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The Rain God Sparknotes

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The Chicano Movement of the 1960s brought to the forefront of Mexican-American consciousness the need to identify as a self-determined group with unique histories, legends, heroes, triumphs, and legacies (Garcia). This belief in the importance of a renegotiation of Chicano subjectivity and the retrieval of a lost history is embedded in the text of Arturo Islas’ novel The Rain God. Miguel Chico puts forth in this story about a family of sinners—the Angel family—that literature can be utilized as a source of recovery through the acknowledgment of systems of oppression. Miguel, who is the narrator-protagonist of the story, as well as a closeted homosexual, writes, “Perhaps he had survived to tell others about Mama Chona and people like Maria. …show more content…

During his dream, Miguel Chico confronts head on the same monster that Mama Chona believed to have taken over her uterus, and which she denied the existence of. This monster of shame tells Miguel, “You are in my cave, and you will do whatever I say,” before he jumps off the bridge with it, killing both his previous self and the monster of shame associated with it (160). When he wakes from the dream, he has a profound …show more content…

In the poem that Miguel Chico is given by his Aunt Mema, it says, “Nothing recalls them [the dead] but the written page” (162). From this poem comes the title of the novel, and the basis for Miguel Chico’s effort to celebrate the life of his uncle who was forgotten in death, and simultaneously loved by his family and hated by the dominant culture during his life. Uncle Felix achieves perfection and becomes the rain god who takes Mama Chona to the next life. He is also, with his scent of the “desert after a rainstorm,” an angel that precedes the coming of rain (180). In this desert wasteland setting, Miguel envisions his Uncle Felix as the restorative cure for his family—the water in the lives of these individuals who see nothing but drought, death, and punishment around them. His death represents a rejection of the oppressive Catholic beliefs that Mama Chona instilled in her family, and an embracement of a pre-colonization belief system in which shame and guilt do not factor into the

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