are sometimes, to her, the same person.
