Learn Your Role And Know Your Place

For many years, Sofia had been pitied as "la Abandonada," roughly translated as deserted, neglected, or abandoned (Larousse 2), but all these years, it had been a role she had been forced to play. A role which she had played so well that she ultimately had convinced herself that Domingo had deserted her. Until he had gambled away what was left of her land to a corrupt judge. (215)

"As her memory came back to her," she realized "how, back in those early days Domingo was little by little betting away the land she had inherited from her father, and finally she couldn't take no more and gave him his walking papers. Just like that, she said, 'Go hombre, before you leave us al out on the street!' Yes! It had been Sofia who had made Domingo leave" (214). "So, without exchanging two words about her decision with Domingo who surely must have seen it coming anyway, Sofia had her peacock-raising lawyer serve the papers she figured were twenty years overdue, and told him to leave" (216-217).

"But back then, to be excommunicated was more fearful to Sofia than the thought of destitution; not to mention that her mother was still alive then, and her mother had been like the Church's conscience incarnated to her daughter. If anything ever brought the fear of God to Sofi even more than the thought of being excommunicated it was her mother's disapproval, so divorce had been out of the question" (218).

So it had been better for everyone, including her daughters to think Sofi had been abandoned, leading to devastatingly codependent behavior in practically all of them.

Sofi reminds me a lot of my maternal grandmother who also married a slick, charming man. But my maternal grandfather was a womanizing ne'er-do-well who saddled her with the eight children who survived her fourteen pregnancies. My grandmother was pitied by the community because she had to work hard herself to support her community. Except at the height of the Great Depression when Franklin Deleanore Roosevelt's work programs prohibited giving work to any married woman who had a husband to support her.

My mother remembers this as the happiest time the family had where her father, a normally peevish and abusive man, was concerned. He would come home exhausted from work, his food would be waiting on the table and he seemed more mellow and affectionate back then. But shortly after the war in Europe started the factories up again, my grandmother voluntarily went back to work and my grandfather went back to being an itinerant painter.

Through the ensuing years, my grandmother labored in the factory pulling double shifts while the whole community, indeed her own children, pitied "Poor little Helen" for having to be practically the sole support of her large family and her lazy husband. What is interesting is that, after my grandmother divorced my grandfather because he was abusive to the children, he married his mistress, got a real job and supported her for the rest of her life. Even then my grandmother always publicly lamented over the disgrace of being divorced, refusing to even consider another man though she was still just in her fifties.

The truth is, like Sofia la Abandonada, Poor little Helen was a proactive woman who had made her own choices. My grandmother didn't care much for the life of a housewife, she loved making her own money, and she practically had to be forced out at retirement. And the reason why she never remarried after divorcing my grandfather was that she loved her independence too much. The problem is that, like Sofia, the last people she clued in were her own daughters who grew up with severe codependent issues of their own.

Works Cited

Castillo, Anna. So Far From God. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1993.

Larousse Concise Dictionary. Spanish-English/English-SpanishThird Edition, Paris France. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006.

Dreams Betrayed

In the very Catholic world of So Far From God, the highest thing that women can aspire to be is wife and mother. The idea that is presented to them by the culture is if the women made the right choices and did everything that was expected of them, they could achieve their goals. It was evident that Sofia messed up from the get-go.

"That marriage had a black ribbon on its door from the beginning. Sofi's grandfather had refused to give the young lovers his blessing, the father had forbidden Sofi's querido to step foot in their house during their three-year courtship, and the local parish priest joined the opposition when he refused to marry the couple in the church" (21).

Sofi's querido had a well-known gambling addiction and therefore, no one was surprised when he abandoned her and their four daughters to pursue his vice. It was the natural consequence of a very bad choice by a young woman who gambled that her love could change him.

Her daughter, Fe, on the other hand, had made all the right choices. She was twenty-four, "with a steady job at the bank, and a hard-working boyfriend whom she had known forever; she had just announced their engagement" (27). "Fe was beyond reproach ... She and Thomas, 'Tom' Torres were the ideal couple in their social circle ... He did not drink or even smoke cigarettes. They were putting their money away for their wedding, a small wedding, ... because they were going to use their savings for their first house. As it was, while Fe had a little something to talk to Esperanza about, she kept away from her other sisters ..., because she just didn't understand how they could all be so self-defeating, so unambitious." (28) Yet Tom ambushes Fe by mailing her a Dear Jane letter on the heels of her paying for the fitting of her own bridal gown.

Fe's case reminds me of my mother and her generation so acutely it makes me uncomfortable. Like Fe, my mother came from a poor, working-class family. Unlike her neighborhood counterparts, she graduated from high school, worked in an office, and deliberately did not marry any of the factory workers who were attracted to her. She had noticed that factory families were always in upheavals due to constant strikes by the workers who would simply impregnate their wives during the down times. She wanted better for herself.

My mother married an air force officer and was reasonably happy for about twenty-five years. Not long after he retired, he filed for divorce, leaving her with a Dear Jane note that he had never loved her. She had further found that in this age of No Fault Divorce that she would have to use all her resources to fight off his divorce action until the laws changed regarding military pensions. At the time, she was entitled to none of it and it was not unusual to find a general's wife having to work in a shop. This was particularly unfair because military wives were not allowed to work if they wanted their husbands' careers to advance.

My mother's lament was, "we were told that if we behaved ourselves, we would be taken care of." Well, twenty-five years later, society and my father had flipped the script on her. Just as Tom had flipped the script on Fe practically the eve of her wedding. Both the literary and real-life outcomes of hanging one's dreams on another person shows how foolish it is to do so.

Works Cited

Castillo, Anna. So Far From God. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1993.