Lullaby

Chato is Ayah’s husband of forty years. He speaks both English and Spanish, and he has spent much of his life driving cattle for a white rancher. Ultimately, however, his faith that he can make his way in white society proves misplaced when the rancher fires him when he grows old. Chato’s willingness to interact with white American culture also causes a rift with Ayah, who blames him for teaching her to sign her name in English, and thus, blaming him for the loss of Danny and Ella. By the time the story takes place, Chato’s health is frail; he has developed a drinking problem, funded primarily by his welfare checks, and he is suffering from some form of dementia. His mental deterioration is highly symbolic, given Chato’s enduring willingness to assimilate, which is an act of ethnic and cultural forgetting. At the same time, Chato’s memory loss is part of what enables his reconciliation with Ayah, since it reduces him to a childlike state; at the end of his life, she can care for him as if he were her child. It is implied that Chato freezes to death at the end of the story. 

Jimmie was Ayah and Chato’s eldest child; he died in a helicopter crash while serving in the U.S. Army. His death is symbolic of white American treatment of Native Americans, which not only exploits men like Jimmie but destroys their future as a people. In losing Jimmie, Ayah also loses the hope of passing her culture on to the next generation; she believes that Jimmie would have prevented Ella and Danny from being taken from her if he had been alive. Jimmie’s Army blanket provides Ayah with a sense of cross-generational unity because it enables her to remember the blankets her own mother and grandmother used to make.