Consumer Goods Symbol Analysis

Then, she remembered her father who worked carrying sixty pounds of cement, the way he flung the sacks over his hunching shoulders for their daily meal, the weight bending his back like a mangled nail; and then she remembered her eldest daughter trying to feed the children with noise, pounding her feet drumming her hand and dancing loca to no music at all, dancing loca with the full of empty Quaker man.

Carrying the full basket to the paper was not like the picture on the red raisin boxes Estrella saw in the markets, not like the woman wearing a fluffy bonnet, holding out the grapes with her smiling, ruby lips…Her knees did not sink in the hot white soil, and she did not know how to pour the baskets of grapes inside the frame gently and bread the bunches evenly on top of the newsprint paper.

She envied the car, then envied the landlord of the car who could travel from one splat dot to another. She thought him a man who knew his neighbors well, who returned to the same bed, who could tell where the schools and where the stores were, and where the Nescafé jars in the stores were located…

The cotton balls in the jar looked too white, like imitation cotton to Petra. She noticed a scale near the desk much like the one used for measuring the weight of picked cotton. The scale reminded her how she’d wet the cotton or hid handsized rocks in the middle of her sack so that the scale tipped in her favor when the cotton was weighed. The scale predicted what she would be able to eat, the measurement of her work…

Even the many things on the nurse’s desk implied fakery; the pictures of her smiling boys (Who did they think they were, smiling so boldly at the camera?), the porcelain statue of a calico kitten with a little stethoscope, wearing a folded white cap with a red cross between its too cute perky little ears…

The clinic visit is the family’s only interaction with middle-class America in the book; the nurse is the only character who isn’t a laborer, and the clinic is one of the few real buildings that the family enters. In this context, Petra’s unease represents her total alienation from that society; the fact that ordinary accessories of middle-class life, like desk ornaments and grinning photos, are so upsetting to her emphasizes the extent to which she lives outside this society. However, it’s important that rather than accepting her exclusion, Petra pushes back. The reality of field work is often erased and ignored by the larger society, but Petra insists that her grim reality is just as important – even more real – than this seemingly normal scene. Even though this moment underlines her poverty, it’s also an important reclamation of her own narrative.

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The oil was made from their bones, and it was their bones that kept the nurse’s car from not halting on some highway, kept her on her way to Daisyfield to pick up her boys at six. It was their bones that kept the air conditioning in the cars humming, that kept them moving on the long dotted line on the map.

In this passage, Estrella is standing outside the clinic, wondering what to do next. Despite the nurse’s “generosity” in undercharging them, the fee has completely eaten up their limited funds, and they have no money to take Alejo to the hospital or get home. Interacting with the nurse has also made Estrella feel needy and indebted, but when she reframes the issue in terms of the contributions to society that she and her family have made their entire lives, it seems that it’s really the nurse (and the middle-class society she represents) who is indebted to Estrella. Here, Estrella emphatically acknowledges the value of her own work while realizing that her society will not voluntarily do the same; this is thus a moment of profound empowerment and disillusion. In a few minutes Estrella will use violence to make the nurse acknowledge her, ending her dream of achieving recognition and agency in society through meaningful and “legitimate” labor.

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