Food and Hunger Symbol Analysis

Throughout I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, the teenage protagonist Julia Reyes struggles with an insatiable appetite for food. Because her family is poor—and because her parents are distracted by their overwhelming grief in the wake of their eldest daughter Olga’s death—there’s rarely anything in the house for Julia to eat. Julia’s ravenous hunger, and the food she consumes which never seems to sate it, become, throughout the novel, a symbol of Julia’s desire to escape her circumstances, make her mark on the world beyond her hometown, and live the life of plenty she’s been dreaming of for years. Conversely, just as Julia’s desire for and love of food represents her desire for more than she has, actual food symbolizes the ways in which Julia is being held back from happiness and satisfaction by the circumstances of her unhappy present: her parents’ poverty, the ways in which she feels strangled by her family’s Mexican culture, and her insecurities about her body, her sense of style, and her femininity more generally. Food doesn’t ever allow Julia an escape—even after eating a large meal she often still feels hungry, and this constant ache is symbolic of her boundless ambition and deep restlessness, and of the larger ways in which society has made her feel constantly deprived.