Estrella Character Analysis

The silence and the barn and the clouds meant many things. It was always a question of work, and work depended on the harvest, the car running, their health, the conditions of the road, how long the money held out, and the weather, which meant they could depend on nothing.

What impressed her most was the way his thumbnail plowed the peel off the orange in one long spiral, as if her father plowed the sun, as if it meant something to him to peel the orange from stem to naval without breaking the circle.

Then, she remembered her father who worked carrying sixty pounds of cement, the way he flung the sacks over his hunching shoulders for their daily meal, the weight bending his back like a mangled nail; and then she remembered her eldest daughter trying to feed the children with noise, pounding her feet drumming her hand and dancing loca to no music at all, dancing loca with the full of empty Quaker man.

She lifted the pry bar in her hand, felt the coolness of iron and power of function, weighed the significance it awarded her, and soon she came to understand how essential it was to know these things. That was when she began to read.

You think ‘cause of the water our babies are gonna come out with no mouth or something? Estrella asked, pushing up her sleeves. She lay on her stomach and dipped her bandana into the water. The cool water ran over her fingers and over the gravel like velvet.

Carrying the full basket to the paper was not like the picture on the red raisin boxes Estrella saw in the markets, not like the woman wearing a fluffy bonnet, holding out the grapes with her smiling, ruby lips…Her knees did not sink in the hot white soil, and she did not know how to pour the baskets of grapes inside the frame gently and bread the bunches evenly on top of the newsprint paper.

Don’t run scared. You stay there and look them in the eye. Don’t let them make you feel you did a crime for picking the vegetables they’ll be eating for dinner. If they stop you, if they try to pull you into the green vans, you tell them the birth certificates are under the feet of Jesus, just tell them.

She thought of the young girl that Alejo had told her about, the one girl they found in the La Brea Tar Pits. They found her in a few bones. No details of her life were left behind, no piece of cloth, no ring, no doll. A few bits of bone displayed somewhere under a glass case and nothing else.

But the tire resisted, Alejo’s body resisted, and she did not want to think what she was thinking now: God was mean and did not care and she was alone to fend for herself…All she wanted was to find a deep, dark quiet space like the barn to cry. That was due her. She deserved it.

00010

— The clinic visit is fifteen dollars, but I’ll charge you only ten because…she paused and glanced at Estrella, then added, because I know times are hard these days. She removed her black patent leather purse from the bottom drawer and placed it on the desk beside the phone. Estrella stared at the nurse an extra second. How easily she put herself in a position to judge.

10100

The oil was made from their bones, and it was their bones that kept the nurse’s car from not halting on some highway, kept her on her way to Daisyfield to pick up her boys at six. It was their bones that kept the air conditioning in the cars humming, that kept them moving on the long dotted line on the map.

In this passage, Estrella is standing outside the clinic, wondering what to do next. Despite the nurse’s “generosity” in undercharging them, the fee has completely eaten up their limited funds, and they have no money to take Alejo to the hospital or get home. Interacting with the nurse has also made Estrella feel needy and indebted, but when she reframes the issue in terms of the contributions to society that she and her family have made their entire lives, it seems that it’s really the nurse (and the middle-class society she represents) who is indebted to Estrella. Here, Estrella emphatically acknowledges the value of her own work while realizing that her society will not voluntarily do the same; this is thus a moment of profound empowerment and disillusion. In a few minutes Estrella will use violence to make the nurse acknowledge her, ending her dream of achieving recognition and agency in society through meaningful and “legitimate” labor.

10100

She did not feel like herself holding the money. She felt like two Estrellas. One was a silent phantom who obediently marked a circle with a stick around the bungalow as the mother had requested, while the other held the crowbar and the money.

After the disastrous clinic visit, Estrella stands in the parking lot wondering what to do next. Throughout the visit Perfecto and Petra have become more and more passive, and their complete absence from her deliberations now shows that she’s truly become the head of the family. Ultimately she threatens the nurse with Perfecto’s crowbar in order to get the money back, taking responsibility for her family even when she has to act in ways she finds morally distasteful. This moment is perhaps the most representative of Estrella’s coming of age, but it presents that process not as a positive development of adult character but a traumatic fracturing of identity. In order to care for her family, Estrella has to sacrifice her sense of her own goodness. This passage builds off earlier moments in which Estrella remarks that caring for her family erodes her sense of self – for example, when she envisioned herself sinking into the tar pits while digging the car out of the mud. Ultimately, it completes the novel’s argument that labor conditions and social exclusion warp the process of growing up for many Latino young people, rendering it an experience of profound loss.

10010

He had given this country his all, and in this land that had used his bones for kindling, in this land that had never once in the thirty years he lived and worked, never once said thank you, this young woman who could be his granddaughter had said the words with such honest gratitude…

After confronting the nurse and leaving the clinic, Estrella and her family drive to the nearest hospital, where Estrella lifts Alejo out of the car and prepares to shepherd her in. Looking back, she thanks Perfecto sincerely, acknowledging the effort and risk he’s incurred in order to get here. Perfecto’s comment that America has “never once said thank you” in all the time he’s worked here echoes Estrella’s epiphany outside the clinic, when she recognized both how essential her work is to keeping American society afloat and how unlikely her society is to acknowledge that fact. Here, Perfecto simultaneously enjoys a moment of sincere connection in a relationship that is often prickly and contrasts that connection to the callousness with which he’s treated by the outside world. For both Perfecto and Estrella, realizing one’s own worth goes hand in hand with renewed sadness at the experience of social indifference.

10110

The twins nuzzled under her arms. Soon, they were on the main boulevard again and the twins slowly fell into the snowlike quiet, shielded and warm and amazed that their big sister had the magic and the power in her hands to split glass in two.

After leaving Alejo in the hospital waiting room, Estrella sadly returns to the station wagon, but when she reaches the automatic doors, she makes a show of walking through them in order to amuse Cookie and Perla. Both girls are deeply impressed and fight to sit next to her on the way home. On a basic level, the fact that the girls have never seen an automatic door (a fairly ubiquitous item) underscores the family’s poverty and exclusion from basic aspects of public life. It’s also interesting that the twins derive so much security from Estrella’s trick and invest their sister with such sweeping powers. The safety they feel underscores Estrella’s actual powerlessness and the danger the family faces more than ever before. By leaving Alejo in the hospital, Estrella has finally acknowledged that she lacks the power to save him or devise a better solution; moreover, by threatening the nurse in order to get Perfecto’s money back, she’s potentially exposed herself to criminal prosecution. While the twins’ behavior creates a touching picture of family unity, it’s disturbingly clear that the safety they feel is entirely imaginary.

00010

Estrella remained as immobile as an angel standing on the verge of faith. Like the chiming bells of the great cathedrals, she believed her heart powerful enough to summon home all those who strayed.

The silence and the barn and the clouds meant many things. It was always a question of work, and work depended on the harvest, the car running, their health, the conditions of the road, how long the money held out, and the weather, which meant they could depend on nothing.

What impressed her most was the way his thumbnail plowed the peel off the orange in one long spiral, as if her father plowed the sun, as if it meant something to him to peel the orange from stem to naval without breaking the circle.

Then, she remembered her father who worked carrying sixty pounds of cement, the way he flung the sacks over his hunching shoulders for their daily meal, the weight bending his back like a mangled nail; and then she remembered her eldest daughter trying to feed the children with noise, pounding her feet drumming her hand and dancing loca to no music at all, dancing loca with the full of empty Quaker man.

She lifted the pry bar in her hand, felt the coolness of iron and power of function, weighed the significance it awarded her, and soon she came to understand how essential it was to know these things. That was when she began to read.

You think ‘cause of the water our babies are gonna come out with no mouth or something? Estrella asked, pushing up her sleeves. She lay on her stomach and dipped her bandana into the water. The cool water ran over her fingers and over the gravel like velvet.

Carrying the full basket to the paper was not like the picture on the red raisin boxes Estrella saw in the markets, not like the woman wearing a fluffy bonnet, holding out the grapes with her smiling, ruby lips…Her knees did not sink in the hot white soil, and she did not know how to pour the baskets of grapes inside the frame gently and bread the bunches evenly on top of the newsprint paper.

Don’t run scared. You stay there and look them in the eye. Don’t let them make you feel you did a crime for picking the vegetables they’ll be eating for dinner. If they stop you, if they try to pull you into the green vans, you tell them the birth certificates are under the feet of Jesus, just tell them.

She thought of the young girl that Alejo had told her about, the one girl they found in the La Brea Tar Pits. They found her in a few bones. No details of her life were left behind, no piece of cloth, no ring, no doll. A few bits of bone displayed somewhere under a glass case and nothing else.

But the tire resisted, Alejo’s body resisted, and she did not want to think what she was thinking now: God was mean and did not care and she was alone to fend for herself…All she wanted was to find a deep, dark quiet space like the barn to cry. That was due her. She deserved it.

00010

— The clinic visit is fifteen dollars, but I’ll charge you only ten because…she paused and glanced at Estrella, then added, because I know times are hard these days. She removed her black patent leather purse from the bottom drawer and placed it on the desk beside the phone. Estrella stared at the nurse an extra second. How easily she put herself in a position to judge.

10100

The oil was made from their bones, and it was their bones that kept the nurse’s car from not halting on some highway, kept her on her way to Daisyfield to pick up her boys at six. It was their bones that kept the air conditioning in the cars humming, that kept them moving on the long dotted line on the map.

In this passage, Estrella is standing outside the clinic, wondering what to do next. Despite the nurse’s “generosity” in undercharging them, the fee has completely eaten up their limited funds, and they have no money to take Alejo to the hospital or get home. Interacting with the nurse has also made Estrella feel needy and indebted, but when she reframes the issue in terms of the contributions to society that she and her family have made their entire lives, it seems that it’s really the nurse (and the middle-class society she represents) who is indebted to Estrella. Here, Estrella emphatically acknowledges the value of her own work while realizing that her society will not voluntarily do the same; this is thus a moment of profound empowerment and disillusion. In a few minutes Estrella will use violence to make the nurse acknowledge her, ending her dream of achieving recognition and agency in society through meaningful and “legitimate” labor.

10100

She did not feel like herself holding the money. She felt like two Estrellas. One was a silent phantom who obediently marked a circle with a stick around the bungalow as the mother had requested, while the other held the crowbar and the money.

After the disastrous clinic visit, Estrella stands in the parking lot wondering what to do next. Throughout the visit Perfecto and Petra have become more and more passive, and their complete absence from her deliberations now shows that she’s truly become the head of the family. Ultimately she threatens the nurse with Perfecto’s crowbar in order to get the money back, taking responsibility for her family even when she has to act in ways she finds morally distasteful. This moment is perhaps the most representative of Estrella’s coming of age, but it presents that process not as a positive development of adult character but a traumatic fracturing of identity. In order to care for her family, Estrella has to sacrifice her sense of her own goodness. This passage builds off earlier moments in which Estrella remarks that caring for her family erodes her sense of self – for example, when she envisioned herself sinking into the tar pits while digging the car out of the mud. Ultimately, it completes the novel’s argument that labor conditions and social exclusion warp the process of growing up for many Latino young people, rendering it an experience of profound loss.

10010

He had given this country his all, and in this land that had used his bones for kindling, in this land that had never once in the thirty years he lived and worked, never once said thank you, this young woman who could be his granddaughter had said the words with such honest gratitude…

After confronting the nurse and leaving the clinic, Estrella and her family drive to the nearest hospital, where Estrella lifts Alejo out of the car and prepares to shepherd her in. Looking back, she thanks Perfecto sincerely, acknowledging the effort and risk he’s incurred in order to get here. Perfecto’s comment that America has “never once said thank you” in all the time he’s worked here echoes Estrella’s epiphany outside the clinic, when she recognized both how essential her work is to keeping American society afloat and how unlikely her society is to acknowledge that fact. Here, Perfecto simultaneously enjoys a moment of sincere connection in a relationship that is often prickly and contrasts that connection to the callousness with which he’s treated by the outside world. For both Perfecto and Estrella, realizing one’s own worth goes hand in hand with renewed sadness at the experience of social indifference.

10110

The twins nuzzled under her arms. Soon, they were on the main boulevard again and the twins slowly fell into the snowlike quiet, shielded and warm and amazed that their big sister had the magic and the power in her hands to split glass in two.

After leaving Alejo in the hospital waiting room, Estrella sadly returns to the station wagon, but when she reaches the automatic doors, she makes a show of walking through them in order to amuse Cookie and Perla. Both girls are deeply impressed and fight to sit next to her on the way home. On a basic level, the fact that the girls have never seen an automatic door (a fairly ubiquitous item) underscores the family’s poverty and exclusion from basic aspects of public life. It’s also interesting that the twins derive so much security from Estrella’s trick and invest their sister with such sweeping powers. The safety they feel underscores Estrella’s actual powerlessness and the danger the family faces more than ever before. By leaving Alejo in the hospital, Estrella has finally acknowledged that she lacks the power to save him or devise a better solution; moreover, by threatening the nurse in order to get Perfecto’s money back, she’s potentially exposed herself to criminal prosecution. While the twins’ behavior creates a touching picture of family unity, it’s disturbingly clear that the safety they feel is entirely imaginary.

00010

Estrella remained as immobile as an angel standing on the verge of faith. Like the chiming bells of the great cathedrals, she believed her heart powerful enough to summon home all those who strayed.