The Mixquiahuala Letters

“Tía Filomena has held the reins on that marriage for thirty years.”

Teresa’s aunt Filomena has a high level of control in her marriage, perhaps even to the point of being domineering. This contrasts with the book’s other male-female relationships, in which women often feel powerless.

“Finally we’ve come to respect our privacy / slip into quiet moments with a cup of tea, a glass / of wine, reflect on the next project. Life is / balanced.”

This quote, a poem Teresa included in one of her letters to Alicia, describes Teresa and Alicia’s transformation into more mature women who now savor life’s quieter, more contented moments over excitement and turmoil. The use of “balance” here implies that the women’s younger selves lacked that equilibrium.

“You were never led by the hand as a little girl by a godmother, or tugged by the ear by a nun whose dogmatic instruction initiated you into humility which is quite different from baptism / when you were anointed with water as a squirming baby in the event that you should die and never see God face-to-face because you had not been cleansed of the sin of your parents’ copulation. [The church] smells of incense, hot oils, the wax of constant burning candles, melting at a vigilant pace, the plaster of an army of saints watching with fixed glass eyes…It smells of flowers and palms that precede Easter. It smells of death.”

This passage, which immediately precedes the incident in which the priest pesters Teresa in the confessional, reveals Teresa’s negative perception of Catholicism. The sensory details, particularly the smells, evoke a sense of being overwhelmed. The “heavy” scents contribute to Teresa’s sense of being smothered or weighed down by religion. The saints “watch” her, but they have dead glass eyes.