Zoe Pamintuan
Contemporary Latino Fiction
Cristina Garcia, The Aguero Sisters

OVERVIEW
Dulce Fuerte is having a miserable time in Madrid, Spain.  She loses her job as a nanny and becomes
homeless for a few days, hiding out in movie theaters and museums, scavenging for food wherever she can find
it.  While stealing from her ex-husband, Dulce sees a letter from Reina inviting her to come to Miami.
Meanwhile, Constancia’s own daughter, Isabel, nine-months pregnant, comes to Miami where she has her
baby son.  Constancia’s beauty business is thriving, while Reina finds an American boyfriend for whom she
fixes old classic cars.  This section also gives us the story surrounding Constancia’s birth and the
subsequent two-year disappearance of Blanca.

ANALYSIS
Garcia continues to explore the theme of the truth and how people deal with truth they find difficult to
admit to.  Constancia’s meticulous and well-ordered world is disrupted with the arrivals of Reina and
Isabel as she is forced to confront her perspectives on the present and her memories of the past.  For
example, while waiting for Isabel at the airport, Constancia wonders if she and Isabel were ever truly
close.  She wonders if the “chilly winter mornings in bed when they read storybooks together” (211) and the
“slow hours pretending to cook alphabet soup in the tub” (211) meant anything substantial.  She question
her somewhat romanticized view of Isabel’s childhood because their relationship now is no longer close and
the two women seem not to have anything in common.
Constancia also seems ambivalent about having had children, believing that giving birth meant ceding
“your place to another” (211) and wondering what legacy she will leave behind for her children and
grandchildren to remember.  This loss of identity is exacerbated by the fact that her own face now reflects
that of her mother, a woman she hated. While at the Seaquarium, Constancia enjoys “pushing
her daughter around in the dolphin wheelchair.  It’s as if Isabel were a baby again, compliant in her
stroller” (215).  And Constancia wishes that things “could remain this well defined” (215). In the past,
her relationship with Isabel was easy and simple, but now, she must redefine her role as not only a mother,
but also a grandmother and this seems not to fit with her own image of herself.   Constancia is also unsure
of what to do with Isabel and the coming of her first grandchild.  She is nervous, “her hands are moist and
shaking.  Is it possible she’s going to be a grandmother?” (213).  Isabel’s pregnancy forces Constancia to admit that she is old enough to be a
grandmother, something she admits to the dying Gonzalo.  Constancia has a difficult time dealing with the chaos
of life and finds solace in controlling the things that she can i.e. her appearance.  She has taken to
wearing vintage clothing, perhaps as a way to sidestep the truth that she is aging, albeit slower than the
women who buy her beauty products.  Constancia’s seeming obsession with her beauty products belie her
underlying denial of the present.  She hides her age behind the products she concocts and sells to other
women who cannot accept the truth that they are getting old.

QUESTIONS
1.      Both Reina and Constancia romanticize the past.  In what ways?
2.      Bodies tell a story in this novel.  How is that true in this reading?