El recado

In my intro to hispanic lit class, we had to read a short story, called El recado (the message). The story is set in a working class neighborhood in Mexico in the 1960's. A young woman goes to the house of the man she's in love with and basically just sits on his doorstep. The whole time you're reading the story, you thinking she's writing it down in a letter to Martin (the man she loves) and she describes what's going on around her, how she feels, how she misses him, just wants to see him, yada yada. You get to the end of the story, and she writes to him, "Te quiero" (I love you) and that there is nothing else written on the page. And then she says that she's not giving him the paper, she'll just ask his neighbor to mention she stopped by. After she had just spent the entire afternoon and evening sitting on his doorstep waiting for him.

So how does this relate to our gender and conflict class? We talked (in Spanish of course) about this woman's actions in the context of her society and time. And really, if this young woman had gone to this guy's house and waited for him all day, she was breaking all sorts of social norms, and people would have seen her as a tramp. But she has this need that she can barely express. She can't say the things she feels... she doesn't have the words, or even the thoughts. There is a strong sense of sexual desire in the story, but it's never directly addressed, even in her thoughts. It would have been so inappropriate in her context; she didn't even know how to think it. So she just says she has to see him, she doesn't know why.

Another thing that we brought up in class is that this was the only choice she had. Women were just supposed to wait- wait for the man to notice them, to make the first move, to make all the moves, to ask for the girl's hand in marriage. She was supposed to wait for him to come around and see her. By going to his house, she was breaking all the rules of her society. But she couldn't do anything more- she couldn't leave the letter, or ask the neighbor to do anything more than mention she had stopped by. (Only imagine what the neighbor was thinking after she had spent the whole day waiting on this guy...)

She was supposed to leave a very passive life, always waiting on the men in her life... and she was very unhappy with her role. At one point she says, "A veces quisiera ser mas vieja..." (Sometimes, I wish I was much older). It's such a sad line for a young woman to say. She wanted to skip all the pain and struggle and confusion that she couldn't do anything about. If she was older, she would be married and all the questions would have their answers. And because she was so limited in what she could do/control, she just wanted to skip it.

OK, so that's that.