Night at the Fiestas

Monica Vigil-Rios is a working-class woman from Santa Fe who, at different stages of her life, has married two different men, both of whom have class backgrounds that are very different from her own. Having grown up with so little, she longs for stability, but she also wants to pursue education and achieve erudition. She wants to escape the difficulties of her upbringing and recalls after that meeting the man who would become her first husband, she “couldn’t leave that desperation behind fast enough” (43). Despite her interest in self-improvement, her first husband, Peter, mocked her lack of knowledge about art, culture, and the world, and she felt out of place among his family. Her second husband, Eliot, is a geologist who is working on his PhD, and he represents a slightly different set of possibilities. While Peter symbolized wealth to Monica, Elliot symbolizes education. She is disappointed by her life with Eliot because she envisioned life as a professor’s wife to be glamorous and scholarly. Instead, they live in a shabby trailer in the Mojave desert so that Eliot can collect geological specimens nearby. Monica’s internal conflict reflects the author’s emphasis on identity formation, particularly the ways in which class shapes character. Although Monica herself comes from humble circumstances and has experienced class-based prejudice, she also engages in the same sort of discrimination and wears her education “like armor,” carrying canonical works of literature around so that people will notice her desire to read “serious” books. Despite these affectations, Valdez Quade presents Monica as a sympathetic character, and the story suggests that the protagonist’s struggles with class and identity are rooted in dislocation and confusion rather than in arrogance or prejudice.

Amadeo is the 32-year-old father of his 14-year-old daughter, Angel. Despite his lack of faith and what his community believes to be his “sinful” nature, he has been chosen to play the role of Jesus in his town’s Easter celebration of the Passion of the Christ. He sees the performance as a way to atone for his life of bad deeds, as he is aware of the negative reputation that he has amongst his family and neighbors. People around him say of him, “You name the sin, he’s done it” (58), and for this reason, Amadeo welcomes the opportunity to show everyone another side of his personality. However,, the narrative implies that Amadeo fails to understand the true lessons of Jesus’s crucifixion, for he does not have a clear picture of what his own path to redemption should be. He believes that the act of portraying a dramatically “realistic” crucifixion—complete with real nails—will allow him to win the love and respect of the people in his town. As he prepares to play Jesus in the passion play, his daughter Angel comes to stay at the house he shares with his mother. She is pregnant and hopes that Amadeo and his mother Yolanda will be her “support system.” Amadeo has never been a true father to Angel, but she does not resent him and is supportive of his desire to play the role of Jesus. Although Amadeo judges Angel for getting pregnant, he and her mother were also no more than teenagers when Angel was born. Thus, Angel has essentially repeated her parents’ mistake. However, Angel is a complex character who is defined more by her dedication to finishing her education and providing a caring home for her child than she is by her early pregnancy. She cooks for her father, forgives him for years of neglect, and attends a class to help her prepare for motherhood. She is therefore much more mature and parental than Amadeo. Amadeo does not fully appreciate Angel for the multifaceted individual that she is until he actually carries the cross on Easter Sunday. In that moment, he realizes that his road to redemption will not be through his performative pantomime of Jesus’s crucifixion, but rather through a renewed dedication to fatherhood and family. He finally understands that salvation happens through action rather than through performative religiosity.

Frances is the protagonist of the collection’s titular story. She is a 16-year-old girl on her way to the Fiestas in Santa Fe. Frances is characterized in part through her immaturity. Although her father is described as a kind and gregarious man, she is embarrassed to be the daughter of the bus driver and tries to avoid him on the trip. She is also characterized, like many of the other figures in this collection, by the way that she speaks to its thematic interest in The Effects of Class on the Coming-of-Age Journey. Frances longs to be seen as erudite, glamorous, and mysterious. She reads Tess of the D’Urbervilles on the bus mostly to be seen reading a canonical work of literature. She admits that she was drawn to its status as an “important book” and by her own desire to be perceived as the kind of person who would read such a lofty tome. Although she is interested in its plot, she is driven to finish the text more to satisfy her ego than to satiate a genuine passion for literature. Her interactions with other people further support her characterization as immature and highlight her desire to be seen as something other than an impoverished, small-town girl. In all of her interactions, she is preoccupied by worries about how she is being perceived, and she is so engrossed in her own self-perception that she struggles to embrace the moment, even in the celebratory chaos of the Fiestas.

Andrea is the main character in “Jubilee.” The daughter of a farm worker, she grows up on the agricultural estate of a wealthy family, the Lowells, whom she resents for their privilege and for the way that they seem to have enchanted her parents. Her mother and father have what Andrea perceives to be an inexplicable amount of respect for the Lowells. By contrast, Andrea sees the Lowells as exploitive and questions a reality in which landowners have so much more money than the hard-working people who actually perform the labor on their properties. Andrea is characterized by her antagonistic orientation toward the Lowells, but also by her interest in self-improvement and social climbing. Although she would rather not think about class, she is driven to “better herself,” and she remembers hating the ever-present “hunger for every possible chance to move up in the world” (179). Like many of the other characters in this collection, Andrea equates being middle-class with having an education, and at the beginning of the story, she has just finished her first year at Stanford. The Lowells’ daughter, Parker, has also just completed her freshman year at Stanford, but the two girls are not friends. Parker is characterized as kind and without prejudice, and the narrative gradually reveals that the distance between the girls is the result of Andrea’s resentment. Although Andrea herself is the source of the story’s conflict, she is another example of the author’s recognition that difficult situations create “difficult people.” Like Nemecia and Monica, Andrea becomes emblematic of the unpleasant truth that “bad behavior” is often rooted in trauma and dysfunction. Andrea’s identity has been shaped in part by the inequality that she witnessed as a child, and her character is intended to be viewed as complex and multifaceted rather than as antagonistic.

The teenage Crystal narrates “Ordinary Sins,” and she is another of the collection’s complex and imperfect figures. She is unmarried and pregnant, and even though she is approaching her due date, she still struggles to give up the promiscuity that resulted in her unplanned pregnancy. She tells people that the father is not in the picture, but the reality is that she only met him once and has only hazy memories of their single night together. However, her dishonesty on this point is rooted more in her fear of judgment than in shame, for Crystal does not demonstrate the self-hatred that her detractors believe that she should feel. Like several of the characters presented in other stories, Crystal struggles to make “good” decisions, but the author does not present Crystal in a judgmental light. Rather than condemning her characters, Valdez Quade humanizes them and explores the motivations behind their various behaviors. Thus, Crystal becomes an important mouthpiece for the author’s pointed critique of Catholicism, for she exposes the hypocrisy and small-mindedness of various people in her parish, both lay and clergy. In this way, her character serves as a focal point for The Contrast between Genuine Morality and Performative Religiosity. In a church full of people who are happy to condemn Crystal for her unwed teenage pregnancy, Crystal emerges as a person who is capable of mercy and forgiveness. Her situation becomes yet another instance in which Valdez Quade suggests that the road to redemption is achieved through working good acts rather than showing blind faith.