Hair Dye, “Miss Clairol”
This story opens with Latina Arlene going through the hair dye section at the K-Mart within walking distance of her home. She’s already been through “Light Ash” and “Flame” and “Sun Bronze.” There are still yet many shades to go which deny her own natural hair color. Many scholars have identified the title product along with Arlene’s particular choices as a symbol of how the media and tries to erase Hispanic ethnic identity in the process of systemic assimilation of immigrants from south of the border.
Stickball, “Growing”
In this story, 14-year-old Naomi is growing up fast. Just a few years earlier she had the freedom to join in a neighborhood stickball game with no thoughts about it being “unbecoming of her.” Little had really changed since then, but now stickball is a symbol of the carefree carelessness of being a kid that is gone forever in the face of grown men honking from their cars at her and calling out “You make me ache” and younger boys following her at the fair and getting her grounded for two weeks.
“The Cariboo Café”
The misspelling of the animal which gives this greasy diner its name becomes symbolic as a result of its misapprehension. The café is the final destination—the end of the line—for a number of different and varied characters including the somewhat xenophobic white owner of the café, an illegal immigrant and two young immigrant children. The symbolism is made clear in the woman’s description of the café as—transposing the letters into numbers—“the zero-zero place.”
“The Moths”
The title creatures of this story are situated explicitly by the narrator near the end of the story when she writes of how her now-dead grandmother explained about “the moths that lay within the soul and slowly eat the spirit up.” At the moment of her grandmother’s death, the moths spills out fill the room, suggesting death is the only real mechanism to unleash the sweet release from the misery and pain of living.
Men
In almost all the relevant stories, men are symbols of the oppression of women. The fathers of young Latinas in “The Moths” and “Growing” are brutishly authoritarian dictators. Husbands are soul-sucking life-takers who usually wind up leaving their wives to half a lifetime of as desperate isolation as in “Snapshots.” Boyfriends are jerks who shrug off responsibility onto their sexual partners like the abortion-seeking Alice in “Birthday.” And from older men making suggestive comments to 14-year-old girls from their car to the parade of dates that Arlene dyes her hair for in “Miss Clairol” the general perspective toward men is that of users and exploiters.
