I. Overview
Yolanda Garcia is finally getting married after all these years of celibacy.  Her wedding takes place in the middle of a field next to a sheep farm.  Her family attends and many key characters give their perspectives on Yolanda and the past.  After her wedding, Yolanda takes her annual summer trip to the Dominican Republic and stays at Don Mundin’s house.  The night watchman, Jose, gets to know and enjoy Yolanda’s company.  She desires a child and he, in turn, wants to read and write.  Here, the importance of the characters and their narratives are shown during Yolanda’s wedding.

II. Analysis
Readers are able to visualize the wedding and the events taking place that lead up to the actual wedding ceremony.  Each character’s story reveals who they are, describes a time in their lives that show their relation to Yo and something they remember about either her or Doug.  Corey  is the selfish daughter against her father’s second  marriage.  When an old Dominican aunt of Yo’s comes up to her, mistaking her for a grandniece, Corey’s bitter emotions become quite evident: “Like please, like por favor, would you stop breathing your bad breath on my face or I am going to scream”  (217).  She comes off as a typical resentful teenager who is having her emotions challenged by a common obstacle in life.  At the wedding, her thoughts of others are shown in her body language.

Meanwhile, Sarita, the cousin, attends the wedding on account of Yo’s personal invitation.  She sounds somewhat bitter throughout her narrative and slightly resentful toward the de la Torre family in the way they treated her mother.  She is very proud of her achievements and shows this with the success of her goal to show up the rest of the family.  She seems to lose her sense of humility when describing how she is no longer able to relate to her family due to their lack of education and funds.   Towards the end of her narrative, she gains this humility back when she confesses that she is willing to give everything that she has up in order “to get that hard-working dark-skinned, tired old woman back”  (226).

Directly after Sarita’s narrative comes Flor de la Torre.   She is almost stuck in her own way of thinking and tricking herself into believing that her husband Arturo could never have fathered Sarita as was claimed by Primitiva.  Flor de la Torre sees the signs that Sarita is Arturo’s child but chooses not to acknowledge them as a result of her old ways of thinking about class systems. Lucinda’s narrative comes flying in with her remembering the past incidents between herself and Yo.  She is seemingly unable to forget the past but does realize that she does forgive Yo for the riff between them in the end.  Tammy is the only wedding guest who does not somehow mention her name in order to identify herself within the narrative.  Her role in Yo’s life has been so prominent that an introduction in not necessary.  She has been Yo’s crutch for a long time and now comes to the realization that Yo no longer needs her in the same way now that she is getting married.

The section closes with a third person omniscient narrative.  Doug plays the role of a savior who releases the hold that the electric fence has on a straggling sheep.  The sheep represents Yolanda Garcia who was stuck in her life, trying to break free from something that was keeping her from experiencing happiness and Doug is the hero who steps up and takes charge in order to free her from that which was holding her back.  When Dexter assists, it shows how he tried to help Yolanda but it was ultimately Doug who was able to free her.  The fact that Corey assisted her father in releasing the sheep shows how she too plays a major role in releasing Yolanda from the hold.  Corey becomes the child that Yolanda never has.

III. Questions

1.  Why does the author make the last narrative a third person omniscient one?
2.  What has Yo gained and lost in her career as a writer?