Summary Of The Mccoy Hotel By Denise Chavez

In the story, The McCoy Hotel by Denise Chavez, takes place in El Paso, Texas. The main character’s mother was a third grade teacher, and a divorced mother of three. Whenever they arrived at the McCoy hotel, the narrator stated that all of her mother’s problems faded away. She was able to escape her daily routine of making oatmeal and going to work – the hotel allowed them to transform themselves, “Some happier times, when the three of us women would know completion, transformation, not of a self-determining kind, but are independent upon someone else,” (Chavez, 1999, pg. 253). The narrator’s mother believed that a man was the key to her happiness - where being loved by a man would bring happiness to one’s life, “ease us out from the unspoken

Being at the hotel transformed her into a livelier woman where she felt beautiful and was concerned with being regarded as alluring, where she did not have any of her past scars of, “Physical and emotional scars all of those years of suffering, a hunched back, bad legs with inflamed, pulsating varicose veins, an inability to sleep…,” (Chavez, 1999,

The narrator recalls feeling trapped in her daily life, “I felt trapped in a world I could never escape. Confined to mediocracy, a pale, thin, overprotected girl...at the McCoy I became like my mother, a new person…,” (Chavez, 1999, pg. 256). She became a woman who, “Felt mature, comfortable with myself, more alive, not exhausted and frustrated by a life nearly over,” (Chavez, 1999, pg. 258), where being around new people allowed her to be the person dreamed of becoming, where she and her sister Margo both longed for freedom. At the hotel, they also stayed with their mother’s younger sister, Chita, “Rooms where shared by two sets of sisters, one younger the other much older...both groups sought respite from intense summer…,” (Chavez, 1999, pg. 255). The room where connected by the restroom, where one day the narrator saw her mother laying on her bed wearing a brassiere and a wet towel holding her breasts. Nudity was utilized as symbol for the independence that the narrator’s mothers was longing for, where doing housework in the nude is a representation of her mother escaping her domestic activities. The body is, “made through table manners, toilet habits, through seemingly trivial routines, rules and practices, culture is ‘made body,” (Bordo, 2014, pg. 473), where a woman’s sexuality is typically utilized to, “discredit her