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Gonzalo
Tío Juan is Gonzalo’s great-uncle. He immigrated to Cleveland from Guatemala to be with his family about two years before the novel begins. As Gonzalo explains, Tío Juan used to be the oldest and most respected man in his pueblo in Guatemala, but in the U.S., Tío Juan is essentially like a baby. He’s unable to do anything for himself since he doesn’t speak English (nor does he speak Spanish; he speaks an “Indian language” that only Gonzalo’s mother speaks), and everything about big-city life is foreign to him as a retired farmer. When Tío Juan and Gonzalo begin to work together in the garden, the experience transforms Gonzalo’s view of his great-uncle. While Gonzalo realizes he knows nothing about gardening, Tío Juan knows exactly how to cultivate the seeds that Gonzalo’s mother buys for him, and he makes a point to help other novice gardeners achieve good results with their own crops. As with many characters in the novel, the garden helps people see fuller, more complex versions of one another.
Tío Juan Quotes in Seedfolks
The Seedfolks quotes below are all either spoken by Tío Juan or refer to Tío Juan. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 4: Gonzalo
Quotes
He’d been a farmer, but here he couldn’t work. He couldn’t sit out in the plaza and talk—there aren’t any plazas here, and if you sit out in public some gang driving by might use you for target practice. He couldn’t understand TV. So he wandered around the apartment all day, in and out of rooms, talking to himself, just like a kid in diapers.
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Watching him carefully sprinkling [the seeds] into the troughs he’d made, I realized that I didn’t know anything about growing food and that he knew everything. I stared at his busy fingers, then his eyes. They were focused, not faraway or confused. He’d changed from a baby back into a man.
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Chapter 9: Curtis
Quotes
I got into it. Every day something new. The first flower bud. Then those first yellow flowers. Then the tomatoes growing right behind ‘em. This old man with no teeth and a straw hat showed me how to tie the plants up to stakes.
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You drop bread on the ground and birds come out of nowhere. Same with that garden. People just appeared, people you didn’t know were there. Royce was like that.
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Chapter 10: Nora
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A fact bobbed up from my memory, that the ancient Egyptians prescribed walking through a garden as a cure for the mad. It was a mind-altering drug we took daily.
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Tío Juan Quotes in Seedfolks
The Seedfolks quotes below are all either spoken by Tío Juan or refer to Tío Juan. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 4: Gonzalo
Quotes
He’d been a farmer, but here he couldn’t work. He couldn’t sit out in the plaza and talk—there aren’t any plazas here, and if you sit out in public some gang driving by might use you for target practice. He couldn’t understand TV. So he wandered around the apartment all day, in and out of rooms, talking to himself, just like a kid in diapers.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Watching him carefully sprinkling [the seeds] into the troughs he’d made, I realized that I didn’t know anything about growing food and that he knew everything. I stared at his busy fingers, then his eyes. They were focused, not faraway or confused. He’d changed from a baby back into a man.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9: Curtis
Quotes
I got into it. Every day something new. The first flower bud. Then those first yellow flowers. Then the tomatoes growing right behind ‘em. This old man with no teeth and a straw hat showed me how to tie the plants up to stakes.
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Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
You drop bread on the ground and birds come out of nowhere. Same with that garden. People just appeared, people you didn’t know were there. Royce was like that.
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Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10: Nora
Quotes
A fact bobbed up from my memory, that the ancient Egyptians prescribed walking through a garden as a cure for the mad. It was a mind-altering drug we took daily.
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