The phrase the "American Dream" was coined by the popular historian, James Truslow Adams, in 1931, in his book The Epic of America. He describes the American Dream as "a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."
In this vision of America, every citizen has the right to live to his or fullest potential, without regard to social class. This dream of America encourages the crossing of social class boundaries and discards the idea of an aristocratic class. However, in actual practice, the individual cannot progress in society without the help of systems of privilege and power. In fact, many invisible barriers exist to keep certain groups of people from fully attaining their "innate" gifts. Witness the phrase, "glass ceiling," for instance.
In Bodega Dreams (2000), Ernesto Quinoz riffs on F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous American novel The Great Gatsby (1925), often taught in high school and college American literature classes as a quintessential novel about the American dream. It's interesting to consider the similarities and differences between the two novels.
The Great Gatsby is narrated by a character named Nick Carraway, from a respectable middle or upper middle class family in the American Midwest. Nick is visiting New York for the summer, and he lives in a carriage house on Long Island next to the fabulous mansion of a mysterious millionaire, Jay Gatsby. Gatsby throws extravagant parties to which all sorts of classy people are invited (it's the roaring twenties), and Nick is included as a neighbor--or so he thinks until Gatsby asks him to do a favor--arrange a meeting with Daisy Buchanan, the love of Gatsby's life, who Nick's cousin and the wife of Tom Buchanan, a wealthy conservative bigot and former football star.
As it turns out, Daisy is the reason that Gatsby has amassed his great fortune--she wouldn't marry him when he was a poor but handsome soldier, so he became a wealthy man with an eye to winning Daisy's heart. Daisy is a seeming lightweight, but she knows which side her bread is buttered on. Tom not only has money, but he has class and family background. So while she flirts with Gatsby, she does not agree when he asks her in front of Tom to say that she never loved him. As the events of the novel unfold, we find that Gatsby's sudden wealth has come from running a numbers racket and he has many connections to organized crime. There's a car accident in which Tom's low class mistress is killed, and Gatsby takes the blame for it to clear Daisy's name. At the end of the book he is shot by the distraught husband of the mistress.
Now that you can see some parallels between the plots, take a look at what's different in Quinonez's Puerto Rican version.
Chino, like Nick, is a narrator on the edge of many worlds. But Chino is married, and the fate of his wife and the baby she is carrying mean a great deal to him. He's not just a "free agent," so to speak.
Gatsby makes his money to impress Daisy, he does not have any aspirations of bettering the neighborhood or serving his community, other than throwing extravagant parties for everyone that show off his wealth.
Daisy and Vera are both associated with the romance of money and beauty, and both marry for money. It's worth thinking about the kind of Cuban that Vera probably married (a wealthy one, for sure) as we explore Cuban and Puerto Rican relations.
Vera, however, is more overtly a betrayer than Daisy. She shoots her own husband and then has Willie take the rap so that she can be with Nazario. In my power point on gender I brought up the subject of Malinche, the Aztec mistress of Cortez, who served as his translator and guide. Malinche has often been held up as a model of indigenous intelligence, but also as a female who betrayed her people. It's possible to see Vera as a negative Malinche figure, as she shoots her husband and causes the death of her admirer in order to be with the man who has the most money and power.
Nick idealizes Gatsby, because he comes to know him as a poor boy from nowhere who wanted to live the American Dream and become a self-made man. Gatsby believes in this "romance" of the American Dream, and so, to some extent does Nick. The other characters in the novel are more cynical about this--especially the ones with the most money and "class."
Chino comes to idealize Bodega as someone who believed in the American Dream as it extends to Puerto Ricans. He wants a better life for his family, and he believes that Bodega wanted that, too. Pertinent here is Bodega's early association with the Young Lords, about which we will learn more on Wednesday.
Worth noting is that almost all of the characters in Bodega Dreams are Latino, and that while Chino aspires to have a nice apartment, a good job, and a happy family, he also wants to retain his connections to his Puerto Rican community and friends, even if it means taking a few risks. He has no desire to join Anglo-American society. However, his use of F. Scott Fitzgerald's plot for his novel demonstrates that Ernesto Quinonez aspires to write a novel that could be part of the English curriculum.
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