Oranges

views updated

Oranges

GARY SOTO
1985

INTRODUCTION
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
POEM SUMMARY
THEMES
STYLE
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
CRITICAL OVERVIEW
CRITICISM
SOURCES
FURTHER READING

INTRODUCTION

The poem "Oranges" by Gary Soto tells the story of a twelve-year-old boy who goes over to a girl's house on a cold December morning, bringing two oranges in his pocket. They go out walking and end up at a drugstore candy counter, where he offers to buy her any candy she wants. When the chocolate bar she chooses costs more than he has in his pocket, the boy finds himself in a potentially embarrassing situation. He quickly manages to appeal to the store's cashier, subtly, without the girl noticing, and is given the candy. As they walk back to her house, he basks in both the gratitude of the girl and the charity of the store clerk, feeling warmth and heat emanate from himself, as if he were able to hold not just the orange he is peeling but fire itself.

This is one of the most popular, widely recognized poems by the renowned Chicano poet. Soto first gained fame as a poet, then went on to use his stories about his childhood, with its poverty and the conflicts of growing up in a bicultural household, to become a familiar name in the field of young adult literature. Originally published in Soto's 1985 poetry collection Black Hair, "Oranges" is also included in his 1995 collection New and Selected Poems. In addition, the last line of this poem was used for the title of another book that "Oranges" is included in called A Fire in My Hands, which is a collection of poems intended for grades six through ten.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Gary Soto was born in Fresno, California, on April 12, 1952. His grandparents were born in Mexico and came to California to work in the booming agricultural industry of the San Joaquin Valley. His father picked grapes for the Sunmaid Raisin Company and his mother worked in potato fields. When Soto was five, his father was killed in an industrial accident at work, and his mother raised Gary, his older brother, and his younger sister on her own. Soto attended public schools in Fresno and was admittedly a poor student, graduating from Roosevelt High School with a low "C" average. He started reading in high school though, and more importantly, that is where he began thinking like a poet. After graduating from Roosevelt in 1970, he went to Fresno City College for a short time before transferring to California State University—Fresno. He graduated magna cum laude from California State in 1974 with a bachelor of arts degree and then went on to earn his master of fine arts in Creative Writing at University of California—Irvine in 1976. While in graduate school he married Carolyn Sadako Oda; they had one daughter, Mariko Heidi, who grew up to be a veterinarian.

In 1979, Soto began a long association with the University of California—Berkeley: he was an assistant professor from 1979 to 1985, an associate professor of English and ethnic studies from 1985 to 1991, and a part-time senior lecturer from 1991 to 1993. During that time, his fame as a writer grew. Among the many forms of recognition awarded him in his early years were a U.S. Award at the International Poetry Forum in 1976 for his first collection of poems, The Elements of San Joaquin; a Guggenheim fellowship from 1979 to 1980; and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in 1981 and 1991. He first published "Oranges" in his 1985 poetry collection Black Hair.

As Soto's reputation as a poet grew, he also published several books of memoirs, relating what childhood in the San Joaquin Valley was like for the son of immigrants. These memoirs include Living Up the Street (1985), Small Faces (1986), Lesser Evils: Ten Quartets (1988), and A Summer Life (1990). His memories of his childhood led him to writing for children and he has become an acclaimed author in the field of children's literature, starting with the 1990 publication of Baseball in April and Other Stories. His works for children range from picture books for young children to short story and poem collections geared for young adults. In 1992 he stopped teaching to devote all of his energies to his prolific writing career.

POEM SUMMARY

Stanza 1

"Oranges" begins with a narrator looking back at his childhood. He remembers a particular experience of walking side by side with a girl. All that readers know about the two characters in this poem is that he is twelve years old at the time of its events, and that she is presumably twelve or near that. When the poem begins, the narrator is alone, having not reached the girl's house yet.

In the third and fourth lines, the speaker introduces the oranges that are referred to in the title of the poem. There are two of them, and the boy is on his way to pick up his date, so readers might infer that he means to share the oranges with the girl. They are not represented here as something positive, though, but rather as a burden. In addition, he allows his focus to stray from the poem's main situation, his first experience with a girl, and instead makes a point of dwelling on the cold weather.

Lines 5 through 7 offer readers a graphic, sensory description of the cold of the day that had been referred to earlier. Soto's description of frost on the ground and breath condensing as it is exhaled indicates that it may have been an unusual cold snap, as most of his poems are autobiographical and take place in Fresno, California, where he grew up: the average temperature in Fresno barely touches the freezing mark at night in December. The fact that the weather was strangely colder than usual could account in part for the prominent place it has in the speaker's memory.

Lines 8 through 12 show the young protagonist approaching the house of the girl he is to go walking with. Though he has never been out with her before, he knows her house well, having looked at it in the night and in the day, familiar with the porch light that burns continuously. Almost as foreboding as the cold weather is the fact that her dog barks at the boy; readers can assume that the barking dog is hers because she comes out of the house in response to its noise, with no mention of the boy knocking or ringing a doorbell.

The fact that this is no casual meeting, but a prearranged date, is indicated in line 13 by the fact that the girl comes to the boy when she sees him. The fact that it is a date is implied in line 15 by the fact that she has taken the time to apply makeup to her face, wanting to make herself look appealing. She has a bright, happy face, and he smiles, and in line 16 the narrator makes a point of mentioning that he touched her on the shoulder, a significant enough gesture to mention, though nothing is made of it.

Lines 17 through 21 describe the neighborhood that they walk through together. It is a commercial area that has a used car lot that twelve-year-olds would feel comfortable cutting through, and it is a conscientious enough community to have recently planted new trees in an effort toward civic beautification.

In lines 22 through 24, the poem describes the feel of the old time drugstore that they enter. The bell rings when the door is opened so that whoever is working there, involved in other things, can know when a customer has entered the shop. The saleslady is a matronly woman who approaches her customers with individual care and attention. The narrow aisles indicate an emphasis on stocking products, without the kind of savvy attention to customer psychology that goes into organizing modern shops.

The boy's grand gesture in lines 25 through 27 is obviously the fulfillment of what he has been planning all along. He gestures to the candy display, offering to buy whichever candy she picks.

Though it is never explicitly addressed, readers can infer that these two young people live in poverty. For one thing, the girl reacts with glee to an offer of a candy bar in lines 28 through 30, implying that she does not have much chance to purchase any candy for herself. The most obvious indicator of their depressed situation, however, is the fact that the boy does not even have the price of a candy bar in his pocket; he only has a nickel, while the candy bar she chooses costs a dime (lines 31-33).

In lines 34 through 38, the boy quickly thinks of a way to deal with the embarrassing situation of having offered to buy the girl a candy bar but not having enough to pay for it. He does not object, or draw attention to his poverty. Instead, he approaches the woman who is running the store and silently offers her a deal, offering her half of the price of the candy and one of the two oranges that he brought along to share with the girl.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Soto reads his poem "Oranges" and discusses his interpretation of it in Seeing Anew: Rhetorical Figures in Poetry, a videotape released by Maryland Public Television in 1992.
Soto maintains a Web site at http://www.garysoto.com that includes descriptions of his works and thoughts about his life.

One of the most significant actions in this poem occurs in lines 38 through 43. The boy and the saleslady establish eye contact across the candy bar, nickel, and orange that he has put on the counter. From the look in his eyes, she can tell why he is not offering her the correct price of the candy he wishes to buy, and why it is so very important to him to buy that candy without being embarrassed. Soto does not even bother to tell readers that the woman allowed him to pay half the price of the candy with an orange, leaving readers instead to understand that his offer has been accepted from the empathy that develops between the boy and the salesclerk.

Stanza 2

The second stanza starts on line 43 with one word, indented, to give readers a sense that more than the setting has changed: the mood of the poem has changed, too, as the boy and the girl have reached a new point in their relationship, with a new closeness. While the first stanza emphasized the coldness outside when the boy was walking alone, the descriptions in the second stanza, lines 44-46, show that the day has warmed a little bit: the hiss of the cars as they pass on the street shows that the frost that once crunched beneath the boy's feet has melted, and the fog that hangs in the air would not be possible if the weather were below freezing.

In lines 47 and 48, the boy takes hold of the girl's hand. She does not object, but still he does not hold it for long, letting go in line 49 after only two blocks. He knows that she accepts him, but that the chocolate that he has bought her is very important to her as well.

The last six lines of the poem, lines 51-56, contain an extended description of the orange that the boy peels as the girl is unwrapping her chocolate bar. Soto does not explicitly describe what makes it so special; that much is made clear through the events that preceded this moment, with the boy bringing an orange for the girl he likes and the salesclerk accepting the orange as payment. Instead, the poem leaves reader with a visual image. The brightness of the orange is contrasted with the grayness of the dark, cool day, and then it is described as looking from afar like a fire in the boy's hand. Since the connotations of fire, in this context, are all positive, readers are left feeling that the boy's outing with the girl has warmed and enlightened him, and that the one orange left is an emblem of the special feeling that came over him that day.

THEMES

Coming of Age

"Oranges" is the story of a twelve-year-old boy who is crossing an emotional threshold and entering into a new period of his life, facing things that he has never encountered before. This is made clear in the first few words of the poem. The fact that he has never walked with a girl until the events related here indicates to readers that they are about to witness something that will change his life. In doing something for the first time ever, especially in entering into his first adult relationship, the boy is gaining some aspect of maturity.

A literary work about a young person who is entering into a phase of adulthood that he or she has never experienced before is referred to as a coming-of-age story. Such tales often end with the protagonist losing his or her idealism, though as "Oranges" shows, this is not always the case. In this poem, the narrator does pass over from being inexperienced with the opposite sex to feeling comfortable in a relationship with a girl. He does not acquire the cynicism that is often associated with a loss of innocence. If anything, the way that his walk with the girl turns out makes the boy more trusting of life and its possibilities than he was before. Though writers often use coming-of-age stories to introduce characters to the crushing responsibilities of adulthood, Soto uses "Oranges" to show that growing and learning can lead to a sense of wonder.

Empathy

The dramatic tension of this story derives from the fact that the boy finds his desires in conflict with his means. He wants to impress the girl by buying her whatever she wants, but the chocolate she chooses costs twice what he can afford. It is a situation that could end tragically, leaving the boy humiliated and cynical about women, but instead Soto shows the boy making a tacit agreement with the woman he is supposed to pay, offering her an orange for half the price of the candy bar. No words pass between them about this deal. He does not have to explain his situation; it is clear. She sees the young people together and she knows what the boy is trying to do when he buys the candy bar, just as she knows, from the fact that he has done what he can to make up the missing money with what he does have—an orange—that he does not want to cheat the store.

She is able to understand how he feels so thoroughly that she falls into an unspoken conspiracy with him, helping him keep the girl unaware that her choice of candy is a burden to him. Soto shows that empathy, the ability to understand the emotions of another person, is one of the most important human emotions by using symbolism. The title of the poem is "Oranges"; one orange is used at the end to show that the boy has a newfound sense of warmth; the other orange is left with the woman at the drugstore, not as a substitute for cash as much as a way of giving her something truly good in thanks for her understanding.

Commercialism

In this poem, Soto makes a subtle comment on the different economic values that are held by people living in the same community. The boy, who is presumably from a poor background if he cannot easily afford a candy bar, arrives for his walk with the girl with two oranges in his pocket, which he must intend to share with her. His plan fails, however, when she does not want the natural, available fruit that he has, but instead finds that the manufactured, packaged chocolate on the store shelf has more appeal.

Soto does not use the girl's choice to indicate that she is wrong to be swayed by the consumer product. In fact, the girl does not have a choice at all: the boy does not offer her one of the oranges before trying to impress her by offering her pick from the candy counter. By doing so, he is implicitly saying that the products on the candy shelf must necessarily be more impressive than the orange that he brought for her. From the way that the girl lights up at his offer of candy, it is likely that she comes from a family that is just as impoverished as his, making the store-bought product more alluring than the oranges that grow commonly around Soto's native San Joaquin Valley.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Examine the changes in dating patterns since the 1960s, when this poem probably takes place. Create a graph that shows the ages at which young people have generally started dating throughout the past hundred years, and then make another graph that shows how the average life span has changed over the same time. Write a short essay that explains what you think the two have to do with each other.
Write a short story or a poem that is a sequel to "Oranges" from the first-person point of view of the girl.
The ability to make fire has always been considered a defining human achievement. Consider the poem's last line. Are the boy's accomplishments in the poem comparable to the historic discovery of the fire-making process? If so, how? If not, why? Write an essay in which you discuss whether or not the events outlined in the poem are momentous.
One theme of "Oranges" is commercialism. Collect advertisements for processed foods, like candy, and natural foods, like fruit, and create a collage. Identify the advertising techniques used in each item you included. Who seems to be the target audience for each advertisement? Which advertisements are most persuasive? Summarize your analysis in an oral presentation, using your collage as a visual aid.

STYLE

Narrative Verse and Free Verse

"Oranges" is an example of a narrative poem, or one that tells a story. Narrative verse is traditionally considered to be one of the four basic literary modes of poetry, along with lyric, dramatic, and didactic poetry. Narrative poems include the oldest poems known to history: epics such as the Iliad of Homer (circa eighth or ninth century BCE) and the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, which is dated to the seventh century BCE. Geoffrey Chaucer's fourteenth-century story The Canterbury Tales is a collection of interrelated narrative poems tied together to make one overall story. Many older narrative poems are believed to be stories that were passed

from one person to another, from generation to generation for hundreds of years before finally being written down.

As with most narratives, Soto's poem is more concerned with the story that it is telling than with using a particular poetic style to capture readers' imaginations. "Oranges" is written in free verse—it does not use any particular rhyme scheme or rhythm pattern to enforce its message. Instead, Soto keeps the action moving so that readers want to know what happens next. The fact that the story of the poem is something that happened to him, or at least could have happened to him, helps create a personal bond with readers, making the fate of the boy in the poem that much more meaningful to them.

First-Person Point of View

"Oranges" is told in the first person, from the perspective of one of the participants in the poem, but in some sense the person who is telling the story is a very different person from the boy who walks with the girl. The speaker of the poem is clearly telling the story years after the action took place. This distance in time gives the poem a feeling of calmness that would be lacking if the events were presented with more immediacy. The very fact that he has chosen to tell about this event, noting that it was the first time he was in a date-like situation, indicates by itself that this was an important moment of his life. Soto's decision to draw attention to the adult speaker in the first line, though, helps to show readers that this one long-ago event is a relatively small part of an overall life. In the last line, he takes an even wider perspective, switching to a different point of view, relating what an observer who was far away from the action might have seen and how they might have interpreted what they saw.

Motif

Soto uses the cold weather as a motif, or recurring device or image used to emphasize the mood or message of the work. In the first segment, the boy's loneliness and foreboding about approaching a girl's house for the first time is magnified by the fact that he is cold. Mentioning the external effects of the cold, such as his visible breath and the sound of frost crunching beneath his footsteps, draws attention to his apprehension by showing just how hyper-aware he is to sensory input. When the girl comes out of her house the first thing she does is pull on her gloves, which is a reasonable defense against the cold air but also draws readers' attention to her overall defensiveness in this new and uncertain situation.

By contrast, the weather seems warmer after they leave drug store. The crunchy frost has melted to wetness, which makes cars on the street hiss on the pavement and moisture has risen into the air as fog. The girl's hand is uncovered during the walk home, allowing the boy to take hold of it briefly. At the end of the poem, Soto uses the weather as a visual aid. The gray, foggy day is invoked to contrast the brightness of the orange in his hand, making it look even more vibrant, like fire.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Mexican Immigration in California

Soto's poetry is often autobiographical, as is the case with "Oranges." Soto was twelve—the age of the boy in this poem—in 1964. He grew up in a Mexican American family in Fresno, California, a city that drew many Mexican immigrants who came to the United States looking for jobs in the agricultural fields of the surrounding San Joaquin Valley. Field work has always been difficult physical labor, often involving stooping to the ground to harvest low-growing fruits and vegetables such as lettuce, artichoke, or strawberries. It is the physical labor involved in harvesting produce in the sun that has traditionally made the work unappealing for Americans who are able to find jobs that offer more money for less work. Workers from Mexico, which has had a more subdued economy, have crossed over to the United States for decades into border states like California, Texas, and New Mexico, to accept salaries that were much higher than they could earn in their own country.

Many of the workers came into the United States without proper documentation, which left them at the mercy of their employers, who could withhold wages, refuse decent housing or toilet facilities, or even physically abuse undocumented workers without much fear of punishment. That changed during the early 1960s, around the time when this poem takes place.

The factor that had the most effect on the lives of Mexican farm laborers was the advent of the United Farm Workers. It was founded by Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chávez, two community organizers who met while working for the Community Service Organization in Stockton, California. In 1962 they left to form the National Farm Workers Association, an organization devoted to fighting for the rights of migrant field workers. In 1965, the NFWA came to national prominence when it joined with the predominantly Filipino Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee in a five-year strike against grape growers in Delano, California. The two groups merged into the United Farm Workers, and Chávez, who led a 350-mile march from Delano to the state capitol in Sacramento, became the recognizable face of the labor movement and an iconic personality in many Mexican American households. His powerful influence on the Latinos of California is evident in Soto's 2003 biography, Cesar Chaávez: A Hero for Everyone.

Multicultural Literature

Soto is often associated with the movement toward cultural diversity in literary studies because he has frequently written about his Mexican American background. Since the 1960s, there has been more emphasis on introducing examples from other cultures into recommended reading lists for schools in the United States. Although founded on the principle of the melting pot, which holds that the country is a place where people from around the world bring their cultural backgrounds to mix with those of others, the standard literature in the United States was, for most of the country's history, very narrow in focus. It favored those of European background, using the country's historical ties to Great Britain as an explanation for treating British literature as the United States's antecedent. In the 1960s, however, different segments of society began to claim their traditions were at least as relevant as those handed down from Europe. The most conspicuous of these was the black pride movement, which took the tenets of the civil rights movement of the postwar generation to the next logical step, asserting that it is just as wrong to deny the importance of black Americans' historical experiences as it is to deny that they deserve equal treatment under the law. Another influential social movement in the 1960s was the American Indian movement, organized in 1968 to advance the rights of Native Americans. The National Council of La Raza began in the same year as an advocacy group for Mexicans, and quickly expanded to support Hispanics of various national origins. The successes of these movements, as well as others like them, stemmed from a broadening awareness of the many different cultures that work together in the United States.

COMPARE & CONTRAST

1960s: The standard price for a Hershey's chocolate bar is uniformly five cents, suggesting that the candy bar chosen by the girl was a more exclusive brand. Hershey bars do not rise in price to ten cents until 1969.
1980s: Variations in the costs of ingredients have made the Hershey Company give up the practice of holding to a standard national price for their chocolates.
Today: The Hershey's chocolate bar still dominates the candy market, though there are many other inexpensive brands of chocolate as well as more expensive ones that appeal to refined tastes.
1960s: The local drugstore is a place known by everyone in the neighborhood. A clerk in a drugstore has discretion about how to enter a sale in the cash register.
1980s: Due to corporate expansion, large nationwide chains begin to replace local drug stores, offering lower prices. The Universal Product Code (UPC) has been developed and is printed on most items; prices automatically come up on the cash register when the code is scanned.
Today: Few communities have independently owned drugstores. UPCs have made cashier work so automated that many stores now trust customers to check out their own orders.
1960s: The number of Mexican American authors with national reputations is very limited. Writers like Tomás Rivera and Luis Valdez become standout members of California collaborative projects such as Quinto Sol Publications and Teatro Campesino.
1980s: One result of the civil rights movements of the 1960s is a growing respect for writers who come from outside of the familiar mainstream culture. Writers such as Soto, Sandra Cisneros, and Al Martinez are just a few of the authors who comprise a blossoming in Mexican American/Chicano literature.
Today: While literature by Mexican Americans continues to flourish, many Mexican American writers resist being categorized by ethnicity. Writers are frequently discussed on the basis of the quality of their works and not their ethnic background.

Throughout the 1970s and '80s, as awareness of cultural diversity in the United States grew, schools gave more attention to representing members of ethnic and cultural minorities in their assigned readings. Standard reading lists that favored traditional writers, mostly the males of European descent of earlier generations who came to be referred to as "dead white men," were opened up to contemporary writers, women, and minorities. In particular, the writings of Mexican American writers, referred to collectively as Chicano literature, came to the attention of literary critics and audiences in unprecedented numbers, owing to the wave of immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries under new, relaxed immigration laws and to a heightened sense of ethnic pride in the Mexican American community.

It was around this time that Soto began publishing his writing. His clear voice and control of language made him a poet respected among his peers, and the fact that he brought to literature a perspective on Mexican American life that had not been represented often in print fit in well with the drive to create reading lists that reflected broader cultural diversity.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

Critics have been impressed with Soto's poetry throughout his entire poetic career. By the time "Oranges" was published in the mid-1980s, Soto was already frequently published in magazines with national circulation and was often included in poetry anthologies. His work was often included as an example of Chicano poetry, though reviewers often made a point of mentioning that his poetry was, regardless of ethnic labels, simply fine work. For instance, Tim D'Evelyn, reviewing the 1985 poetry collection Black Hair, which included "Oranges," for the Christian Science Monitor, mentions early in his review that Soto taught in the department of Chicano studies at Berkeley; later in his review D'Evelyn notes that "Soto deserves attention. His extremely plain style keeps him honest. But I'm pretty sure he won't take praise if it is offered to him as a representative Chicano poet…. Somehow Gary Soto has become not an important Chicano poet but an important American poet."

A few years later, some of Soto's poems for young adults, including "Oranges," were brought together in a collection called A Fire In My Hands. Because of the plain style and the author's notes about his inspiration for each poem, reviewers began looking at Soto as an inspiration for beginning writers. Barbara Chatton, writing in School Library Journal in 1992, praises the collection, noting that Soto's writing "provide[s] gentle encouragement" to young writers. Heather M. Lisowski made the same point when, fourteen years later, she reviewed the revised and expanded edition of A Fire In My Hands for School Library Journal, adding that the book "demonstrates the genesis of a poem as well as the compelling universality of the human experience."

Overall, critical response to Soto's poetry has been consistently positive. Rochelle Ratner, reviewing Soto's New and Selected Poems in Library Journal summed up the feeling that seems to be the consensus: "Soto has it all—the learned craft, … a fascinating autobiography, and the storyteller's ability to manipulate memories into folklore."

CRITICISM

David Kelly

Kelly is a writer and an instructor of creative writing and literature. In this essay, he rejects the standard interpretation that "Oranges" presents a vision of childhood innocence.

The poem "Oranges" by Gary Soto is frequently included in anthologies of literature as a sole example of Soto's writing. Readers praise it, finding it to be pleasant and unchallenging. The assumption that this poem is about a charming courtship between innocent children may be touching, but it does not really respond to the facts given in the poem. "Oranges" does reaffirm the basic goodness of life, but its view of young love finding its way is anything but sweet.

The poem tells readers nothing about its narrator at the start except that he is telling about a time when he was twelve years old. In the story, the boy goes to a girl's house one December morning to walk with her. The fact that it is just a walk with her, nothing more, is quaint enough without it being something he has never had a chance to do before, and readers are naturally inclined to root for the innocent, non-threatening child. Though it may be his first romantic experience, the walk together is not spontaneous: the girl is waiting for him wearing makeup, and she runs out to join him on the sidewalk as soon as he has arrived. Soto refers to this as walking together, but it could also be properly called a date.

The boy shows up for his date bearing a humble present: two oranges, presumably one for her and one for himself. Curiously, Soto does not mention any dialog passing between the two children, so readers do not know why their date follows the course that it does. Does he have the idea to go to the drugstore, or does she? Or was it the thing he suggested when he asked her out originally, the premise of their date? The basic foundation of their relationship is left unexplored.

What readers are told is that, arriving at the drugstore, the boy gestures to the candy counter, offering the girl her choice of candies. This causes the poem's dramatic complication as the girl's choice is a candy bar that costs twice as much as he has with him. For a moment, humiliation looms, but the boy immediately fixes things by making a deal with the sales lerk without a word passing between them. He puts on the counter a nickel and an orange, and seeing before her a poor young man who is desperate to impress a girl, recognizing his discomfort, realizing that he would not do anything so strange unless he had to, the woman behind the counter chooses to play along and accept his offer without drawing attention to it.

As they walk off together, the girl remains blissfully ignorant of what has just transpired. She holds the boy's hand for a short while. The poem ends with the boy feeling a sense of power, as if, instead of an orange, he holds fire itself in his hand, warding off the December cold. It is as if he has tapped into one of the basic elements of life, of humanity itself.

In some sense, he really has touched upon one of life's building blocks because he has, over the course of this poem, learned a great deal about what makes the world go around. The oddity here is that many readers find this poem cute, seeing it as an insignificant story about an awkward young lover. There is a young couple in "Oranges," but their relationship is hardly romantic. Longing occurs and deals are struck, but what does not show up in the poem is love.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

Many of Soto's works reflect his childhood in Fresno, California, the setting of this poem. In particular, readers can see the background of the boy who is presented here in Living Up The Street, a 1985 memoir that was reprinted in 1992 by Laurel Leaf.
Soto's poem "That Girl," included in his 2002 collection A Fire in My Hands: Revised and Expanded Edition, describes a boy who has an infatuation with a girl. Both that poem and "Oranges" are autobiographical and readers can see the relationship developing between these two young people.
David Hernandez, a Puerto Rican poet, uses images from childhood such as kites, crayons, and pop-up books to capture the feeling of love in his poem "Kid Love," available in his collection The Urban Poems, published by Fractal Edge Press in 2004.
Richard Rodriguez is a Mexican American writer who, like Soto, grew up in a California agricultural town, Sacramento. His autobiography about his formative years, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, is considered one of the best memoirs published in recent decades for the way that it interweaves his personal development with social issues relevant to Chicano lives. Originally published in 1982, a new edition was released by Dial Press in 2004.
Sandra Cisneros is a Chicana writer whose works cover many of the same themes that Soto explores. Her 1983 novel The House on Mango Street follows a twelve-year-old girl, Esperanza Cordero, as she grows up in a Chicago neighborhood that is much more closed than the Fresno of Soto's poem.

A young, inexperienced boy would know little about love, of course, no matter what he knows about wanting to love—this is what inexperience is all about. His unfamiliarity with what he is doing may explain for readers why everything seems strange to him. Soto captures his uncertainty perfectly in the poem's removed, objective tone. "Oranges" tracks the events that transpire with focus and clarity, but it never dips below the surface to offer up what the boy thinks about anything, including what he thinks about the girl he is so desperate to impress. Of course he "likes" her—they would not be taking this walk otherwise. His liking her naturally means that he wants her to like him, too, but somewhere beyond the range of the poem, the boy's desire for the girl has passed a fork in the road. One path leads toward the selfless, shy love that so many readers see when they read this work, and the other leads toward a drive to possess the girl, which seems to be the direction that the boy has actually taken.

What makes the poem seem charming is the boy's apparent insecurity. He is so desperate for the girl's esteem that he jumps into a situation and quickly finds himself over his head. It is not prudent of him to offer the girl anything she wants from a candy display that holds items costing more than he can afford. There are innocent explanations available for such fecklessness. It may be that he comes from a life of such poverty that even such a small financial transaction is strange to him, and so he has no idea, when he makes his offer, that the nickel he is holding might not be sufficient. It might seem to him like such a grand amount that it can purchase anything. Or it may be that he assumes for some reason that the girl will understand that his offer of "anything" applies only to the less expensive items. If he operates under some civil code that makes him avoid embarrassing others, he may assume that she understands the same rules. Or it may be that he is so driven and wild in his need to impress her that the reality of his finances just does not cross his young mind.

Whatever it is that compels the boy to make an offer he cannot support, he finds himself suddenly, unexpectedly in the potentially catastrophic position of having to take back his offer, admit his poverty, and tell the girl that she can only have some less expensive candy, if such a thing exists. This would be catastrophic because of the shame he would have to bear, though, in a larger sense, it might be good for their budding romance to test the girl's patience. If she were to lose interest in the boy after finding out that his finances are limited, she might be someone he would be better off without.

This, after all, raises the seamy aspect of Soto's poem. The tender romance that it presents is, at its center, based on a successful financial transaction. The boy expects this, but then he is just a frightened and inexperienced child. More discomforting is the fact that the poem itself offers no hint that the boy is naïve in his understanding of relationships. The girl's affections never do prove any more substantial than the boy's purchasing power.

Instead of showing that the boy is childish in his nervous desire to be her financial supporter, the poem goes on to verify his expectations. After he provides the girl with her desired chocolate, the poem refers to her in line 47 as "my" girl; after that, the boy takes her hand, but their one affectionate moment is cut short so that she can get to her real interest, her candy. It is the transaction that holds them together, not an emotional connection.

Yet this is not a cynical poem; it is just cynical about romance. There is a true emotional exchange in the poem. The boy starts his walk with two oranges, one for himself and one as a gift for the person he cares about, and at the end of the poem the two people left with the oranges are the ones who have found an honest human connection.

Though readers may be inclined to focus their attentions on the relationship between the young boy and girl, it is the boy's silent arrangement with the grown woman that really provides this poem's moral center. Both "sales" and "lady" in the title that Soto gives the clerk serve to make her seem more alien, putting her at arm's length from the couple at the center of the poem. The poem sets her up as a bit player, a functionary, a prop who is no more important to the story than the used car lot or the tiered candy display, but she ends up providing the poem's one big surprise and its one big emotional moment.

In recognizing the boy's dilemma, this cashier stands in for all readers who sympathize with him, acting as readers would like to believe they would act to help out the poor, clueless, longing child. She joins into a conspiracy with him to hide his financial shortcoming. Their conspiracy is not a deal hammered out at the bargaining table, but is instead arranged spontaneously, with one silent glance. This boy's embarrassing financial situation is a common one: the clerk recognizes it, and she then goes one step further by accepting an orange, a token gesture, for cash, absorbing a financial loss. It may be a small gesture, but it is a much greater tribute to their common humanity than anything that transpires between the boy and the girl. Whether their aloofness is due to their youthful anxiety or the financial exchange at the heart of their relationship is debatable, but one thing is clear: the boy and the girl are joined by a candy bar. The boy's exchange with the saleslady is based on the sort of recognition that holds the human race together.

It is natural that readers would want to focus their attention on the boy's discomfort in this poem, finding him endearing in his youthful attempt to impress the girl he desires. But the cuteness, unfortunately, just is not there. The poem shows no bond beyond the candy that the boy gives the girl to buy her affection. This is not the heartwarming tale that many readers want to project onto the events that are actually explained on the page. Even worse, though, is the fact that summarizing this as a "young romance" poem might cause some readers to miss the true wonder that Soto is revealing for them, which is the magical way in which humans of different generations and genders can see themselves in one another and are willing to reach out to help.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on "Oranges," in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.

Tamra Orr

In the following excerpt, Orr discusses the autobiographical nature of Soto's poetry.

It is hard to pinpoint what one factor has made Gary Soto the popular author he is today. Is it because he is one of the first young adult writers to devote himself exclusively to detailing the Mexican American experience? Not only is he a Chicano, but everything he writes—stories, books, and poems—centers completely on Chicano characters. "I don't talk about ethnicity," he says. "I show ethnicity."

All of his writing centers on his own life or the lives of fictional people embodying and expressing their Mexican heritage. Much of Soto's work is autobiographical in that he writes a lot about growing up as a Mexican American. It is important to him to create and share new stories about his heritage. Soto says, "There are many different kinds of writers. Some people like to write things that are factual and historical. For me, the joy of being a writer is to take things I see and hear and then rearrange them. I like to tamper with reality and create new possibilities." When fellow Mexican American author Alejandro Morales asked Soto during a recorded interview if it is a burden being a Chicano writer, he replied, "No. It is a privilege."

Soto's work, which includes picture books for young children and novels for adults, almost always includes a glossary of Mexican words and phrases to help readers understand and learn the language that his various characters use. Although most of Soto's writing is peppered with Spanish words and expressions, his themes remain both very personal and entirely universal. This allows readers, regardless of their cultural backgrounds, to be able to relate to his stories.

One of the reasons that Soto is a respected author is that he experiments with various types of writing rather than sticking to any single form. Unlike many authors, Soto has dabbled in everything from fictional short stories to poems to plays. His autobiographical essays about his childhood and adult life are just as popular as his books of poetry. He writes adult fiction as entertainingly as he does children's picture books. Soto even wrote a libretto for his children's book Nerdlandia for the Los Angeles opera. In addition, he has produced, directed, and written three films: The Bike, The Pool Party, and Novio Boy.

Another reason that readers enjoy Soto's writing is the personal detail he adds to his work, reminding readers of themselves and their own life experiences. Whether he is writing about a young man dancing with a broom he pretends is a pretty girl or his own struggle to understand his father's death, Soto strikes a deep chord inside readers. Soto's writing leads readers to recall similar moments in their pasts, creating a bond between reader and author.

Soto's work is not always cheery and optimistic—sometimes it is raw, difficult, and painfully realistic. In a profile published in Macmillan Profiles: Latino Americans, Soto says, "I think even in sadness, there's a certain beauty and satisfaction." He adds, "Even though I write a lot about life in the barrio, I am really writing about the feelings and experiences of most American kids: having a pet, going to the park for a family cookout, running through a sprinkler on a hot day, and getting a bee sting!"

In the end, readers may not know precisely why they enjoy Soto's writing, but they find it entertaining and enjoyable. According to Macmillan Profiles, Soto's works "evoke the small beauties of life that emerge from the background of daily struggles." Indeed, Soto's stories, essays, and poems remind people of all ages what is important in life, what is to be remembered, cherished, and most of all, appreciated. His work leaves people looking at their lives a little more closely and, perhaps, gaining a clearer idea of what makes them all so special.

Source: Tamra Orr, "Introduction," in Gary Soto, Rosen Publishing Group, 2005, pp. 7-10.

Julianne White

In the following essay, White analyzes Soto's use of imagery and symbols in "Oranges."

When I was twelve years old, walking somewhere, anywhere (but especially to a store) with a boy was cause for giddy celebration. Such a walk was so important because it signalled the end of childhood and the beginning of the journey toward adulthood, which we could only perceive as a very good thing indeed. In Gary Soto's poem "ranges," the narrator of the poem walks that walk with the girl of his dreams to the drugstore on a cold December morning. When she picks out candy that costs a dime, he places his one nickel and one of his two oranges on the counter. The saleslady, obviously sensitive and kind, accepts this unusual method of payment, choosing not to embarrass him. While they walked home eating their respective chocolate and remaining orange together, the boy finds a new sense of confidence and independence. Soto's poem does not suggest that the poem's persona looks back on his puberty as a painful, awkward, or traumatic period of his life; rather, he remembers this experience with all the warmth and regard of one for whom growing up was perhaps not so bad.

Soto makes effective use of poetic language in this poem. The narrative format and the absence of rhythm and rhyme make the poem read more like a short story. However, the relative short length of the lines, resulting in a visually lengthy poem, reflects the fleeting aspect of adolescence, the period that has passed since the incident in the poem occurred, and how adolescence seems drawn out while one is enduring it, but in reality, disappears all too soon.

Soto begins the narrative with a description of himself, the day, and his companion:

The first time I walked

With a girl, I was twelve,

Cold, and weighted down

With two oranges in my jacket.

December. Frost cracking

Beneath my steps […]

She came out pulling

At her gloves, face bright

With rouge. (1-6; 13-15)

The words "December," "frost," and "cracking" (5) in the first part of the poem emphasize the chill of the weather, mimicking the sound of walking on snow. Also, it reflects the chill between the boy and the girl in their awkwardness with each other. In addition, "face bright with rouge" (14-15) shows not only the cold weather (some of the color in her cheeks may actually have to do with the temperature), but also the girl's inexperience with applying makeup.

Inside the drugstore, the imagery continues. Even though the days of overstuffed five-and-dime stores are long gone, many young people today will recognize the cramped feel given by Soto's description:

[…] We

Entered, the tiny bell

Bringing a saleslady

Down a narrow aisle of goods.

I turned to the candies

Tiered like bleachers,

And asked what she wanted—(21-27)

The "narrow" (24) aisles crammed with goods make the reader feel the cramped, uncomfortable tension between the boy and girl as they make their selections. "Candies tiered like bleachers" (25-26) echoes the familiar image of rows of children in school taking a class picture, sitting in assemblies, standing at pep rallies, or cheering at a football game. The narrative of the poem reaches its climax when the girl, taking her cue from her generous friend, picks out what she wants, rather than what she thinks the boy can afford. The tension then comes from the reader's uncertainties: Will the boy ask the girl to change her selection? Will the saleslady demand cash or no sale?

[…] I fingered

A nickel in my pocket,

And when she lifted a chocolate

That cost a dime,

I didn't say anything.

I took the nickel from

My pocket, then an orange,

And set them quietly on

The counter. When I looked up,

The lady's eyes met mine,

And held them, knowing

Very well what it was all

About. (30-42)

The oranges and the candy are the major symbols of the poem. The candy represents a seemingly unreachable goal, or material goods out of the financial reach of children. The oranges give the narrator "weight" and importance, and then they become a medium of exchange used to buy the candy. In a moment of impressive decision-making, the boy takes a chance that the saleswoman will accept the orange without question; her lack of hesitation gives him the confidence to continue his special walk. Although his courage is impressive, the risk was also a safe and intelligent bet: If the saleslady had refused to honor his orange for payment, he would still have the two oranges to share with the girl on their way home. Either way, he proves himself and impresses the girl, which was the goal in the first place, and he is rewarded for his bravery by being allowed to hold her hand on the walk home.

His confidence appears in the warm glow from the remaining orange, which could be mistaken for fire from a distance:

Outside

A few cars hissing past,

Fog hanging like old

Coats between the trees.

I took my girl's hand

In mine for two blocks,

Then released it to let

Her unwrap the chocolate.

I peeled my orange

That was so bright against

The gray of December

That, from some distance,

Someone might have thought

I was making a fire in my hands. (43-56)

The warmth suggested by the color of the orange contrasts with the cold of December. The cars "hissing past" (44) and the fog hanging "between the trees" (46) remind the reader of the cold. The boy also confidently asserts his new-found manhood: the fact that he is the one who takes her hand, then "release[s]" it to "let" (49) her unwrap her candy bar, suggests that he feels a sense of control over the girl (who is now "my girl," 47, emphasis added), the situation, and his own life. The cold and the fog are now unimportant in light of the rite of passage that transpired inside the store.

In The Wonder Years, the late, great ABC situation comedy set in the late 1960s, Kevin Arnold tried on a weekly basis to find a way to communicate his feelings to Winnie Cooper. This television show demonstrated, with a great deal of humor and grace, the truth that simple things like walking home from school together take on monumental importance when one is twelve years old. Because of the poem's subject—the nearly universal experience of first love—and the author's deceptively skilled use of poetic devices, I believe that this poem will no doubt stand the test of time and become a classic of young adult literature. As a teacher of ninth-grade English, I would even use it in conjunction with a study of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, along with other classics that treat young love with dignity, without being patronizing or overly sentimental.

Soto's message is a simple one: as adults, we have taken for granted those simple events of childhood that lead us to our maturity, our grace, and our sensitivity. Although all people must endure puberty, the seemingly trivial occurrences make adolescence worth enduring. The poem's simplicity and lack of elaborate ornamentation create a gentle statement of the universality of human experience and allow us to recall with fondness and warmth the quiet triumphs of our own childhoods, which all too often go unnoticed at the time and unremembered later.

Source: Julianne White, "Soto's ‘Oranges,’" in Explicator, Vol. 63, No. 2, Winter 2005, pp. 121-25.

Rudolf Erben and Ute Erben

In the following excerpt, Erben and Erben address the conflict between Soto's childhood desire to emulate the white, middle-class families he saw on television and his reality as a Chicano boy growing up in California, noting in particular his ambivalence about material possessions, which figures prominently in "Oranges."

Chicano writers have identified as the Chicanos' central dilemma their dual consciousness, their being products of both Mexican and American cultures. Gary Soto's recent collections of prose reminiscences, Living Up the Street and Small Faces, go a step further. They attribute the Chicanos' cultural schizophrenia to the pervasive impact of the dominant group's popular culture. In his autobiographical accounts of growing up in Northern California in the 1950s and 1960s, Soto names as his main socializing forces the mass media (TV, comics) as well as popular icons and rituals (fashion, cars, sports).

Critics have focused on the strong sense of ethnicity, poverty, and class-consciousness in Living Up the Street and Small Faces. In addition, both books exemplify how popular culture, mass-mediated or other, triumphs over the Chicanos' own cultural expression. Mass-mediated popular culture in particular expresses the concept of cultural hegemony. On the one hand, the media entertain, inform, and reaffirm values of the dominant white middle-class culture. On the other hand, they cannot simply impose popularity, but must also "relate to the concerns of the audience" (Walsh 4). Thus, members of minority groups can either accept the dominant culture's messages or they can reject them. Or they can appropriate cultural symbols of the dominant group and merge them with elements of their own culture, thus turning them into their own culture. Living Up the Street and Small Faces reflect these complex dynamics of popular culture's production and reception, as they recount Soto's struggle to mediate between two unequal cultures.

Living Up the Street and Small Faces testify to the omnipresence of television in the lives of Gary Soto, his relatives, and his peers. Soto's family buys its first television set when Gary is five years old. Soto describes his and his siblings' first viewing experience as awe-inspiring: "The three of us sat transfixed in front of the gray light of the family's first TV. We sat on the couch with a bowl of grapes, and when the program ended the bowl was still in Rick's lap, untouched. TV was that powerful" (Street 7). After this initiation, the television becomes a focal point in the lives of the Soto family, and viewing a regular ritual that strongly affects family life.

Soto's recollections affirm television's displacement and content effects. According to Joyce Cramond, displacement effects relate to the "reorganization of activities" caused by the introduction of television. Some activities "may be cut down and others abandoned entirely to make time for viewing." Content effects refer to the "influence of particular types of broadcast material usually on attitudes, values, thinking, knowledge, and behavior" (267). Accordingly, the Soto family frequently schedules daily activities so as not to coincide with favorite shows, and the content of selected programs serves as a model for daily activities.

The Soto children, in particular, suffer from television's displacement effects. Watching television is not only their favorite pastime, but it determines their day, especially during vacation periods. In the summer, Gary is torn between going to summer school or "watching TV, flipping the channels from exercise programs to soap operas to game shows until something looked right" (Street 67). His siblings, Rick and Debra, spend the summer watching shows "neither of them cared for" (Street 25). And Gary himself finds nothing wrong with turning on the television, just waiting "for the week to pass" (Street 48) His obvious addiction to television even leads him to skip his baseball practices, so he can watch "Superman bend iron bars" (Street 59). As a recent survey shows, Gary's viewing habits correspond to those of his peers, who watch approximately six hours of television daily (Greenberg et al. 186).

Television controls the adults' lives, especially the men's, as well. During their leisure time, the fathers neither participate in family life, nor do they engage in any other form of social, physical, or mental activity. Soto describes their after-work activities:

They came home to open the refrigerator for a beer and then to plop in front of the TV. They didn't even have the energy to laugh when something was funny. Rick and I saw this in our stepfather. While we might have opened up with laughter at a situation comedy, he just stared at the pictures flashing before him—unmoved, eyes straight ahead. (Street 55)

And yet, Soto refuses to criticize them for watching so much television. His images denounce the socio-economic system that drains working people dry to the point of complete exhaustion, that turns them into "robots of flesh with unblinking eyes" too worn out to take control of their lives (Faces 101). These men, "beaten with work that made little money" (Faces 101), rely on television as a way of life in order to put some order into their existence (Marsden 120).

Soto elaborates on various of television's content effects. For most of his childhood, Gary looks upon television programs as an important source of information and emulation. They provide ideas for games and, more important, present the acceptable American lifestyle.

War movies and other violent programs captivate five-year-old Gary. A program on fire prevention, for example, leads him and Rick to play with fire in their house, and they almost burn it down. War movies inspire the children's fantasy and induce them to play violent games. Soto recollects how he and Rick "sat in a rocker-turned-fighter plane, and machine-gunned everyone to death, both the good and the bad" (Street 22). The "good guys" become Gary's role models. John Wayne, as the archetypal American male, particularly stimulates Gary's fantasy:

I watched the morning movie in which John Wayne, injured in an attack on an aircraft carrier, had lost the ability to walk, but later, through courage and fortitude, he pulled himself out of bed, walked a few stiff steps, and collapsed just as the doctor and his girl friend entered the room to witness his miracle comeback. I saw myself as John Wayne. Nearly blinded by a mean brother, I overcame my illness to become a fighter pilot who saves the world from the Japanese. (Street 24)

Domestic comedies about middle-class life sharpen Gary's awareness of class differences. These shows enlighten him about lifestyles more enticing than his family's own. Because he has seen middle-class styles of dress on the shows, Gary recognizes a playmate's father as a member of that class: "I took it all in: His polished shoes, creased pants, the shirt, and his watch that glinted as he turned the page of his newspaper. I had seen fathers like him before on the Donna Reed Show or Father Knows Best" (Street 20).

While Gary bases his identification of this particular man on outer appearance only, he is also a keen observer of people's behavior and manners. Both reinforce his desire to live like the fictional families of domestic comedies. Thus, Gary yearns to imitate the family in Father Knows Best, simply because it appears "so uncomplicated in its routine" (Street 31). The family life in Leave it to Beaver impresses him even more:

This was the summer when I spent the mornings in front of the television that showed the comfortable lives of white kids. There were no beatings, no rifts in the family. They wore bright clothes; toys tumbled from their closets. They hopped into bed with kisses and woke to glasses of fresh orange juice, and to a father sitting before his morning coffee while the mother buttered his toast. They hurried through the day making friends and gobs of money, returning home to a warmly lit living room, and then dinner. Leave It to Beaver was the program I replayed in my mind. (Street 34)

Thus, when he watches the show, Gary weighs the reality of his own family against the idealization of the Cleaver family.

As might be expected, the two families contrast sharply. Gary's parents are overworked, poor, and live on a diet consisting mainly of tortillas and beans. The Cleaver family, by contrast, combines obvious material wealth with harmony among the family members. But most of all, its polite manners and conversation appeal to Gary. As a result, he tries to convince his siblings to wear shoes for dinner and to dress up, and he urges his mother to cook dishes such as turtle soup instead of the routine beans and tortillas. At nine, Gary is too young to understand that the Cleaver family represents an idealized version of the American family. And since Gary has only limited experience with real middle-class families, the Cleavers represent what he believes to be white middle-class America.

Gary wishes to emulate television's Anglo middle-class families for two reasons: he wants to live a less deprived, more comfortable life, and he longs to be accepted by white middle-class America. He is convinced that if he and his family only "improved the way we looked we might get along better in life. White people would like us more." Later on, he reasons, Anglo-Americans might even invite him and his family to "their homes or front yards" (Street 35). Since television initiates him into a lifestyle generally accepted by mainstream America, Gary naively believes that through emulation he can at once assimilate into the mainstream and tear down racial barriers.

From an early age, Soto internalizes subtle messages of oppression. By exposing him to widely accepted fictional lifestyles, television reinforces Gary's already existing feelings of inferiority and, subsequently, arouses his desire to copy such lifestyles. As Gary matures, television loses its power over him. Again, Gary's development parallels that of his peers, whose viewing also decreases with age, according to Aimée Dorr (104). Gary now sees through the unrealistic images of life that television presents, and he understands the manipulative power of those images.

Gary's reaction to this realization alternates between amusement and cynicism. Instead of maintaining his futile desire to emulate the lives of television middle-class families, he learns to accept the realities of his own life: "I knew I could give away the life the television asked me to believe in" (Faces 58). He schedules his days according to his plans even if it means staying home on Saturdays. Mainly because "the television said we should go places," he decides otherwise (Faces 101). Symbolic of his new-found understanding is Soto's description of a picnic scene from Leave it to Beaver. He tells how he first associated the Cleaver family's white clothes with television's unrealistic portrayal of white middle-class families. He even reacts with amusement to his former susceptibility to television, which once prompted him to fall in love:

I was primed to fall in love because of the afternoon movies I watched on television, most of which were stories about women and men coming together, parting with harsh feelings, and embracing in the end to marry and drive big cars. (Street 69)

… Soto feels as ambivalent about material possessions, such as clothes and cars, as he does about sports. Soto's clothes consciousness originates very early in his life. Again, it is the mass media that first teach him about fashion and its power to signal socio-economic status. Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen state: "Americans were expected to dress in a certain way, and the avalanche of commercial imagery that accompanied the postwar boom—magazines; film; advertisements; and the new ‘Information Bomb,’ television—supplied constant reminders" (236). Clothes gain importance during Soto's adolescence when they become a means to express personal identity and status among peers. All in all, Gary's response to fashion is quite complex. He makes fun of fellow students from more affluent backgrounds because they devotedly follow every fashion. At the same time, he longs to be able to afford exactly the same clothes in order not to appear poorer. Finally, he longs for clothes worn by subculture groups, whose existence on the fringes of society mirrors his own.

Gary's dedication to current fashion expresses his desire to change his social class. Like many Americans of Mexican descent, he works as a grape picker in the summer, so he can afford fashionable clothes. While picking, he dreams of his future possessions:

If I worked eight hours, I might make four dollars. I'd take this, even gladly, and walk downtown to look into store windows on the mall and long for the bright madras shirts from Waiter Smith or Coffee's but settling for two imitation ones from Penneys. (Street 103)

After his summer job is over, Gary goes and buys "a pair of pants, two shirts, and a maroon T-shirt, the kind that was in style" (Street 103). He very carefully combines old and new clothes, using a complicated system designed to hide that he can only afford a few new things: "I worked like a magician, blinding my classmates, who were all clothes conscious and small-time social climbers, by arranging my wardrobe to make it seem larger than it really was" (Street 105).

Again, Gary's fashion preferences express more than his acceptance of societal norms; they also give voice to his rebellion against rules. As he approaches adolescence, Gary prefers clothes typically worn by marginal groups such as bikers. He elaborates on his embarrassment over a jacket "the color of day-old guacamole" that his mother buys him as a fifth grader. He has desired a biker jacket made of "black leather and silver studs with enough belts to hold down a small town" (Faces 40). Mainly because he fears his peers' ridicule, he hates to wear his new jacket: "Everybody saw me. Although they didn't say out loud, ‘Man, that's ugly,’ I heard the buzz-buzz of gossip and even laughter that I knew was meant for me" (Faces 42). The incident clearly shows Gary's dependence on acceptance through his classmates, white or nonwhite. As teenagers, they engage in the same rebellion and create their own subculture.

Fashion remains important to Soto as he grows up. For the maturing Gary, clothes stop symbolizing rebellion. They again become synonymous with a better life, a life not on the fringes of American society but within the mainstream. Due to his poverty, however, Gary still can only dream of such a life. With his friend Jackie, he likes to stroll through shopping malls, "occasionally stopping to gaze in store windows, especially at clothing stores where we grew dreamy as incense looking at shirts, pants, belts, loafers—those wonderful things that were as far from us as Europe" (Street 81). As a successful writer, Soto can finally afford to and does waste money on expensive designer clothes with "labels that can't be seen without getting intimate" (Faces 21).

Just like clothes, cars have a symbolic meaning for Soto, as they do for society at large. An American icon, the car represents the "national obsession with mobility and change" (Patton 12). While this holds true predominantly for the dominant society, minority groups have also appropriated certain models as manifestation of their own cultural assertion. Young Hispanics, for example, desire and value certain cars for low-riding—the "'56, '57, '63, and '64 Chevrolets" (Plascencia 143)—and thus modify an icon of the dominant culture for their own needs.

References to cars in Living Up the Street and Small Faces bear further witness to Soto's cultural ambivalence, expressed in the car's dual symbolism. On the one hand, Soto echoes a common Chicano belief in calling an Anglo friend's '57 Chevrolet "a car only a Mexican or a redneck looks good in" (Street 124). On the other hand, Soto adapts mainstream America's esteem of the car as symbolic of social mobility. His car-buying habits reflect his participation in both cultures. He starts with cheap, old models, such as a '49 Plymouth. Later he jumps back and forth between run-down cars and models more in accordance with his gradually improving socio-economic status. Soto reminisces:

If I look back I think of how we moved from car to car, most of which were no better than a faceful of smoke. My Buick Roadmaster limped up the street like a hurt rhino; my $85 Rambler was ugly and died of ugliness on the way to the junk yard. My wife and I sold a perfectly good Volkswagen for a perfectly useless sports car that gleamed in glossy photographs, beckoning us to be the happy couple leaning against it. It smoked badly, made noises, leaked puddles of oil in the driveway. The engine was so bad that bicycles passed us up. Then there was another Volkswagen, then an Audi, then a Volkswagen convertible, we still weep for that we traded for an Oldsmobile, which I gave my inlaws after three years. I turned around and bought a 1966 Chevy that could pull your hair back, if not tears from your eyes, on a black stretch of highway. We moved from car to car. (Faces 30)

For Soto, as for many others, the car has become what Phil Patton calls an extension of one's "self-image, of individual style, of clothing" (15). His unfulfilled desire for the right car even leads him to test drive various models without intending to buy one. He goes from first test driving a BMW to trying out a Pontiac Grand Prix. In the end, he snaps out of his trance and asks himself what made him want "to buy a new car? What brain cell said ‘Pontiac’?" (Faces 74). One possible answer is his cultural ambivalence, his growing up materially deprived in a society that judges people almost exclusively by their material wealth.

For Soto, the problem of being Mexican in the United States has as much to do with socioeconomic issues as with questions of cultural identity. Into adulthood Soto remains ambiguous about mainstream America. Critical distance and rejection of middle-class culture and materialism alternate with his simultaneous desire to belong. One of the few passages in which Soto openly discusses his inner conflicts concerns educated and acculturated Chicanos:

That night we talked about educated Chicanos, those graduating from universities but falling for the "new car" and the "tract home on the Northside." The adults were playing "Disneyland for the kids, Reno for us." It was a simple game like Rummy or checkers, and those who were intelligent, somewhat ambitious but not aggressive, and not terribly bad to look at, could play it. For them, it was a thrill to flip open a check book at a fashionable clothing store and produce a driver's licence and two credit cards. Though we talked and made some sense, we didn't say out loud that we were tired of this poor life and, if we had the chance, we too would grab the good jobs and go water skiing on the weekend. (Faces 114)

The conversation with his friends shows two contradictions. First, for Soto and his friends, being educated and falling for the lures of American materialism are incompatible. And yet, they would like to live a materially comfortable life. Second, they realize that in order to succeed in American society, they must not threaten the dominant culture. As Soto puts it, Chicanos may be "somewhat ambitious" but never "aggressive." Soto rejects Chicanos who submit to these unwritten rules, yet would make the same concessions in order to get ahead.

These apparent contradictions demonstrate that Soto still searches for his place in American society. Having learned that the dominant culture grants him only limited participation in its lifestyle, he remains undecided about his own position toward the dominant culture. From early childhood on, television and other socializing forces inundated him with images of mainstream America. He grew up in a multicultural environment, participated in both Anglo and Chicano culture, and seems to be able to move in and out of the two, to blend and blur them with relative ease. But the conversation with his friends ultimately proves the persistence of his inner conflicts and ambivalent feelings. Even though it started at a very early age, for Soto, the process of acculturation is not yet finished.

Source: Rudolf Erben and Ute Erben, "Popular Culture, Mass Media, and Chicano Identity in Gary Soto's Living Up the Street and Small Faces," in MELUS, Vol. 17, No. 3, Autumn 1991-1992, pp. 43-52.

SOURCES

Cart, Michael, "Latino and Latina American Literature," in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children's Literature (accessed September 11, 2008).

Chatton, Barbara, Review of A Fire In My Hands, in School Library Review, March 1992, p. 264.

"Detailed History," in National Council of La Raza, http://www.nclr.org/section/about/history (accessed September 11, 2008).

D'Evelyn, Tom, "Soto's Poetry: Unpretentious Language of the Heart," in the Christian Science Monitor, March 6, 1985, p. 19.

"Gary Soto," in Encyclopedia of World Biography, http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/Sh-Z/Soto-Gary.html (accessed October 16, 2008).

"The Hershey Bar Index," in the Food Timeline, http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodfaq5.html#candybar (accessed September 10, 2008).

"Immigration Issues," in Beyond the Border, http://www.pbs.org/itvs/beyondtheborder/immigration.html (accessed October 16, 2008).

Kennedy, X. J., and Dana Gioia, "Narrative Poetry," in An Introduction to Poetry, Twelfth Edition, Pearson Longman, 2006, p. G11.

Lisowski, Heather M., Review of A Fire In My Hands: Revised and Expanded Edition, in School Library Journal, May 2006, p. 156.

Paredes, Raymund, "Teaching Chicano Literature: An Historical Approach," in Teaching the American Literatures, http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/tamlit/essays/chicano.html (accessed September 11, 2008).

Ratner, Rochelle, Review of Gary Soto: New and Collected Poems, in Library Journal, May 1, 1995, pp. 100-101.

Rodriguez-Scott, Esmeralda, "Patterns of Mexican Migration to the United States," http://www1.appstate.edu/~stefanov/proceedings/rodriguez.htm (accessed October 16, 2008).

Soto, Gary, "Oranges," in Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing, 3rd compact ed., edited by Edgar V. Roberts and Henry E. Jacobs, Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2006, pp. 825-26.

"United Farm Workers of America," in Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2008, http://encarta.msn.-com/encyclopedia_761586130/United_Farm_Workers_of_America.html (accessed August 27, 2008).

Wittstock, Laura Waterman, and Elaine J. Salinas, "A Brief History of the American Indian Movement," http://www.aimovement.org/ggc/history.html (accessed September 11, 2008).