No, of course not. I see.

"This happened, too. I swear I'm not making this up. It's all true. It was the last time I was going to be with your father. We had agreed. All for the best. Surely I could see that, couldn't I? My own good. A good sport. A young girl like me. Hadn't I understood... responsibilities. Besides, he could never marry me. You didn't think...? Never marry a Mexican. Never marry a Mexican... No, of course not. I see. I see."

Though brief, this passage, appearing midway through “Never Marry a Mexican,” is among the story’s most emotionally resonant. Coming directly after two sections that traded narrative audience, it capitalizes on the mild confusion bred by the transition. Throughout, the piece is written in a subjective narrative first-person: our protagonist is telling her story. Less consistent, though, is to whom, and the answer changes several times, here being particularly noteworthy. Whereas the opening portion feels as though (or at least doesn’t dissuade the reader from believing that) it is directed at the reader, this passage, as with a few others in the piece, is directed very specifically at someone within the story: the son of her ex-lover, whom, despite her claims, she still loves dearly, and whose decision to end their affair has left a permanent blemish she can’t escape. These shifts in audience are accompanied by shifts in tone: as the material becomes increasingly personal, and often enough increasingly dark with it, it also becomes increasingly conversational. This allows Cisneros a greater flexibility with the structure of the language – unlike the opening section, which reads as her telling a story, and as such relies on traditional sentence structure, the passage where she’s telling the son of the last time she saw his father is a conversation, an emotionally-charged one, at that, and reads as such. Few of the sentences are complete, and one of those is just the assurance “I swear I’m not making this up.” The most substantive, “It was the last time I was going to be with your father,” comes early in the paragraph, and is followed by a string of broken statements, headed by “We had agreed,” and degenerating into a string platitudes, “All for the best,” “My own good,” that makes the entirety reek of a pained disingenuousness. It is largely the structure – the fragments, the statements trailing off into ellipses -- that convey the narrator’s state, driven to distraction by the memory of it.

For a story dominated by the tragic romantic misadventures of its protagonist, very little is invested in characterization of the two primary romantic counterparts: Drew, the father, seems complex from an objective distance, but all his traits are being filtered through the anguish of our narrator, as it standard for a subjective narration; the son serves as little more than a confidante and prop for her sexual revenge. This flatness might seem peculiar, if the audience were at any point mislead to believe that her romances were the piece’s central theme. But no, of course not – there is a reason the story begins at the border, and the first portion is devoted to her family’s, and her own, identity crisis. In this passage, that confusion expressed as a child comes back with bruising pertinence, riding on the back of a motif, suddenly and surprisingly doing double-duty. When the piece opens, her reflection on her mother’s advice to “Never marry a Mexican,” and how she’d extended that to all men, but with particular focus on a laundry list of Central and South American nationalities, gave the impression of an independent young woman, yes, but as importantly one defining herself (and being defined as those around her) as from “el otro lado,” primarily American. Here, though, the very same mantra is being applied to her, giving reason (whether unspoken or not) for her romantic abandonment. And her understanding and acceptance of this – “No, of course not. I see. I see.” – is devastating.

Discussion question: is there a particular significance to the gummi bears? If so, what?