A Future of One's Own

Ashley Hope Pérez, What Can’t Wait. Minneapolis: Carolrhoda Lab, 2011. 234 pages.

Recently, substantial concern and work have been devoted to the difficulties with which young Latinas must contend as they grow up. Besides scholarly projects such as Lisa C. Dietrich’s Chicana Adolescents: Bitches, ’Ho’s, and Schoolgirls, Mary Harris’s Cholas: Latino Girls and Gangs, Lucila Vargas’s Latina Teens, Migration, and Popular Culture, and Rosie Molinary’s Hijas Americanas: Beauty, Body Image, and Growing Up Latina, relevant creative work ranges from the picture books of Gloria Anzaldúa (with her aptly named protagonist, Prietita) to novels by Judith Ortiz Cofer and Sandra López to “chica lit” by Diana López and Michelle Serros.¹

Ashley Hope Pérez’s debut novel What Can’t Wait is an important addition to this growing body of work. It depicts a teen named Marisa Moreno growing up in a Houston barrio and trying to transcend the circumstances of her life. The situation of Marisa is sure to resonate with many contemporary readers.

Her education is one of many stressors that this high school senior must negotiate. While her best friend plans on going to the local community college and her family expects her to (just) enroll at the University of Houston so she can stay nearby, Marisa actually has in mind UT Austin, where she would like to study engineering. As occurs in many Latino/a narratives (e.g., Francisco Jiménez’s Breaking Through [2002], Viola Canales’s The Tequila Worm [2007], even Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory [1983]), Marisa feels guilty for wanting to leave her family. That her older sister depends on her to babysit her daughter, Anita, that Anita depends on Marisa to provide the attention no one else seems to provide her, and that her parents depend on her to help out with household finances exacerbate her feelings of selfishness. At the same time, Marisa fears leaving lo familiar for the uncertainty of life elsewhere.

To her credit, Pérez thus opens up an important (re)consideration of the Latino family that offers to speak to the experiences of readers who have felt similarly torn. What emerges is the realization that familial clinging has unfairly constraining, unnecessarily unhealthy effects on adolescent subjects. Rather than attesting to the strength of familial bonds, such clinging emerges as symptomatic of both a fear of change as well as a habit of control. On one level, the text thereby suggests that the terms of familia must be reconfigured such that physical proximity does not continue to be confused or equated with love or loyalty. On another level, the text’s acknowledgment of the emotional stress that such a situation engenders within the adolescent subject problematizes the ways that family (and friends) may unwittingly (but also deliberately) curtail the ambitions and the potential of a teen. In turn, such a portrayal could help to give a teen (as well as her/his family and friends) a critical perspective on Latino/a family dynamics and thereby create a platform for resisting if not transforming them.

Owing to the trying gravitational pull that Marisa’s family exerts on her, her AP Calculus teacher, Ms. Ford, constitutes a crucial presence in her life. It is Ms. Ford who encourages Marisa to apply to UT Austin and provides the support that Marisa needs, especially when Marisa hits a low point and runs away from home (and thus seems to give up any care for her future). Given the utter unfamiliarity of higher education for teens like Marisa, the importance of Ms. Ford cannot be overlooked. For many Latino/a students who are the first in their family to go to or even think about going to college, the world of higher education can be an overwhelming, intimidating, even unreal and frightening one. One might in fact wonder how many futures have gone unrealized and deferred because of uncertainty about the application process or just not knowing what opportunities are “out there.” Ms. Ford provides the guidance that does nothing less than create a spectrum of new possibilities for Marisa. If not for Ms. Ford—and teachers like her—it would be all too easy, even likely, for Marisa—and students like her—to remain hopelessly and haplessly mired in the circumstances they seek to escape.

Thanks to Ms. Ford, now available to Marisa is an alternative to the status quo that threatens to engulf her (as it has done and continues to do to countless Latina teens). The first application essay that she hastily composes suggests as much:

Dear UT,

My sister got pregnant at seventeen, giving up her career at Sonic to take care of the baby and hate her husband Jose full time. My brother has a GED, and his idea of a long-term goal is saving up money to get new rims for his truck. My parents are not interested in learning English—they only took that one class so that they could meet the requirements to get citizenship. Papi loves my paycheck and only tolerates me, and Mami’s biggest dream is for me to get married and live on a house on this same street so that she can watch her nietos grow up just as unhappy. Oh, and if you’re wondering why I missed the PSAT last year when I should have tried for National Merit Scholar, it was because no one else could stay home to watch my niece that day. (27-28)

Reflecting on this draft (which she does not submit), Marisa first quips, “I know that sounds pissy and super-critical,” only to assert, “but it’s completely true” (28). She then relates, “Then it hit me that I feel this way because I know I want something different” (28). As significant as such a statement is for suggesting the poignancy of Marisa’s situation, especially given its fatalistic tone, it also works effectively within the text’s broader gender implications.

Like works such as Luis J. Rodríguez’s América Is Her Name (1998) and Susan Gonzales Abraham  and Denise Gonzales Abraham’s Cecilia’s Year (2007), What Can’t Wait dramatizes a young Latina staring down the barrel of a dead-end fate.² Pérez executes this particularly well with the handling of female lineage. The female line of Marisa’s family includes her mother, her older sister (Cecilia), and her niece Anita. Her mother and sister embody the kind of future she does not want for herself as both are trapped in problematic, stifling relationships that they refuse to leave. (Divorce comes up in the course of the novel for each woman, in fact. As each woman rejects the possibility of leaving her spouse, the entrapment of them becomes clearer.) Moreover, both women threaten to hold Marisa back, tracking her into their same fates. For instance, Mrs. Moreno urges Marisa to marry her boyfriend Alan even though a) they have only begun to date, and b) they are barely graduating from high school. Mrs. Moreno’s rationale that Marisa ought to marry in order “to be away from here a little” (157) owing to problems between Marisa and her father only promises to trap Marisa as both Mrs. Moreno and Cecilia have been trapped.

Thus, when Marisa proclaims, “I want something different,” it is a different fate for herself as a racialized, classed, and gendered subject. With Anita in line to grow up, too, the disruption of the cycle that has already claimed Mrs. Moreno and Cecilia becomes that much more urgent.

While I really appreciate the novel’s engagement with matters of family and education, I find myself a bit leery about the turn toward sexual trauma. When Marisa runs away after a fairly vicious fight with her father (one which includes him declaring, “I am ashamed that you are my daughter” [124]), she first goes to Alan’s house, where she tries to initiate sex with him in an apparent effort at recovering some kind of self-validation. But when Alan stops her, wisely telling her, “You’re upset; you’re not thinking straight” (127), Marisa becomes angry, leaves, and ends up at Cecilia’s. One day at Cecilia’s, Pedro, a classmate, shows up and sexually attacks Marisa. The scene is powerful to be sure, and the aftermath wrenching to bear witness to:

I lock the door behind him and curl up on the floor, hugging myself and crying. When I finally get up and go to the bathroom, I don’t look in the mirror; I just drop my head straight over the toilet and throw up until there is nothing left.

I turn on the shower, dying to scrub every inch of my body…. (143)

In subsequent pages, Marisa is haunted by shame, guilt, and self-consciousness. I have to admit, however, that elements of this segment of the novel are reminiscent of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (1999). Of more concern, though, is the handling of Brenda. When Brenda starts seeing Pedro, Marisa wants to warn her but cannot manage it. When Marisa, desperately fearing for the safety of her friend, finally does manage to speak what has needed to be said, Brenda first says, “Don’t joke about that” (197), but then changes to “Oh my God, Marisa. Oh shit. All this time you were trying to tell me, and I just gave you hell. Lo siento tanto, babe” (197). At this point, I thought Brenda’s sympathy worked too easily. Perhaps it would have been more effective—and helpful—to portray more resistance on the part of Brenda to capture what some victims go through? Maybe Pérez wanted to emphasize a resolution for this conflict. Or maybe she was running out of pages and couldn’t flesh out this aspect of the story in all its complexity.

By the end of the novel, Marisa heads to UT Austin (that she was planning on sneaking off to college in the middle of the night struck me as a bit of a stretch) where a new life awaits. The final line reads, “There’s no magic here, just my own life” (232), but I think a more apt line to take away from the novel occurs earlier—admittedly in a different context—when she states, “But the only chance I am going to have are the ones I make for myself” (201). The latter lines stresses the difficult, indeed precarious position of the Latina teen. She’s in a tough spot, and with no guarantees that the conditions of her life will change on their own, it befalls her to protect herself and her own future. 

--phillip serrato, san diego state university

Notes

¹ See, for example, Anzaldúa’s Friends from the Other Side and Prietita and the Ghost Woman; Cofer’s The Meaning of Consuelo and Call Me María; Sandra López’s Esperanza: A Latina Story; Diana López’s Confetti Girl; and Michelle Serros’s Honey Blonde Chica novels.

² In one of the more telling moments in Rodríguez’s picture book, the eponymous girl’s fear for her future (or lack thereof) is succinctly articulated when we read, “América is sad. ‘Will this be my life?’ she wonders. ‘Not to write. To clean houses, get married, have children. To wait for the factory to feed us.’ She sees in her mind all of the sullen faces that look out of third-floor windows when she walks to school and the desperate men without jobs standing on street corners. They all seem trapped, like flowers in a vase, full of song and color, yet stuck in a gray world where they can’t find a way out. ‘Will this be my life?’”

Works Cited

Abraham, Susan Gonzales and Denise Gonzales Abraham. Cecilia’s Year. El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos P, 2007.

Anderson, Laurie Halse. Speak. New York: Square Fish, 2011.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Friends from the Other Side. San Francisco: Children’s Book P, 1993.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Prietita and the Ghost Woman. San Francisco: Children’s Book P, 1995.

Canales, Viola. The Tequila Worm. New York: Wendy Lamb, 2007.

Cofer, Judith Ortiz. Call Me María. New York: Scholastic, 2006.

Cofer, Judith Ortiz. The Meaning of Consuelo: A Novel. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004

Dietrich, Lisa. Chicana Adolescents: Bitches, ’Ho’s, and Schoolgirls. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998

Harris, Mary. Cholas: Latino Girls and Gangs. New York: AMS P, 1988.

Jiménez, Francisco. Breaking Through. Sandpiper, 2002.

López, Diana. Confetti Girl. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010.

López, Sanrda. Esperanza: A Latina Story. Mountain View, CA: Floricanto Press, 2008.

Molinary, Rosie. Hijas Americanas: Beauty, Body Image, and Growing Up Latina.  Emeryville, CA: Seal P, 2007.

Rodríguez, Luis J.  América Is Her Name. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone P, 1998.

Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. New York: Bantam, 1983.

Serros, Michelle. Honey Blonde Chica. New York, Simon Pulse, 2007.

Serros, Michelle. ¡Scandalosa!: A Honey Blonde Chica Novel. New York, Simon Pulse, 2008.

Vargas, Lucila. Latina Teens, Migration, and Popular Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 2009.