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  • Butterfly Boy: Memoirs of a Chicano Mariposa by Rigoberto González
  • Nancy Kang (bio)
González, Rigoberto. Butterfly Boy: Memoirs of a Chicano Mariposa. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2006.

The butterfly in the title of Rigoberto González’s memoir is a loaded symbol that refers first to the fiery clouds of monarch butterflies spreading northwards from Mexico. In [End Page 750] this seasonal transit to the United States, they resemble the farm laborers of the author’s extended, cross-border family. Born into a “culture of work,” the Chicano writer declares, “What of the migratory Los González, moving from one place to another and marking every stopping place with angst?” (168). The fragile insect also alludes to the Spanish epithet mariposa for a gay man, an identity which González claims and embraces, and the shape of the bruising kisses that his mentally unstable boyfriend makes all over his neck and back.

Although the epithet “butterfly boy” appears initially to infantilize the autobiographical subject, the pejorative sense recedes once we understand that this coming-of-age narrative spans the period of González’s birth in Bakersfield, California, in 1970, to his journey twenty years later to Zacapú (a city nestled among mountains in southwestern Mexico) with his father. Calling himself “butterfly boy” acknowledges the awkwardness of the young cipher, a child “effeminate and demure” who “wanted to do girl things” while surrounded by a culture of machismo (88, 91). Sitting years later in a cramped and ill-ventilated bus, the memoirist flutters impatiently between present and past time in order to find a place of emotional repose, no matter how fleeting.

Framed by this brief summer road trip, the narrative breaks into five short sections of self-reflection, poignant flashbacks, and imagistic vignettes of growing up in small town Mexico with numerous relatives and later, the fruit-rich Coachella Valley of California. Part of “el campo,” or a large farming community of Hispanic migrant workers (officially, denizens of the Fred Young Farm Labor Camp), González was flanked by a loving (if sickly and overburdened) mother and a charismatic, irresponsible father whose affection he particularly craved. Avelina González is notable for her participation in the grape boycotts and other forms of grassroots activism during the early 1970s under the leadership of César Chávez. Searching through his mother’s possessions upon arrival in his grandparents’ Zacapú home, Rigoberto muses, “In one picture I’m holding a red flag with the familiar UFW [United Farm Workers] logo—a black eagle, or upside down Aztec pyramid, depending on how it is viewed” (180). Suffering from a weak heart and eventually passing away unexpectedly at age thirty-one, González’s mother left behind two young sons, twelve-year-old Rigoberto and ten-year-old Alex, both of whom were subsequently abandoned by their father.

An alcoholic with a larger-than-life personality, Rigoberto, Sr. exists as a source of lifelong ambivalence, especially given his choice to marry and start a new family without fully attending to the emotional and material needs of his previous family. As the memoirist confesses bitterly, “Apá, I have called my father since I was a child. My mother was Mami. I lost both. One to death, one to fear. I have forgiven only one” (24). On the bus, clipped and moody exchanges between the eager-to-please older man and chronically depressed son contrast with sections of lyrical “ghost-whispering,” or reconstructed nocturnal conversations between González and his absent lover. The recuperative search for a father figure is persistent and compelling, as the writer admits, “In Indio, I’m the son and grandson of farmworkers who have never once hugged me, but whom I miss terribly, especially when I need to run away from the man who tells me that he loves me, he loves me, he loves me” (8).

The unnamed lover, like Rigoberto, Sr., is an older man, worldly and wealthy whereas the father is small-minded and cheap. In one crushing episode near the conclusion of the text, the father presents his twenty-year-old son with a birthday gift of cologne, despite [End Page...

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