Meaning in "Geraldo No Last Name" Literature Review

And it is the tragedy of not knowing that Marin imagines in the story's last paragraph, when she envisions the family he left behind in Mexico as they "wonder, shrug, remember" the pretty boy who vanished and was "never heard from…again."

Cisneros arranges "Geraldo No Last Name" around two basic structural facts. One is the filtering of the story through Marin's consciousness, so that the subject of the story is not really Geraldo's brief life and death -- it is about what somebody like Marin thinks about when she contemplate somebody like Geraldo. And the second fact is, of course, the emphasis given to the different elements of what Marin considers: in some sense, the sad fact of Geraldo's death is subsidiary to the sad facts of his actual life as an illegal worker in a foreign country, who will die without ever seeing his family again.The fact that Cisneros ends the story with Marin's imaginings of how Geraldo lived -- the impoverished and cramped circumstances of his life in America as he worked for money to be sent home to family -- suggests that this is the story's real tragedy.

Works Cited

Cisneros, Sandra. "Geraldo No Last Name." In Wyrick, Jean. Steps to Writing Well. New York: Cengage, 2013. Print.

Cruz, Felicia J. "On the 'Simplicity' of Sandra Cisneros's House on Mango Street." Modern Fiction Studies 47:4 (2001): 910-946. Print.

Harlow, Barbara. "Sites of Struggle: Immigration, Deportation, Prison and Exile." In Calderon, Hector and Saldivar, Jose David, (Editors) Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology.….....