Summary: Chapter One

An old station wagon bounces along an unpaved road through an orchard of orange, avocado, and peach trees. The family in the car includes Estrella, who just turned thirteen, and her mother, Petra. Estrella’s younger brothers Rick and Arnulfo, and her twin sisters Perla and Cuca, are also in the car. The car’s driver, a man named Perfecto, is much older than Petra. He is her companion but not her husband, and he is not the children’s father. 

The car arrives at a shabby two-room bungalow where migrant workers sometimes stay. The children go exploring in the orchard. Petra inspects the cooking pit in front of the house. Up on the porch, Perfecto kills a scorpion. Inside the house, Perfecto sees some crates that Petra can use as an altar for her statues of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. The children find an old barn. When Estrella peeks inside, birds flutter out through the caved-in roof. The startled twins scream. Perfecto, who by now has followed the children, scolds Estrella for going near the barn. The walls are ready to collapse, he says. Estrella resents being scolded by a man who is not her father.

Two boys, Alejo and his cousin Gumecindo, both fifteen, have seen the car arrive. They are stealing peaches to sell later at a flea market. When the birds fly up from the barn, Gumecindo fears that the screams he hears are connected with La Llorona, the legendary ghost of a mother whose children drowned. Alejo says the screams are just fighting cats, but he wants to go take a look anyway. At the barn, instead of cats or a ghost, Alejo and Gumecindo find a boy with a harelip and stumplike arms. The boy is playing in the barn but falls and cuts his elbow. To distract the boy, Alejo uses his hands to makes shadow puppets on the barn wall, by the light of the setting sun.

Petra loved Estrella’s father, but she was afraid of him. She thought about leaving him, but instead he left her. Supposedly he went back to Mexico to bury a dead uncle, but he never returned. He and Petra sometimes spoke by phone and argued, but they lost contact as Petra and the children moved around in search of work. Eventually, Petra bitterly accepted that her husband was not coming back. She struggled to keep the children housed and fed. When at times she lost her temper at the crying twins, Estrella intervened. When Perfecto came into Petra’s life, Estrella resented him at first. She found his toolbox interesting, however, and Perfecto kindly explained to her what each tool was for, and how to use it. Estrella realized that knowledge is power. The teachers at school had been more interested in getting her and the other migrant children cleaned up and free of lice than in teaching them anything. But now Estrella wanted to learn to read, and she did.

Estrella once got into a fight about Perfecto, with a white girl named Maxine. Maxine was from a migrant family with a bad reputation. One of the brothers would steal comic books. Maxine couldn’t read, so one evening, she asked Estrella to read a comic book to her. From then on, Estrella would often read to Maxine after the two of them were done working in the fields. When Maxine saw Perfecto and learned that Perfecto wasn’t Estrella’s father, Maxine asked why Petra was sleeping with him. At that, Estrella attacked Maxine. Maxine’s mother broke the fight up by beating Estrella with a broom handle and threatening to kill her if she didn’t go home immediately. The foreman asked Estrella and her family to leave the area to keep the peace.

Back at the bungalow, Perfecto is plugging a hole where mice come and go. There is still some tension between him and Estrella over her visit to the barn, but the two of them work together to get the hole patched. Later, Estrella takes a watermelon to an irrigation ditch to wash it, and when it slips from her grasp she swims after it. Alejo, up in a tree, spies on her by the light of the full moon. When Estrella returns to the house, her mother is out warming herself by the remains of a fire in the cooking pit. Petra has Estrella draw a circle around the house with a stick, to keep scorpions away from the house during the night.

In the morning, as a plane sprays insecticide on a nearby grape field, Alejo comes back to the house. He brings a sack of peaches as a gift. Petra gives him some beans in return. When she tells him they are for his mother, Alejo replies that his mother is dead. After a little more conversation with Petra and Estrella, Alejo politely says goodbye and walks away. Turning back for one last look, he thinks of the girl he just now spoke with, the girl he spied on by moonlight.

Analysis: Chapter One

The opening sentence of the novel introduces the barn, which will be a powerful symbol throughout the book, representing possibility, an escape for Estrella from the limitations of her daily life, and Estrella’s own future. The barn is compared to the full moon and a cathedral, a pair of images suggesting the balance throughout the novel of the power of magic and folk belief with faith in the Catholic church. It provides shade from the intense sun, and its vacancy allows breezes to move throughout it freely. While standing in the barn, Estrella recalls the only real memory she has of her father. Then Perfecto interrupts her reverie with an admonishment, telling her she has “no business” in the barn. His edict leaves her wounded by anger. She rejects his command because he is not her father and therefore has no right to impose limitations on her.

Throughout this chapter and the book as a whole, Viramontes uses lush images of the natural world to describe a theme of the contrast between the abundance of the world the migrant laborers live in and the subsistence poverty the agricultural market system forces them into. The landscape is full of beauty and plenty, from the wind moving through the fruit trees to the oranges described as ornaments above their heads. Yet even as the natural world is described as beautiful, it is vulnerable to being destroyed by the agricultural system, as are the workers’ lives. Though the foreman tells the workers that the water is safe, the workers know that pesticides leech into the irrigation canals. When Estrella and Maxine lie in the cattail reeds to look at comic books, the scene is spoiled by the rotting body of a dead dog floating in the water. It is a harsh reminder that the natural world provides, but it has also been poisoned by the agricultural system, which consumes its less fortunate creatures.

Birds are a motif throughout the novel, often suggesting a possibility of a life of greater freedom for the workers. When the family first arrives at the bungalow, a dead bird inside the house reminds Perfecto that sparrows that get into buildings will kill themselves by beating their bodies against the walls that trap them. This reminder represents his own fear of dying while unable to escape the labor system. While the system traps the workers in a highly regimented life, Viramontes contrasts their lives with images of birds flying around the same environments, following their own needs and desires. When Estrella opens the door to the barn, the noise leads the owls and swallows inside to rush out at once, foreshadowing the power to inspire people that she will come into at the end of the book. Alejo makes bird shadows to calm the injured boy in the barn, an example of the grace of birds inspiring people to see more beauty and possibility in the world. Birds’ ability to find freedom and gather in flocks makes them an apt symbol for the workers in the novel.