Gender roles
The vast majority of the stories in the book center around women and their way of interacting with the world. The women in the stories all suffer in some way or another and most than often the people who make them suffer are the people closest to them such as family members and their husbands. The narrator lets it be understood that it was expected for women to be treated badly by their husbands. The women even consider it normal when someone they knew turns out dead or badly beaten. This shows just how much women had to suffer and how easy it was for the men in that time to remain unpunished for their deeds and actions that more than often harmed women.
Tradition and modernity
In the short stories, many of the characters find themselves between modernity and tradition. Especially for the characters who still live in Mexico, they are subjected to following the same traditions their parents and family had to follow all their lives. This creates conflict, both internally as the characters in question are unsure what to do, and also conflict between the characters who want to change and their families who want everything to remain the same. This makes the relationship between the characters to be tense and the characters in question to be unhappy because they are unsure how to react and what is the best course they should take. The stories explore these conflicts and how hard it was for the characters to adapt to a new life.
Innocence and maturity
Another theme in the stories is coming of age. Some of the characters in the stories are children who begin learning about what it means to be an adult and live an adult life. Some children in the stories come to understand how their race, skin color, sexuality and family define them and how they can navigate in the adult world. In some stories, the children have their first sexual experience and are thrust into the adult world when they realize they are pregnant. Through these experiences that are at times violent, the characters change from kids to adults who must learn how to take responsibility for their own actions.
