A Literary Analysis on “Mother Tongue” By Demetria Martinez
A Literary Analysis on “Mother Tongue” By Demetria Martinez “His nation chewed him up and spat him out like a pinon shell, and when he emerged from an airplane one late afternoon, I knew I would one day make love with him” (Martinez, 3). And so it starts, the story of a nineteen year old Mexican- American girl named Mary (Maria; as he only chooses to call her), who helps out and eventually falls in love with Jose Luis Alegria, a Salvadoran refugee. Martínez's story of María is told against the backdrop of the 12-year civil war in El Salvador. Maria and Jose Luis develop a friendship that slowly turns into a typical novella love affair. Through their relationship, both characters are forced to confront the violence of their pasts—his at the hands of Salvadoran torturers who abducted him and murdered his fiancé, hers at the hands of a sexually abusive neighbor. Their story is told through several different voices. Here they are in a nutshell - first it starts with Maria as an older woman who is now relieving her memories of the summer Jose Luis entered her life. As Jose Luis gets introduced and we get to know him the story will shift to his and perspective of their situation, then it would shift back to present day Maria; and then the nineteen-year-old Maria. There are also other voices, including that of their son (also called José Luis), as well as through newspaper articles, diary entries from the past, and poems. Martinez gives us a chance to really get a closer look into the bigger picture of the story because we get to here it from so many different voices. That being said, we can also see that the novel contains four main characters and three 1st person narrators. Maria, who is the principal narrator, is nineteen years old (as previously stated) at the story’s beginning. Through her friend Soledad, a fifty-year-old Mexican immigrant, she becomes involved in the “helping out immigrants” movement and meets Jose Luis, who back then was
Cited: Americas Watch. 1991. El Salvador’s Decade of Terror: Human Rights since the Assassination of Archbishop Romero. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. 2007. On Latinidad: U.S. Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Kandiyoti, Dalia. 2004. “Host and Guest in the ‘Latino Contact Zone’: Narrating Solidarity and Hospitality in Mother Tongue.” Comparative American Studies 2, no. 4: 421–46. Lomas, Laura. 2006. “‘The War Cut Out My Tongue’: Domestic Violence, Foreign Wars, and Translation in Demetria Martínez.” American Literature 78 (June): 357–87. Martínez, Demetria. 1994. Mother Tongue. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe.