The Madonnas of Echo Park

The seventh chapter of The Madonnas of Echo Park is narrated by Angie, a Mexican-American woman who is Juan’s wife and Cristina’s daughter. Angie opens her chapter by gushing about her “girl-crush” (125) on Gwen Stefani, whom she admires for her multicultural (largely chola-inspired) fashion sense and her cool girl attitude. Angie nostalgically associates Gwen Stefani with her teenage best friend, Duchess, whom she labels “a Mexican Gwen” (127), hinting at the irony that in spite of Gwen Stefani’s “badass chola” (127) pretensions, she is actually white. Angie reflects that friendship is like a pop song: a melody you fall in love with, only to fall in love with “a thousand other songs in the exact same way” (128). Angie’s relationship with both pop songs and Duchess appears more complex than Angie may realize, however, considering Duchess’s “completist” (125) mentality and long-term devotion to Gwen Stefani after her heyday.

Like Gwen Stefani, Duchess is known for her distinctive style, and makes most of her clothing herself. Duchess also flaunts a confident, regal attitude, boasting that she is the daughter of a gang “queen” (hence, her nickname). Angie fondly details how she met Duchess outside of another friend’s quinceañera practice during her senior year of high school. In her recounting of this memory, Duchess encourages Angie to make mocking faces through the window at the uppity prima, instantly ending her relationship with that friend. Duchess tells Angie that friends come and go, describing her rift with former friend Aurora Esperanza, who adopted a taste for “white music, MTV shit from England” (132) that Duchess did not support. Duchess feels the world is filled with opportunity, philosophizing, “Why chase a bus when another one’s right around the corner?” (130)

As Angie and Duchess grow closer, The Madonnas of Echo Park insinuates that they may harbor some homoerotic tensions beneath their friendship’s surface. When they first meet, Angie slyly explains that she avoided having a quinceañera of her own when she told her mother she was a lesbian, “that seeing those damas in those fancy satin dresses would get me hot and excited” (131). They also share a significant, charged moment while sitting together one afternoon under the jacaranda trees. Duchess draws a picture of a beautiful girl in a red dress (whom Angie believes is Duchess). A jacaranda blossom falls into Duchess’s hair, and Angie bursts its fluid trying to grasp the blossom. Duchess responds by drawing a similar blossom in the hair of her red-dress girl, saying the blossom is “a part of me now” (134).

A week before graduation, rifts start to form in their friendship. While Duchess has taken a teller job at a local bank, Angie wants to move beyond her neighborhood. Duchess and Angie go to a mall in Glendale (a mostly white neighborhood) to return one of Cristina’s dresses that no longer fits. While at the mall, Angie stops to check out a chain store called Contempo Casuals. She chats with a white store worker named Debbie and fills out an application. Duchess gets into a screaming match with Angie, accusing her of thinking she’s “better than [Duchess]” because of her lighter skin. Angie is embarrassed, noting, “It didn’t feel right to act this way in a white neighborhood” (138).

At graduation, Duchess is radiant in a homemade dress, and Angie feels awkward in the ugly, cheap dress she bought from Contempt Casuals, where she now works with her new friend, Debbie. She speaks politely with Duchess, who introduces Angie to her boyfriend, Juan. Juan is immediately attracted to Angie and pursues a date with her. They bond over margaritas and have sex, but Angie expresses her hesitance to get involved with a Mexican boy. She adopts Debbie’s perspective and language, writing Juan off as a “fuck-and-run” (142).

Angie’s mother, Cristina, begins to decline. Depressed by her extreme weight gain, Cristina shuts herself in, letting her house grow dirty and dusty while she obsesses over old movie star photographs, which she hangs on her wall. Cristina takes Angie to The Option—the upscale restaurant where Hector worked—just before it closes. The once grand establishment is now a shadow of its former self, serving Cobb salads “blistered with mold” (144). Cristina, however, is mostly interested in the many photos and caricatures of movie stars on the restaurant’s walls. Cristina secretly steals a photo of Rita Hayworth’s caricature before they are asked to leave.

While waiting at the bus stop where Beatriz sees the Virgin Mary, Cristina longingly reflects that Rita Hayworth was “a Mexican movie star who was discovered at a bus stop. Her skin was so light she could pass for white” (144). After they return home, Cristina rapidly declines, moodily slapping her daughter for attempting to dust her photos. Angie leaves and doesn’t return until she learns Cristina died. She then sells her mother’s house for a large amount of money, which she uses to pay off her student loans from UCLA. Juan sees the For Sale sign and puts a note in the mailbox asking Angie out.

Angie goes to ask Duchess for job at the bank where she still works. They have lunch together and reconnect, though both women feel less enthusiastic about the possibilities life offers. Duchess offers to help her Angie get a supervisor position, but Angie knows she wouldn’t feel right being Duchess’s boss.

Echo Park begins to gentrify, and Angie embraces the change, feeling more at home with the white newcomers. Her contentment is interrupted when she learns Duchess has been stabbed and killed in a confrontation at her bank. At the funeral, they spread Duchess’s ashes under the jacaranda trees. The next day, Juan asks Angie to marry him, and she says yes.

Angie’s story then leaps ahead to the present moment, where she wanders her apartment, late at night, looking at a wall full of Duchess’s drawings that Duchess’s mother gave to Angie after the funeral. Angie looks at the drawing of the girl in the red dress, now noticing, from the facial details, that the drawing is actually Angie. She reads a letter from Juan written on the back of the drawing, which tells her that he first fell in love with her when he saw her in her terrible Contempo Casuals dress at graduation, saying that any girl who could look good in a dress that bad “needed to [be] his own” (149). In his letter, he says he has been killed in action.

Angie listens to Gwen Stefani, filled with peculiar hope as she feels her baby kicking inside of her. She muses that she will name her baby Maria, and that Maria will probably hate the pop song when she’s a teenager.