The Story, World, and Context of Esmeralda

The short story "Esmeralda" is one of the few in Mia Alvar's collection In the Country that is narrated in the second person, referring to the reader throughout the story as if they were Esmeralda. The titular character is an undocumented Filipina migrant and custodian, alternating within the story between living her present life in New York City circa the September 11th terrorist attacks and her childhood growing up in the Philippines. From the very beginning of the story, Esmeralda is characterised as a piously Catholic character, and much of the context of her childhood in the Philippines as well as the way she lives her present-day life is grounded in traditional Catholic culture. Salient, too, are predominant hierarchical conceptions of race and skin colour, in both the Philippines and the United States. Thirdly, her gender oppression, while not always explicitly stated, is made clear throughout the story through her relationship and treatment relative to her brother, Pepe. Combined with Esmeralda's reminiscences of a natural disaster in her childhood interpolating her living out the September 11th attacks, these themes create a general motif that her tragedies and intersectional marginalisation as an impoverished dark-skinned woman of colour follow her unceasingly, from past to present into beyond. However, various events in the story, including her relationship with a White American middle-class office worker, John, showcase that just as she is paralysed by the religious and cultural constructs in which she was raised, she is also vindicated and empowered by her own identity and philosophy. She carries faith in her destiny and exercises agency, being emboldened by her desires and circumstances.

From the very beginning of the story, Esmeralda's faith is established as the strongest core of her character, especially in its implicit positioning of her as a dark-skinned woman of colour relative to historical constructs. Alvar writes that "The God that you imagine looks like Father Brennan, the man who baptized you: tall and Irish, with white hair and kind blue eyes" (p. 155), after which her White American love interest, John, is introduced as being similarly pale and blue-eyed (p. 156). She is also established to be of at least dubious legal resident status within the United States, from people who paid under the table and "never asked to see your papers" (Alvar, p. 157). Her marginalisation, and her own awareness of such, is generally also well-established from the beginning, as she even admonishes the complaints of privileged Americans: "Try hunger. Try losing your house, a voice inside you, that would never leave your mouth of course, wanted to say" (Alvar, p. 160). She recounts a childhood within a historically deeply religious and traditionally patriarchal society, knowing that she was culturally valued less for being a dark-skinned girl in relation to her paler younger brother. Yet, she actually finds hope and motivation in her social position given this: there were "dreams you had for Pepe. A boy that fair could finish school, grow up to star in movies, run for office. Being a girl — a poor and dark one, no less — you wouldn't dare dream these things for yourself" (Alvar, p. 161).

Even in adulthood, she takes a sort of proud responsibility for the support she sends back home in spite of her brother's "troublemaking," making the point that "'If I stopped sending anything, who knows when my mother would see him?'" (Alvar, p. 166). Specifically, she takes great solace in her faith, and pride in her similarity to Jesus Christ as she innocently bears the sins and burdens of others out of her own goodness. Within "the one House and the one Father who were never far away" (Alvar, p. 166), in a foreshadowing to the tragedies she is later explained to have experienced in literally losing her house and being abandoned by her father, Esmeralda remarks on "what a joy it was to serve, to bear another's load. Those loads weren't heavier than a crown of thorns, were they? No heavier than a cross" (Alvar, p. 166).

As the story goes on and the aftermath of the September 11th attacks becomes clearer, Esmeralda wants to continue realising her self-sacrificial duty of work despite all non-rescue traffic into the city being blocked off. Having realised through decades of lived experience that Filipinas like her are fetishised, perceived as a monolith, and stereotyped into specific service roles like nursing, she asks for forgiveness from God before impersonating a nurse and thus entering the city without much difficulty (Alvar, p. 167). Thus she has taken advantage of her own marginalisation and racialised status for her own ends. Later, after realising that John is falling in love with her despite his marriage and obtaining her documentation, even as a registered alien, Esmeralda nonetheless feels empowered to outwardly express to John her conflicted feelings about their relationship, "so help me God" (Alvar, p. 174). She goes on to do exactly this, implying the sanctity of marriage vows and her own rigid religious morality in an exercise of her agency as a woman, and subverting the often-patriarchal nature of traditional religious culture. She is also able to justify her invasion of John's online computer files as an "accident" due to her position as a custodian, also a subversion of her subaltern status in an empowering move (Alvar, p. 175). In her ongoing experience of the terrorist attacks' aftermath, her memories of the typhoon in her village that destroyed her house and the luck it took for her baby brother to be saved prompt a "pray[er] for love, not just acceptance, of God's will[…]Farm girls saw their share of death" (Alvar, p. 178). Thus, Alvar continually asserts that Esmeralda's power and determination arise precisely from her marginalised position. She feels that the fact of her faith and perseverance despite all odds give her strength, and she is as such demonstrably able to actively leverage her circumstances for her benefit (through such cases as being "the Filipina nurse" and her moral insistence within her relationship with John).

Esmeralda's Christlike self-sacrificial attitudes and acceptance of her fate, for better or worse, continue with narration describing her acknowledgement of her own adulterous sin after being religiously admonished by her (extremely hypocritical) brother: "You're right, Pepe, you should have said. In another time, another country, villagers would have stoned you to death" (Alvar, p. 179). And her attitudes about the world are nuanced by this more frigid understanding of the condition of herself and women everywhere, as she states she's willing to dig through rubble and witness the gore of death to close the lids of a woman who'd died in the attacks, "in case she left this world with her eyes open" (Alvar, p. 180). She endures unfounded abuse from her employers for working too slowly, at one point distances herself from John for the perceived immorality of their affair, and continues to notice the contrast between her brother being afforded as many chances as he can take for his behaviour while she is afforded close to none (Alvar, pp. 181–187). Even despite all of this, though, her faith grounds her, and the story ends with her enjoying the assistance and company of John, whom she considers herself lucky to have met. Despite all of the hardship she has endured, she cannot help but appreciate the strokes of luck and fate which brought herself and John together, with the story's final lines invoking a metaphor of "tallness" versus "highness" (Alvar, p. 190); the latter represents a kind of metaphorical and unmeasurable closeness to the sky (and implicitly, God and Heaven) that the more literal, physical "tallness" cannot capture.

To conclude, the character of Esmeralda is fundamentally dependent on the social, cultural, historical, and religious constructs that define both her childhood and her adulthood. With her Catholic faith and relationships with Jesus Christ and God always an underpinning of her actions and motivations, Esmeralda displays a material awareness that is both bound by her faith and beliefs but also empowered by the same. Her past and her present are characterised by surviving tragedy and adversity, and she consistently leverages her marginalised circumstances for her own self-sacrificial morale as well as material gain. Thus, Esmeralda is ultimately conditioned to accept her fate and seeks to actively appreciate the will of God as both benefits her (e.g. her luck in meeting John) and oppresses her (e.g. her condition within colourist and racist patriarchal society). She is aporetically a product, a victim, and an agent arising all at once out of adversity, context, and circumstance.

Works Cited

Alvar, Mia. In the Country: Stories. Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.