--> “As usual, after the strawberry season was over in Santa Maria, Papa decided to move to the San Joaquin Valley in Central California to pick grapes. Like the year before, we had spent the summer months picking strawberries for Ito, the Japanese sharecropper” (96).
Francisco’s family is constantly on the move, looking for work and avoiding the immigration authorities. This memoir, The Circuit, tells the stories of that constant movement, through the childhood eyes of Francisco himself. I really enjoyed this book for many reasons.
First of all, Jimenez does an excellent job of capturing the experiences of his childhood using child-like language and understanding. This is an extremely powerful way to tell a story because it really felt as though young Francisco was speaking with all the innocence of a child. For example, in this story, Francisco and his older brother Roberto are trying to help their parents build a home: “Late one evening, thinking the caretaker had left, Roberto and I sneaked into the dump…we went back several more times until we got enough lumber to complete Mama’s floor. We also found pieces of linoleum and laid them over the wood to cover the holes and slivers. The different shapes and colors made the floor look like a quilt” (30). If Francisco had written this from an adult perspective, it is likely he mayn’t have been so optimistic about scavenging a city dump. However, written in a child’s voice, the unfinished floor becomes a patchwork quilt.
Secondly, the structure of the text works really well with the genre and subject matter. With the text broken up into smaller stories, it is as if the reader is experiencing “episodes” of the author’s life—an extremely accurate representation of how memory works. One of the stories that particularly resonated with me was the story about Francisco’s younger sister spending his penny collection on gumballs: “‘Did you put the pennies in the gum machine at the store?’ [Mama] asked. When my sister nodded again, my heart dropped to my stomach. I felt my face on fire. Everything blurred. I stormed out of the house, slammed the door behind me, sat on the front stairs, and cried” (107). This memory was presented so authentically I could imagine myself there. This was obviously a really horrible experience for Francisco because it is a memory that sticks out above others. I also liked what this story said about ownership: children take pride in their creations and collections just like adults and once that is taken away, they too feel robbed. However, we also see what happens after the pennies are taken and the house burns down—Mama comforts him and he learns a valuable lesson: “Feeling a lump in my throat, I started thinking about Carl, my pennies, the house. Then, for a long time, I thought about my librito and what Mama had said. I could see in my mind every word, every number, every rule, I had written in my note pad. I knew everything in it by heart. Mama was right. It was not all lost” (112).
And last but not least, I learned something—and any book that follows with that statement is one worth reading. I learned an incredible amount about Mexican culture and the spiritual practices that various Mexican families practice. I learned more about La Virgen and La Llorona and about the struggle between western medicine and curanderas. “‘The doctor told us my son would die because we had waited too long to take him there. He said it would take a miracle for him to live. I didn’t want to believe him,’ she continued gaining strength as she talked, ‘but he was right. It took a miracle’” (44).
Most importantly though, I learned more about the incredible strength and resilience it takes to keep a family alive and safe. The constant movement and hard work of this family really made me question by own strength. What if I moved to another country where the only work available was manual labor that was excruciatingly painful and never ending? Would I have the determination to push through it in order to save my family? I would like to think that I would, but Francisco’s story is a tribute to how hard this might actually be.
Now, when it comes to “The Circuit,” I also learned a lot about the Mexican culture and I was able to see the hardship that migrant famers go through. One interesting thing that you point out has to do with the child like language that Francisco uses. This mechanism reminds the reader that we are reading this “episodes” through a child’s memory and see it through his eyes. This creates a great emotional connection with the author. Therefore, as a reader, you are taken on a journey, and with each turn, you hope for a greater outcome. Hope!, now that was the underlying theme throughout this text. Hope could inspire a family to continue on living, to fight, to survive. Without hope, the human will eventually wears out. This text will be a great read for those who feel that their obstacles are too great, this text will motive them to never yield at the face of adversary.
ReplyDelete~ Abdullahi