Hoyt Street by Helen Ponce Book Overview

Hoyt Street

The autobiographic work Hoyt Street by Mary Ponce describes in intimate detail what it was like growing up in a Hispanic family inside the United States of America. Even though the author is relating stories from her experiences going as far back in time in the 1940s, she is able to relate to the present audience as though a comrade in a common historical moment. The crux of the story seems to be the prejudices and discrimination that will impede her life but which are just beyond the reach of comprehension to a child age 8-13. On the cusp of her understanding are the facts that her best shoes are stained and that she works in the field and that there are some businesses where people like her are unwelcome, but this knowledge does not permeate deep enough to affect her. By presenting the story this way, author Ponce allows the reader to experience this distress through the eyes of a child and bear witness to how time allows the blinders to be removed and adulthood allows us to see the world for the terrible and abusive place that it is.

Unlike many books-based which are marketed as ethnic or racial literature, Hoyt Street does not use the Chicano heritage of the protagonist to impose a point about the place of her people within the wider culture of the American landscape. Rather she weaves in information about her heritage throughout the book so that it adds textuality to her character. This book could have been any child growing up during the 1940s in the United States. The fact that this Ponces live in a Hispanic-American household serves as background information to the small events and observations that make up the plot of the story. Yet, at the same time, the Hispanic-ness of the character and of her family also is allowed to permeate the entirety of the book. For example, Ponce blends Spanish and English phrases seamlessly within the same sentences, as people in bilingual homes often tend to do. Instead of addressing the topic of Hispanic or Mexican-American culture in order to make a political point, Ponce intricately embroiders the cultures into the everyday activities of a normal American child. Little Mary's primarily characteristic is not her culture, but her character.

Throughout the story, it is made evident that the primary relationship in the book is that of the Ponce family and the metaphor of their domesticity, the kitchen. In many households, particularly in the 1940s where the mother's job was to cook the meals and tend the household chores, the kitchen was the epicenter of a mother's warmth. Ponce says early in the book, "My first memories are of the kitchen with the window, the small room where my parents slept, and the large living room with a bed where my sisters slept" (Ponce 8). This passage indicates exactly what is important to the Mary character and what is not. The kitchen is her primary memory, the thing which has the strongest recollective power. Second to this is the mention of sleeping spaces. She recites these as facts, not giving emotion to the insinuation of lack of money or poverty which would necessitate the daughters all sleeping in the living room in one bed.