Poverty and Entrapment Theme Analysis

Julia Reyes and her parents live in a roach-infested apartment in a working-class neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. Stomping roaches dead and mopping up their guts is a regular necessity—and outside of the apartment, things are sometimes even worse. Julia must endure threats and harassment from neighborhood men as well as a chronic lack of money for public transportation and food. Her friends from school, Lorena and Juanga, face similar problems, and often have to resort to theft to get by or endure homelessness due to problems at home. Julia’s difficult circumstances make her feel trapped, and make her dreams of attending a prestigious college and making a life as a writer are all but impossible. On a visit to Mexico, Julia encounters poverty on a vastly different scale, and is forced to consider the ways in which poverty forces desperate people to do terrible things. Throughout the novel, Erika L. Sánchez examines the structural problems that threaten to hold Julia and her friends back, and ultimately suggests that extreme poverty is a cycle which only a fortunate few are able to escape.

The truly abject circumstances Julia has grown up in have always just been considered a given. As undocumented immigrants, her parents have limited opportunities to bring in an income: her father is a factory worker and her mother is a housecleaner. Because Julia is so ambitious and self-centered a lot of the time, she begins resenting her parents for entrapping her in poverty rather than taking a hard look at the mechanisms which are keeping them down, and extending to them empathy and assistance rather than judgement and vitriol. There are several moments in the novel that force Julia to reckon with the cyclical, systemic poverty which plagues her family, and to see that while her circumstances are difficult, the very idea that she has a chance to escape is more than so many people in her community have. When Julia goes with her mother to clean houses one winter day, she witnesses firsthand the sacrifices—both physical and moral—her mother has to make every day just to make ends meet for Julia. From employers who speak smugly and condescendingly in Spanish to her to those who sexually objectify her and force her to clean disgusting, almost purposefully dirty parts of their homes, Amá never knows what kind of house she’s walking into. Julia sees firsthand the repetitive and difficult nature of her mother’s work life, and begins to understand that her mother is trying her hardest to make the best of a system that’s rigged against her.

When Julia visits Mexico and discovers several beautiful drawings that Apá made when he was still living in Los Ojos, she understands even more deeply the sacrifices required of a life lived in pursuit of escaping cyclical, systemic poverty. Though Apá was widely regarded as the best painter in Los Ojos, he gave up his art entirely once he arrived in America. When Julia herself returns to Chicago and asks her father why he gave up drawing and painting, he explains that continuing to make them would have been “a waste of time,” nothing more than a painful reminder of all the avenues in life that closed to him the moment he crossed the border. Apá’s aloof, resigned nature makes sense to Julia in a new way all of a sudden—she sees that within the trap of poverty, there’s barely any opportunity to escape, let alone to stop and breathe.

Julia’s most personal reckoning with the nature of poverty comes when she begins dating a boy she meets at a used bookstore in downtown Chicago. The cute and smart Connor has grown up in Evanston—a wealthy suburb of Chicago—and has lived a life which is almost the opposite of Julia’s. When she goes to visit Connor at his parents’ sprawling house, which is the size of the entire apartment building Julia and her family live in, she sees at last the vast gulf between her life and Connor’s. Though fewer than twenty miles separate their homes, an unspeakable ocean of experience lies between them. Julia’s parents work hard, subject themselves to humiliation, and give up their dreams each and every day just to scrape by within a system which ignores or outright exploits them, while Connor has never known what it’s like to open the fridge and find nothing but condiments or stomp out roaches when they scatter at the flick of a light switch. Julia begins to understand in a more acute way just how difficult it might be for her to achieve her dreams—and how worth, dedication, and sacrifice rarely have any relation to success in America.

Julia is still just a teenager at the end of the novel, but wise beyond her years. As she boards a plane to fly off to NYU on a full scholarship, she is acutely aware of just how lucky she is to be given the opportunity to escape the south side of Chicago. She has seen in action the systems of oppression, debt, and labor which keep the poor impoverished while the rich get richer, and understands that her escape from it represents a responsibility to honor the sacrifices her parents have made for her, and to never forget the combination of hard work and dumb luck that have allowed her the chance to be the first in her family to break the cycle.