The Madonnas of Echo Park

“Here was a way you could see how the music on our cheap transistor radios looked, these popular songs that throbbed with glamour, desire, and plastic gratification—a reimagining of the American Dream in bright pastels. Our parents didn’t comprehend the words and were fearful that the songs they had fallen in love with growing up would be attached to a language we’d never speak and a country we’d never see.” 

In the Author’s Note, Skyhorse speaks of the magnetic power MTV has over him and his sixth-grade immigrant classmates, who are too poor to have regular MTV access, and for whom he describes everything he sees on the channel. Skyhorse explains how the affluence and fantasy-fulfillment they see in white musicians’ MTV music videos contrast greatly with the lives and experiences of their Mexican immigrant parents, to the degree that MTV feels like an entirely different language. This language of “glamour, desire, and plastic gratification” effectively replaces the little they know—and remember—of Mexico, dividing them from their parents’ generation and overwriting their ethnic identity. As Skyhorse says, MTV is the “mutual language” (xii) of American children from his generation.

“Everyone in this book insisted he or she was a proud American first, an American who happened to be Mexican, not the other way around. No one emphasized this more than Aurora. I am a Mexican, she said when I caught up with her, but a Mexican is not all that I am.”

Here, Aurora speaks to the complexity of her identity as a Mexican-American. Though she hears stories from her mother that connect her with her Mexican identity—such as tales of her mother’s former neighborhood, Chavez Ravine—she most strongly identifies, as many second-generation immigrants do, with the American environment she has seen and known. As a second-generation immigrant, Aurora feels a sense of loss, knowing that there are many aspects of her mother’s experience she does not have access to, having grown up both literally and metaphorically speaking a different language.