56 pages • 1 hour read
Brando SkyhorseThe Madonnas of Echo Park
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Author’s NoteChapter Summaries & Analyses
Author’s Note Summary
In the Author’s Note, the author, Brando Skyhorse, introduces himself and his connection to Echo Park. Skyhorse describes his experience living and attending middle school in Echo Park during the 80s. His sixth-grade class is ethnically divided between American-born Mexicans and first-generation Vietnamese Americans, who choose to sit on opposite sides of the room. Skyhorse explains that at this stage in his life, his mother raises him as Native American, and he is unaware that he is part Mexican. Thus, he is unsure where to situate himself within his classroom, and sits at a table by himself.
Despite racial tensions in his class, the students bond together over their shared material longings, especially their desire to hear what was on MTV. Most of the students in Skyhorse’s class come from poor families that do not have regular access to television, let alone cable channels like MTV. Skyhorse’s parents gift him his own TV set with an MTV connection, making him a hub of cultural knowledge in his middle school. He tells his fellow students what he sees on MTV, building an aura of mystique around the channel.
The sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. O’Neill, notices her students’ enthusiasm for MTV. She decides to throw an MTV-themed class party the day before their holiday break. A Mexican-American student, Aurora Esperanza, asks if there will be dancing. Skyhorse seems impressed by her, though he derogatorily refers to her friend, Duchess, as a chola.
For the dance party, Mrs. O’Neill requires each student to bring a record. Many students are concerned about the cost of records, and Mrs. O’Neill advises them to purchase $0.99 singles. Most of the boys in the classroom, including Skyhorse, are extremely anxious about the idea of dancing with girls, especially girls outside their ethnic groups. With a small group of girl-fearing boys, Skyhorse makes a pact that he will not dance at the party.
At the MTV party, Mrs. O’Neill collects students’ dance music contributions. Though most students have purchased discount singles, a Mexican-American student named Aurora Esperanza contributes a rainbow-sequined record case filled with alphabetized 45s. Mrs. O’Neill gives Aurora the honor of choosing the first song. Resplendent in her red-fringed blouse, tapered jeans, and platform sandals, Aurora chooses Madonna’s “Borderline,” which she enthusiastically proclaims is a “new” song.
Aurora approaches Skyhorse and asks him to dance with her. Though in hindsight Skyhorse recognizes that he must’ve been attracted to Aurora, he doesn’t yet understand this attraction as a sixth grader, recognizing only that she makes him uncomfortable. Responding to this discomfort, he tells Aurora that he can’t dance with her because she is Mexican. The whole class hears his rejection of Aurora, and she is greatly hurt.
After the party, Mrs. O’Neill scolds Skyhorse for his cruel words. She tells him to apologize, but Aurora leaves the class before he can speak with her, and she never returns to class after the holiday break. We later learn that Aurora never returned because she felt unable to face her fellow classmates after the infamous drive-by shooting at the mercado—El Guanaco—in her neighborhood, where she was dancing to the song “Borderline” with a group of young girls in Madonna-styled costumes.
Skyhorse tells Mrs. O’Neill that he is unsure how to apologize if he cannot speak to Aurora directly. Mrs. O’Neill tells him he will have to find another way to express that he’s sorry. As the adult author of The Madonnas of Echo Park, Skyhorse explains that this book is his offering to Aurora: his apology for refusing to dance with her as a child.
Author’s Note Analysis
Skyhorse’s Author’s Note begins to introduce the sociocultural divisions between first- and second-generation Mexican immigrants, illustrating these divisions through their different relationships to MTV. As he explains, “Our parents didn’t comprehend the words and were fearful that the songs they had fallen in love with growing up would be attached to a language we’d never speak and a country we’d never see” (xii). While the parents of second-generation Los Angeles children worry they’ll grow up without understanding where they came from (whether their families came from Mexico, or the surrogate Mexico of Chavez Ravine), the multi-racial Vietnamese and Mexican students of Skyhorse’s classroom unite over their love of MTV. Skyhorse describes MTV as the “mutual language” (xii) of second-generation children, suggesting that this modern-day cultural replacement (and displacement) has both negative and positive effects.
Skyhorse’s Author’s Note also hints at the cultural complications of living within an in-between space that cannot fully be identified with one group or another. As a middle-school student, Skyhorse struggles to finds where he fits in, feeling that he neither belongs with the Mexican student groups or the Vietnamese student groups. When he turns Aurora down for a dance because she is “Mexican,” Skyhorse asserts his confusion—however rudely and awkwardly—with his own identity.
The Author’s Note also significantly introduces the theme of lies, culpability, and apologizing for one’s mistakes. Skyhorse offers this book as a kind of apology to Aurora, not only for turning her down, but for failing to appreciate the complexity of their Mexican identities (and the complex, multi-layered performativity of those identities in MTV’s golden era). In the author’s own words: “a work of fiction is an excellent place for confession” (xx).
