Summer of the Mariposas

The heavily policed US-Mexico border is an ever-present complication in the sisters’ journey, adding difficulty and danger to what might have been a simple road trip through the US-Mexico borderlands. In this way, the role of the border in this novel mirrors its role in the lives of many real-life communities and families.

Though the Garza sisters live on the US side of the border, their extended community includes many people who make their homes on the other side. The novel makes clear that the border does not delineate two separate countries so much as it artificially divides a single, contiguous region—the borderlands—in which many people’s lives take place on both sides of the line. Throughout the novel, the sisters must navigate the obstacle of the border and its enforcers—the US Border Patrol—to get where they are going. It is because of this obstacle that the discovery of Gabriel Pérdido’s body presents enough of a challenge to set the story in motion.

The simplest course of action would be to alert the authorities, but Juanita—quick-thinking and community-minded—recognizes that reporting a likely homicide would mean putting the Border Patrol on high alert, endangering other members of the community. Juanita reminds her sisters of the Border Patrol’s past treatment of border crossers: “To them illegals are no better than stray dogs. They’d shoot them before they’d help them” (12). The Border Patrol’s function is to make the border’s artificial divisions real. Even the language Juanita uses here, calling undocumented migrants “illegals,” echoes the US government’s worldview, in which some people are legal—and thus worthy of full humanity—and others are not. Juanita and her sisters choose to take on great risk to reunite the as-yet-unidentified body with its family without involving these hostile authorities. In doing so, they align themselves with a view of the borderlands that is the precise opposite of the Border Patrol’s view—one in which community extends across both sides of the border and matters far more than an imaginary boundary ever could.

As the sisters prepare to head home, they realize they must cross the border again, this time without the aid of La Llorona’s magical earrings. Odilia appeals to Tonantzin, the Aztec mother goddess, who offers to aid their crossing in exchange for a favor: Odilia must give roses to “the mother”—a cryptic phrase she initially interprets to mean her own mother, though she later realizes it means La Llorona. This gift allows La Llorona to finally heal from the grief and guilt of her children’s deaths and take her place among the stars. This is especially important given that Tonantzin embodies the ideal of motherhood, while La Llorona is traditionally viewed as the antithesis of that ideal. In this novel, Tonantzin sees La Llorona not as she is portrayed in folklore but as she is: another mother, heartbroken and in need of healing. La Llorona’s healing mirrors the healing of the Garza women, who come together to support each other. In thwarting the artificial division of the border once more, the sisters knit their fractured communities back together.