Sabrina & Corina: Stories

“Lying there with my mother in the afternoon light of my bedroom, I imagined her far into the future, driving day and night, her little white truck sliding from mountain peak to valley, through snow and heat waves, windstorms and lightning. Her headlights beam bright and warm, shining into town, the place where I’ll live when I’m finally a grown-up and my mother’s black hair is silver and her face is well lined. In the distance, I see her arriving, joyously waving to me, her last stop.” 

This quote reveals that, beneath Sierra’s facade of toughness, glib invulnerability, and sarcasm, her dearest wish is for her mother to love and want her. Although she spends most of the story exercising cold antagonism or an attitude of indifference toward her mother, and rejects a figurative motherhood for herself during the sugar baby assignment, this passage illustrates the true vulnerability that animates the construction of her persona. 

“The lighting was warm and rosy and on each of the four walls was a full-length mirror. My grandmother believed every woman needed to know how she looked from any angle. It was important, she said, to know how the rest of the world viewed us.” 

Corina’s grandmother enforces the male gaze on her granddaughters. She has taught them, since they were children, to view themselves through the eyes of men. This simple detail reflects the role of women as guardians of patriarchy, who help to perpetuate its strictures by normalizing a power structure that renders women as objects to be claimed and consumed by men. It shows that it is not only men who create and maintain the culture of patriarchy: Women can also play key roles keeping other women in line according to the ideology of patriarchy.  

“Even after she dropped out in eleventh grade to work at a sports bar downtown, I used to do homework in the back booth, marveling at the way she glided between tables, sleek and fluid with her long hair curled around her elegant neck. Men would follow her between their bites of onion rings and beer-battered fish, insatiable, as if my cousin was just another symptom of their hunger.” 

This passage illustrates the differing manners in which Sabrina and Corina respond to the pervasive misogyny of their patriarchal environment. While Sabrina finds some fleeting sense of worth in the sexual attention of men, Corina quietly studies her, comprehending more about the situation than the seemingly mindless and predatory men who swarm around Sabrina. Although the atmosphere of sexual objectification and male violence seems inescapable and pervasive, Corina constructs her own kind of escape through her critical engagement with her own position as a woman, and that of Sabrina as well. She strives to see Sabrina not solely as a pretty face, which is how she is treated by most people in the community (both men and women), but as a human being and a woman who is struggling within a violent environment. 

“I took a seat in the last row of the viewing room. Classical music played from the ceiling speakers. Sabrina’s casket was open, flowers arranged on either side, an ivory curtain behind it, making it look as though she was on a stage. Aunties and uncles walked with their arms linked. They gazed down, turned their heads to the side, whispered, and stepped away. Some of my cousins smoothed her hair. My mother kissed her hands. My grandmother snapped a photo as a part of her normal routine at funerals. When it was my turn, I kneeled at Sabrina’s casket and touched her face. It felt colder than before. There was lipstick on her forehead where someone had kissed her. I was smudging it away when my grandmother appeared at my side. ‘Everyone is saying she looks beautiful, Corina.’ She patted my head and kissed my cheek.” 

This passage demonstrates the pageantry of Sabrina’s funeral, which perpetuates the same lack of understanding and objectification that characterized her life. This story illustrates how Sabrina’s community was complicit in her death, and in the injustice that pervaded her life. Everyone—young and old, women and men—treats Sabrina as a living doll, in both life and death. Her murderer, a man, is never named or discussed in any detail. Instead, details like this are fleshed out: the artifice of dolling up Sabrina’s dead face with makeup, placing her body on a stage, and then lining up to consume it, one last time. The ritual of her funeral does nothing to express the reality of her life, and is done more for the living than for her. This crystallizes Sabrina’s role within the community: Her own identity, agency, desires, and humanity are conveniently papered over under a palatable facade of the pretty girl, who exists to satisfy the gazes of everyone around her, rather than to be a full person. 

“The other theater never played pictures in Spanish, and Doty suspected that, as usual, Tina had found her date with a white man. Her sister had a thing for Anglos. They made more money, they could live and go anywhere in the city, and Tina believed each of the sisters could end up married to one. After all, they were both light-complected. But Doty felt white men treated her as something less than a full woman, a type of exotic object to display in their homes like a dead animal.” 

Tina, eager to get married, has secured a date. The passage demonstrates how marriage serves as a vehicle for class- and race-based social ascension. Under White supremacist patriarchy, Latina women such as Tina can use their light skin as an asset that can elevate them from their lower social standing as Latina women. The caste system of White supremacist patriarchy is on full display here, as Tina grasps that White men have the only true and unfettered freedom within this complex cultural, social, and economic system. As the story demonstrates, her lack of criticality about that system, substituted for a desire to progress within it, makes her complicit in the violence that Doty eventually suffers. It can be argued that Tina’s uncritical worship of Whiteness plays a pivotal role in Doty’s ostracization and mistreatment. 

“They mostly sat at the tables along the front, Tina scoping out the room for the best-looking men and the prettiest girls. ‘Competition,’ she always said, but Doty never cared for the men there, and she didn’t view the women as competition. She simply enjoyed them, their beautiful clothes and hair, their bright happy faces.” 

This passage demonstrates the differing mentalities of the two sisters. Because Tina is engaged in an individualistic, almost Darwinian struggle to transcend her social and racial position, she sees other women merely as competition, with the potential to derail her from her goal of securing an advantageous marriage. On the other hand, Doty has no interest in using the overarching caste structure of White supremacist patriarchy to her advantage. Instead, she is simply interested in experiencing and appreciating the beauty of the women at the dance. 

“Vanity is risky, my baby. Let me tell you, you had a great-great-aunt, Milagros, the same Milagros your mother is named after, and she used the herbs too often and her black hair grew so long and so beautiful that all the men in our pueblo and even from far away wanted to marry her, but she would not choose one because she believed the longer and more beautiful her hair grew, the better her choices of husband would be until one night, when the rest of the children were sleeping soundly in the same bedroom, her hair coiled around her neck like a snake, squeezing all the life from her throat.” 

While Grandma Estrella’s remedies illustrate the power of ancestral traditions to heal and transmit community wisdom and resilience, tales such as the one in this passage illustrate the coexistent power of ancestral traditions to transmit the values of patriarchy. While Grandma Estrella’s remedies preserve and enhance life, this tale is a cautionary one, designed to police women’s interest in themselves and warn them that they must never get carried away with enjoying or cultivating their own beauty. It teaches them that their beauty is not a power that they can claim for themselves, or something that can be enjoyed on its own terms, but rather that it is something that should always remain submissive to male desire—lest that vanity get out of control and claim their very lives. 

“Grandma Estrella used to bathe me […] when I was younger, working my knees and elbows with a washcloth and Ivory soap. Once, I asked her why she needed to scrub so hard it hurt. ‘Because we are not dirty people,’ she had said. Later, when I asked Mama about it, she told me when Grandma Estrella was a little girl, her own teachers called her a dirty Mexican and it never left her, the shame of dirt.” 

This quote shows the enduring scars of White supremacy. The fact that Ivory soap here is specifically named is not a coincidence, as the bar is famously white in color, and its very name is a term for a white color. Historically, Ivory soap advertisements even trafficked in images that posed dark-skinned Indigenous peoples as dirty, and in need of the cleansing power of whiteness to purify and clean them. The psychic violence of this ideology is not abstract—it leaves longstanding, hurtful evidence of its corrosive presence. This fact is exemplified by Grandma Estrella’s internalization of the racial insult she received as a child. 

“We sat around my mother like she was a tree, hooking onto her limbs, smoothing her scratchy Pendleton blankets. My father told stories of work—the new tenants, the old ones who had passed, and the renovations to the eighth-floor deck. After a while, he was quiet and let his forehead rest against her crown. Before my mother was sick, he often slid his arms around her waist as she cooked dinner. He sniffed her curls and kissed her shoulders and earlobes. She used to giggle, shaking him off, saying, ‘Stop that, Ramón, the babies don’t want to see that.’” 

This passage depicts the Atencio family in a moment of caring for Nayeli: “Julian Plaza” is a bit of an outlier in the collection, as it depicts a family whose members thoroughly enjoy intimate, loving relationships with each other. The quiet simplicity of their love and intimacy is on display here, as each member of the family does everything they can to support the healing and life of Nayeli. 

“‘Maybe she was abandoned,’ [Cora] suggested. Cora smirked and I felt the edges of my mouth mirror hers. Like blackbirds silently shifting direction in midflight, in that moment we understood one another without words. We wanted to take that baby deer home with us, where it would sleep beneath our beds, graze throughout our yard, drink water from our tub. Our new sister, the animal. But we heard our mother then. She was sprinting in our direction, her hands gripping the bottom of her long yellow sundress as she shouted, ‘No, baby girls!’ She looked taller and stronger than usual as she ran in strappy leather sandals. Even in twilight, I could see her face, determined and poised. She looked like fire burning her way across the valley.” 

Alejandra’s memory communicates one of the story’s underlying themes: the loss of innocence. The story explores the ways that the logic of children is both sincere and misguided—and how this logic will always conflict with the reality of the world. Nayeli’s strong, authoritative but also nurturing and corrective entrance into the scene exemplifies this idea. This memory from Alejandra’s childhood is also a form of foreshadowing. The girls bypassed logic, practicality, and reality as they spontaneously hatched a plan to bring the baby deer home and raise it as their sister—in much the same manner that they will later hatch a plan to spring their seriously ill mother from Miss Cynthia’s house. The memory takes on a special poignancy when the reader realizes that it is the random cruelty of the world, as well as insurmountable class and money obstacles, that will shatter the girls’ hopes of nursing their mother back to health. 

“But Cora didn’t have to find a new way to bring our mother home, because not long after, while the three of us were at Julian Plaza—my father on his knees, pulling white hairs from drains, and Cora and me watching Nickelodeon in the rec room—our garage was robbed, the thieves taking everything my father sold to pay Miss Cynthia.” 

This quote illustrates the brutal reality that surrounds the Atencio family’s small and fragile refuge of familial love and loyalty. The love and dedication that they have for each other is not enough to sustain them; financial realities make them vulnerable. The only way that Ramón can provide for his family and arrange for semi-professional medical care for Nayeli is by doing degrading tasks at his day job, and by selling stolen or salvaged items out of his garage. Once he loses this side job to thievery, Nayeli must come home, as he can no longer afford to pay Miss Cynthia. 

“Alana had been suggesting for years that Pearla sell her house on Galapago and rent an apartment in a building for seniors. The Denver housing market was booming, Alana often said, and retirement homes were much more chic than they used to be. Even houses on the Westside were going for half a million dollars. But Pearla had been on Galapago for sixty-two years, since she married Avel, when they were the first in the family, on either side, to own property.” 

This passage highlights the generational divide that influences Alana and Pearla. Alana, practical and young, does not quite grasp the gravity or importance of Pearla’s home ownership. Eager to place her grandmother somewhere where she will worry about her less, Alana wants Pearla to move into a senior home. Pearla, on the other hand, has a broader view of the family and regional history, which animates her desire to keep her home on Galapago. To be the first in the family to own property, and to persist in her presence despite gentrification displacing her neighbors and community, is no small feat. 

“As they entered Mt. Olivet’s iron gates, clouds seemed clear and sunshine brightened the headstones and mausoleums. They first drove by the graves belonging to rich folks, those with marble angels and stone beacons. All her life, Pearla had put aside money for a respectable grave, prematurely using the money for Mercedes, giving her daughter a proper stone. Her own parents were buried in the desert with only wooden crosses to mark their bones. The crosses decayed over time, crouching into the earth, until one summer, on a road trip to the San Luis Valley with Avel and Mercedes, Pearla couldn’t locate her mama’s and papa’s graves anymore. She left wildflowers and sage near a mile marker that seemed close enough.” 

This passage demonstrates that the material impoverishment of the Latino working class in America persists even in death. Fajardo-Anstine examines the less-obvious effects of inequality and segregation—which not only control movement and life while people are alive, but dictates a caste stratification in death, and therefore affects the psychic and psychological realms. Here, Fajardo-Anstine highlights how Pearla used her energy while she was alive to save up for a “respectable” burial for herself and her family. Pearla’s preoccupation with her family’s burial and extra labor of planning and scrimping to prepare for death demonstrates the far-reaching stranglehold that America’s social and cultural structuring exercises on her life. 

“A detective called me the next morning. In a booming, breezy voice, he told me he understood how scared I must be, but pressing charges would mean a trial. It could take weeks, months, to convict this guy. It’ll be tricky, he explained, especially since you two weren’t technically dating. I eventually agreed. What I wanted most, I told him, was to go home. ‘Good choice,’ he said. ‘By the way. I’m looking at your pictures right now. You’re Spanish or something, right? You could be a model. Something in those eyes.’” 

In this quote, we see the aftermath of the incident in which Liz’s lover attacked her. The individual who is supposed to be looking out for her welfare as a crime victim—the detective—is not helpful. In fact, he dissuades her from pursuing a criminal case against her former lover. He objectifies her and comments upon her appearance at the end of the conversation—which is an inappropriate, sexualized manner to interact with her. Through this interaction, we see the distance between what is expected from the institution of the police, and how Liz actually experiences the police in her life. 

“As we rode the elevator, I studied my mother’s face, the corkscrew-shaped scar dangling along her jaw. It had never occurred to me, but there was a time before that scar, before my mother knew my father, when her face was still unbroken and she was still young.” 

“Cheesman Park” is about the gulf between superficiality and reality. There is the park itself, which hides its history as a former graveyard and still contains the bones of the poor in its soil. There is Liz’s face, which she wears makeup on to cover its grisly bruising. There is also her mother’s face, which bears a scar upon it from abuse that she suffered at her former husband’s hand. In this scene, Liz grapples with the fact that there was a time before that scar marred her mother’s face. Liz is acknowledging the complexity of her mother’s life, and attempting to humanize her, by appreciating that she is far more than what is only skin-deep. 

“We lived on Denver’s Northside, in the shadow of Mile High Stadium, a neighborhood that was now called Highlands, though only white people said that. Our house was a slender brick square that rested on a high plot, giving it the illusion of something great among knifing condos and black BMWs. The gentrification reminded me of tornadoes, demolishing one block while casually leaving another intact. Our block, Vallejo Street, was unrecognizable.”

Cole reflects on the gentrification of her neighborhood. There are various elements that contribute to the erasure of herself and her community, including the deceptively simple issue of naming the neighborhood itself. We see that only White people call the neighborhood Highlands. This name change, achieved exclusively through White people’s parlance, is the first step of erasure: It imposes a new name—and thus a new identity—upon the neighborhood. It’s also an act of “Columbusing”—a phenomenon coined within contemporary pop culture to denote how White people historically come upon a territory and summarily erase the people, culture, and civilization that already exists there, to rename and reclaim that territory as their own discovery.

“The class I liked most, though, was Language Arts. We read Lilies of the Field and I had this clear picture of a little desert town. I liked going there, so I read the book more than once. I also loved biographies, especially about women inventors, like Bette Graham, who came up with white-out. I thought maybe I could do something like that—come up with my own inventions, but after I got out, I knew no one would have enough faith in me.” 

Cole makes a break with the persona that she presents to the world to articulate her interior thoughts. As someone largely scorned by her community, she finds it difficult to express her true self and her true desires—and to have her true self and true desires recognized and affirmed by those within her community. Cole feels the power of others’ resignation and lack of faith in her. This limitation in the imagination and compassion of those around her has a tangible and palpable effect upon her own self-worth. 

“‘It was snowing. I was so tired and Grandma was so scared. They cut you out of me because you wouldn’t come for hours.’ She took our hands, moving them beneath the blankets and sheets, halting at her cesarean scar. ‘Here. This is where you came from. You cried and cried. The doctors said you cried so much you’d never need to cry again. They were right. You never cry, Neva. You’re always tough.’ She paused a moment, and we both were quiet.” 

Neva has asked her mother Desiree to tell her a story. The story is one of Neva’s stories—because it is the story of her birth. This idea nods to a line in the story in which Neva asserts that she has no stories of her own. In this moment, her mother chooses a story about Neva, thereby reversing Neva’s assertion and highlighting the intimacy of their relationship. 

“Her stance was wobbly and unrefined, as though she had given someone else permission to wear her skin. That’s when I knew she was forever caught in her own undercurrent, bouncing from one deep swell to the next. She would never lift me out of that sea. She would never pause to fill her lungs with air. Soon the world would yank her chain of sadness against every shore, every rock, every glass-filled beach, leaving nothing but the broken hull of a drowned woman. I turned away from my mother then, heading toward the carriage house, whispering no so many times that I sounded like a cooing dove.” 

Casey has stood up Desiree and Neva for their Christmas plans to go to Mission Beach. Desiree has raged and vandalized his house in reaction. When Neva finds Desiree packing the car the next morning, Neva assumes that they will be returning to Colorado. Instead, Desiree announces that they will still be taking the trip to Mission Beach with Casey. As Neva watches Casey make up with her mother, Neva sees that her mother is powerless. The direction of Desiree’s—and, by extension, Neva’s—life is dictated by whether Desiree can successfully maintain a romantic relationship with a man, and thereby secure some semblance of financial and social stability. 

“‘Give me just one, Ali Bird. A son to carry on my name.’ ‘You don’t need a son for that,’ she said. ‘I carry that name.’” 

Alicia does not live within a context that nurtures and cultivates her whole self, as this interaction with her husband shows. He undervalues her as a woman and his wife, who has taken his name. The fact that she now bears and carries his name within the world does not even rate a comparison to what it would mean for him to have a son (and not a daughter) to take his name and therefore uphold his legacy. This quote therefore demonstrates the quiet violence of patriarchy. It also demonstrates the small way that Alicia advocates for herself. 

“They once knew a kid who died in the yards. He wasn’t much older than sixteen. It was the middle of summer, early at night. The bull hadn’t come out to patrol. The kid was painting a train when he took a step back and a single freight rolled over him. Word spread among crews, and soon kids visited the unfinished signature, painting their own wishes in black. A poem appeared. May your journey be an endless track / may your trains keep rolling / may your name be completed when you’re back.” 

This quote develops the story’s thematic engagement with names. The story of a 16-year-old child, accidentally killed while illegally painting his name on a train, exemplifies both the beauty and precarity of the subculture that Alicia is a part of. Through tagging, she expresses her presence and identity. The members of this subculture do this in the face of gentrification, poverty, policing, and racism—things that are actively erasing and killing them. This passage shows the delicate, secret, and piecemeal way the members of this subculture assert their own presence in this world, and also affirm each other. 

“If she fails, she’ll lose her scholarship, the Displaced Fund, given to the grandchildren of Denver residents, mostly Hispano, who once occupied the Westside neighborhood before it was plowed to make way for an urban campus. Then she’ll lose her work-study job at the library. After that, Ana will be back home with Mom.”

This passage highlights the irony of Ana’s position within neocolonial America. Although she is a descendant of the Navajo people, who inhabited the lands we now call America since ancient times, she finds she must defend a meager place within an imposed system of capital and race that renders her an Other, an outsider. The paltry gestures of this system at inclusion include giving her a scholarship, which ironically acknowledges her displacement, but also imposes its own set of strictures, based completely in settler logics of White supremacy, that she must meet to continue receiving monetary support. While the name of the fund, “The Displaced Fund,” gestures toward a recognition of her actual lineage and birthright to the riches of America’s territories, the fund is a function of a colonial system that sets all the terms for progress within its hierarchy while erasing and robbing Indigenous peoples of their true histories and humanity.

“‘Ghost sickness,’ says Brown, ‘is a culture-bound syndrome of the Navajo and other southwestern tribes.’ She speaks with pink gum in her tight mouth. ‘Taken out of its cultural context, the illness doesn’t exist.’ […] ‘If one were to go to the doctor today with these symptoms, you’d have what’s known as anxiety or depression. Modern medicine handles it without all-night dances and prayer ceremonies,’ says Brown sarcastically.” 

This passage demonstrates Professor Brown’s scornful, disrespectful, and racially caricaturized attitude toward Indigenous beliefs and culture. Because Brown uses the (White) modern, scientific classifications of illnesses as the only authority on such matters, it is easy for her to depict Indigenous beliefs and conventions regarding illness as mere delusions: relics of a bygone and more primitive time. The presence of Ana—a living, breathing descendant of Navajo people—does nothing to erode Brown’s position. We therefore see that the violent logics of colonial erasure continue to exercise themselves, in real time, in contemporary America. When Indigenous culture at large is rendered as a dead object, existing merely for anthropological study, the actual living descendants of Indigenous peoples are also erased and relegated to a realm that is illegible according to the conventions of White supremacist, settler colonialism.