Pat Mora -- \"Curandera\" and \"Immigrants\" --

¶ … Pat Mora -- "Curandera" and "Immigrants" -- are quite different and yet they both express the what it's like to be Latina and they detail experiences that are unique to Latinas in America.

"Curandera": A curandera is a woman of Latina ethnicity who practices folk medicine. In the poem, the curandera has bonded and her life has progressed with and is dependent upon nature -- the desert -- even though she lost her husband. Her craft is about healing, and the relationship to nature is powerfully presented around the theme of healing with folk medicine.

"Her days are slow, days of grinding dried snake into power, of crushing wild bees to mix with white wine." This could be suggesting monotony because she does the same thing every day, grinding and crushing, using the available resources of nature to help people heal. But the coyote and owl, too, do the same thing every day, so it is not monotony, but rather the music of nature and the song of the desert. Ironically the desert is thought of as barren and desolate, but the curandera uses the resources there and she breathes in sync with the mice, the snakes, and the wind. Not only does she survive in the desert, she thrives, and gives life to others.

"Immigrants": This is a cryptic look at what new immigrants are supposed to do in order to be accepted into the American culture, in order to become part of that melting pot that consists of many cultures. The sad part is the immigrant can't speak Spanish or Polish out loud: "…speak to them in thick English, hallo, babee, hallo, whisper in Spanish or Polish when the babies sleep." It is almost suggested that using a native language is forbidden. Using the terms "apple pie" -- an all American cliche -- and "blonde dolls that think blue" is throwing popular (but cliched) American values into the face of the reader. The "football" and "tiny cleats" images are used in order to prepare the child for its chance at glory, because in American anyone can be a superstar in music or sports if they work hard and play by the rules.

"The Cariboo Cafe": In this short story, broken into three sections, the characters are undocumented immigrants; the mother and the children have gone over the edge of what might be considered "sane" and "normal"; which is not that unusual for "displaced people," and Helena Maria Viramontes wants readers to relate to the terror and fear that illegal immigrants experience when police are near. What makes this story stand out is the excellence in Viramontes' narrative that slaps the reader in the face with what it's really like to be an illegal immigrant in the U.S.

Viramontes makes it very interesting by aptly going into the minds of the three main characters that are seeing and reporting on the same event, which is the confrontation of a woman and the two lost children she embraces and informally adopts. What the reader gets is the fact that immigrants are not really part of the society. People do not seem to see them in the streets. Sonya, one of the two lost girls, is the classic immigrant girl totally lost in a strange world where they don't speak her language and she fears deportation.

Also in this story Viramontes describes the owner of the cafe, who has zero social standing himself but is bitter because he lost a son in Vietnam and his Spanish-speaking wife Nell is estranged from him. He seems a man without much happiness and perhaps that is the reason he informs authorities about the illegal immigrants. The author uses references of light very effectively in various ways in this story. Symbolically, the light (supposedly from a metaphoric lighthouse) provides various moods and images into the mind of the reader -- and denotes action in the story. Beams of light coalesce other beams of light and lead the children to the cafe, but in the third section of the story, after the cafe owner has notified the authorities, the next light from the searchlights of the police.

Interestingly, besides the police lights, another beacon burns "stupid" moths, and the moths become a metaphor for the illegal immigrants. The mother says that the moths "…are always attracted to the light, they fly into fires, or singe their wings…I don't understand why nature has been so cruel as to prevent them from feeling warmth" (Viramontes). Clearly the reference is to the cold chill that illegal immigrants get when facing American society, and when they are drawn to the "light" they can get burned.

A Lower East Side Poem: Miguel Pinero has a love-hate relationship with the place he lives, on the Lower East side. The poem appears to be the poet's last will and testament as he condemns the mean streets of New York and yet those are his streets so he's got to defend them too. All of the crazy activities that go on in this ghetto, the hustlers and drugs users, cocaine dealers and "freaks," and the saloons and greasy spoons -- he wants his ashes spread amongst all those wild and illegal images. Don't take my ashes back to Puerto Rico, he asks; instead please make sure to spread them were there is "…stabbing shooting gambling fighting & unnatural dying & new birth crying." The poem is hopeful, thanks to the 5th line of the final stanza (" & new birth crying"), and thanks to other lines like "I stand here proud as you can see, pleased to be from the Lower East" (Pinero). It is also a grim message that if you are born in the Lower East Side, you will likely die there. This is the poet saying who he is by where he is.