Rocio As A Role Model In Shooting Stars By Denise Chavez

When we are growing up we tend to look for people to be our role models people who represent how we want to be and behave while we grow up, we look for people to lead us through our journey of aging. Denise Chavez presents the views of growing up through the story of Shooting Stars through the eyes of the character named Rocio. The story takes place in New Mexico and Texas where Rocio spends much of her summers with her mother’s family. Rocio is growing up, beginning to age, as she grows older she is looking for someone to help her know more about womanhood. Throughout the story she comes across a few young women who she really admires and wants to be like but is later disappointed by their final outcome and the choices they make throughout

Fear of aging is what causes Rocio to look for womanly role models because she is afraid of what is happening to her, she mentions “Texas was women to me: my fading grandmother, my aunt dying of cancer, my mother’s hunchbacked aunt” (Chaves 57) by mentioning her fading grandmother she means her dying grandmother she means that her grandmother is so old that she is almost gone. To Rocio they are all old and close to death and for this reason she does not look towards them as role models for fear of one day becoming like them and getting old and being so close to death. At the beginning of the story she mentions “death by stoning. Death by fire. Death by insecticide. Death by scalding” (Chaves 54). Rocio mentions death constantly because she is afraid of it she is scared that she is going to die she also mentions “as a child, I spent long hours imagining my disappearance in that ever fearful darkness children know so well”( Chaves 54). With this she means that she imagined the day she died and was afraid of it, she was afraid of the darkness that would one day take her she is afraid of being nothing, afraid of death. Rocio regrets having read The Incredible Shrinking Man, she regrets having read this book because she is experiencing growing up and imagines that one day she will disappear from existence as Scott from The Shrinking Man did. As Rocio matures and grows older her view of death changes she does not mention death as much as she did in the beginning of the story. For fear of death Rocio is trying to find someone to be her role model so that she can have someone to assure her that she is not going to die, she fears talking to people about growing old and she herself mentions it when she says “I never spoke of growing old, or seeing others grow older with any sense of peace. It was a subject that was taboo, a topic like death” (Chavez 64). This is why