What It’s Worth Giving Up to Stay in a Family

Some see California’s Central Valley, the setting of Manual Muñoz’s new collection, The Consequences, as a place of idyllic farm life: rows of almond trees and grapevines, visions of a vital California. For others, like the generations of immigrants that have toiled in the fields of the US’s most productive agricultural region, it is a world that offers the promise of a better future. But, it is also one of heavy responsibilities and oppressive rules. In this world, family becomes a necessary mechanism, one that feeds the spirit and protects from the harsh conditions of racism and exploitative labor, but one that also takes a significant toll on personal desires.

The family becomes the single most crucial structure from which any deviation could have the worst consequences, among them death and deportation. But Muñoz also shows how the gendered mold makes excruciating demands of its characters. The tyranny of heterosexuality exerts its violence not only on queer characters, but also on heterosexual men and women who believe they’ve made all the “right” decisions and yet feel cheated out of something important that they may not necessarily understand.

Here, Muñoz invites us to consider two sides of a coin in which one side is “consequences” and the other is “compromisos,” the title of this particular story. Translating roughly as responsibilities or commitments, compromisos are the counterpart of consequences. Together they share an unbreakable lifeline, like the two Fridas sitting side by side. Compromisos, whether fulfilled or failed, will always bear consequences. A toll is always taken and something is inevitably lost in the journey.

In “Compromisos” the story, Muñoz’s main character, Mauricio, in love with another man and on the brink of separating from his wife and children, struggles to balance his desires with the family where he was sheltered, a structure he helped build. At the end, Mauricio must pay his dues. Under the strictures of family and culture, under the intense pressures of a racist and exploitative labor environment, what is owed to the community that sustained Mauricio and to the families that raised him? What does Mauricio owe to himself? Assimilation and heteronormativity are their own kind of currency, granting purchase of access and mobility, but it’s a double-edged sword that cuts both ways.

Like the pink carnations he initially buys to give to his wife, Mauricio must offer tribute to the machinery that keeps him safe, sometimes discovering that his offering may be irreplaceable. When all is said and done, and the dust begins to settle around the events that define his life, the dues paid may in fact turn out to be an irretrievable sacrifice.

However, keeping count of personal loss is an inexact, if not impossible science. Weighing acquired burdens while measuring the volume of void in action is an impossible task revealed most clearly in Mauricio’s lucid moments. Through the fog, the deadfall of night, or the cruel blindingness of the Central California sun, la mirada de Muñoz (Muñoz’s gaze) reveals to us these moments. He dilates or constricts the eye to expand and sharpen our view of these lives so often unseen. Truly, it takes a master seer to reveal these moments of intimacy sometimes so dearly guarded they are unknown even to their keeper.

– Carribean Fragoza
Author of Eat the Mouth That Feeds You