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.
Symbols & Motifs
Jacaranda Trees and Blossoms
Jacaranda trees and blossoms reappear throughout all of the female narratives in The Madonnas of Echo Park. Though the images of the jacarandas change and adapt to the particular themes of each story, they resonate throughout the book as a symbol for the shared pain—and hope—experienced by Los Angeles women.
The image of the jacaranda is first introduced through Felicia’s story in “The Blossoms of Los Feliz.” Felicia opens her story by describing the tear-down of Chavez Ravine, where she lived with her grandmother as a child. Because she has observed demolition workers struggling with the strong native jacaranda trees, Felicia attempts to grow a jacaranda tree from a branch in her home. As she overwaters the branch, Felicia notices that the drowning flowers move toward the water, not away from it. She compares this stubborn “drowning” of one’s blossoms to Aurora Salazar, “the last woman evicted from Chavez Ravine, [who] learned this lesson when she was dragged by her wrists and ankles like a shackled butterfly off her land” (26). Felicia later connects the idea of drowning blossoms to Mrs. Calhoun, the wife of her wealthy employer, when she finds Mrs. Calhoun dead in her swimming pool with jacaranda blossoms all around her. Felicia identifies with the desperation of both women and perceives a strange mix of delicacy, vulnerability, determination, and dark strength in the jacaranda blossoms. As she explains, “This is what women do, when they have an ocean of dreams but no water to put them in” (27).
In Angie’s story, the jacaranda blossoms suggest a blooming of feminine friendship—and perhaps more than friendship—between her and her teenage best friend, Duchess. The two girls sit together under a jacaranda tree as Duchess draws what Angie believes is a self-portrait: a beautiful woman in a red dress. In a charged moment, a jacaranda blossom falls into Duchess’s hair, and Angie releases a burst of liquid while attempting to disentangle the blossom from her curls. Duchess then draws the blossom into the red-dress-wearing woman’s hair, remarking that it is a part of her now (134). Years later, after Duchess is killed at the neighborhood bank where she has worked for her whole adult life, her ashes are buried underneath a jacaranda tree (148). Reflecting back on her friendship with Duchess, and looking over the old red dress drawing, Angie realizes that the woman in the picture contains many of her features, and that the drawing is a portrait of both of them. Thus, in Angie’s story, the jacaranda blossoms embody the sustained connection between these two women, from the shared hope and excitement of youth to the pain of disillusionment, which nevertheless helps Angie to appreciate their connection.
The jacarandas also connect the shared legacies of Beatriz, Felicia, and Aurora Esperanza. Haunted by the guilt she feels after turning away her mother, sisters, and daughter, Beatriz has reoccurring dreams of her daughter, Felicia, wherein Felicia sits on an island surrounded by jacarandas (63). When Aurora comes to visit Felicia in Echo Park, she notes the old jacaranda trees with cracked bark in her mother’s yard (154), an image that aligns with Felicia’s stubborn refusal to sell her home to developers. As Aurora comes to rediscover Echo Park and appreciate the neighborhood as her home, she encounters Beatriz, connecting the symbol of jacarandas to three generations of her family. Thus, the image of the jacaranda blossom comes full circle from the protective desire and hope of Aurora Salazar to the hope Aurora Esperanza feels for her future in this neighborhood.
The Madonna Song “Borderline”
In The Madonnas of Echo Park, Brando Skyhorse introduces the book’s inspiration—Aurora Esperanza—through the Madonna song “Borderline.” She plays the song at his school’s 6th-grade MTV dance party, asking Skyhorse to dance with her. Skyhorse refuses, however, because Aurora is “Mexican,” and at the time, Skyhorse is unaware that he, too, is Mexican. As a Native American in a classroom divided between Vietnamese and Mexican immigrant children, Skyhorse feels like his identity resides in some uneasy in-between space, its own kind of “borderline.”
As the song that inspires a group of Mexican-American mothers and daughters to dance outside an Echo Park mercado, “Borderline” signals a liminal space between Mexican and white identity. In the music video for “Borderline,” the white musician Madonna performs the role of a Mexican woman returning to her home neighborhood, which is signified by a scene where she dances outside the mercado. In the actual gathering of Echo Park mothers and daughters (all of whom grew up near El Guanaco), the girls effectively perform the role of Madonna performing their own lives. Thus, the song represents a questionable commingling between the second-generation Mexican daughters such as Aurora, who identify with “white” MTV culture, and their first-generation Mexican mothers, who initially fail to see the irony in their gathering at El Guanaco. As Aurora tells her mother, aptly channeling the “Papa Don’t Preach” rhetoric of Madonna herself, “Oh Momma, you don’t understand” (48).
The symbol of the song “Borderline” also reflects Los Angeles’s status as an in-between space, a kind of cultural and physical borderline between the US and Mexico. Hector reflects on the ways US boundaries have been drawn, effectively stealing land from Mexico and necessitating that many Mexicans slip “into this country like thieves, onto the land that once was ours” (1). Beatriz details the historic development of borderlines in Los Angeles, describing how her husband “created our first suburbia, a place built on the fundamental notion of keeping people out you think aren’t as good as you believe yourself to be” (57).
Modern-Day Saints
Mexican Catholic iconography abounds in The Madonnas of Echo Park. The title itself aptly doubles as a reference both to the pop star Madonna and the sanctified strength of the Mexican-American women, the figurative Madonnas who live in, protect, and cherish the neighborhood. The book presents the reader with a wide variety of holy Madonna images that speak to their particular time, place, and cultural atmosphere: a series of modern-day “saints” that bespeak the celebrity worship of Los Angeles.
For Cristina, the glamorous movie stars of her favorite films, such as Louise Brooks and Rita Hayworth, embody her imagination of “saints” (11). Rather than maintain a shrine with images of Jesus and Mary, Cristina fills a wall of her home with pictures of Hollywood stars, religiously dusting them. For Aurora, Morrissey occupies the position of “saint” in her imagination, to the degree that she replaces her father’s face with cut-outs of Morrissey’s in family photos, and she aligns Morrissey’s metallic silver Porsche with “the color of [her] faith” (194). Angie elevates Gwen Stefani to the level of sainthood, collecting everything Stefani has ever produced or designed. Angie reveals, however, that the true saint in her mind is Duchess, whom she describes as a “Mexican Gwen” (124), and whose drawings line her wall, much like Cristina’s Hollywood “saints.”
These Hollywood saints meld with Beatriz’s visions of Our Lady Guadalupe, a very modern version of the Virgin who wears a pantsuit and nurse’s shoes and is significantly sighted at the same bus stop where Rita Hayworth was discovered (144). They also bleed into Aurora’s strange interactions with The Lord, a male dog trainer who “works in mysterious ways” (187).
