“Is this our home? Is this our country? I ask Maria. Don’t these men have mothers, lovers, babies, sisters? Don’t they see what they are doing? Later, Maria says, these men are babes farted out from the Devil’s ass. We check to make sure no one has heard her say this
Without Geraldo, this is not my home; the earth beneath it, not my country” (75).

I liked this quote because I think it does a great job of portraying the absolute despair that the woman narrating the story at this point is feeling throughout the entire story. At this point it is clear that she is not comfortable at all living in America. She does not know if she is meant to stay in California. She cannot feel at home because technically she isn’t at home. Her unsettled attitude is reflected upon throughout this entire story, which had a very unsettling tone. Almost every event gave me a feeling of unease, with the little girl and her brother getting lost in the beginning, the man who owns the diner talking about his estranged family and how he misses them, and especially the ending of the story where it becomes tragically apparent that there is not a happy ending in sight for our narrator. That unsettling feeling is especially apparent in this passage. The women despise the soldiers; say nothing but horrible things about them and view them as the scum of the earth, but in the end, they are still completely vulnerable to them and must surrender to their power. They can say whatever they want about them, as long as no one is around to hear them say it. This was so sad to me: this woman’s struggle throughout the story was awful to read about, because there is literally nothing she can do to make her life better. She is stuck in so many aspects of her life; she really doesn’t even have a home anymore, if a home is somewhere where one can go to feel safe. It seems as though this woman can never truly feel safe, and the only person who can give her happiness, her son, even gets taken away from her. Once that happens, she sees no hope, no point in doing anything besides retreating back to where she came from. It is as if without her son, she is a child herself, she relies on him so much. This aspect of the story was especially heartbreaking to me, because once she lost her son it was clear she was not getting him back. In this way, the ending is the only way the story really could have ended, because it provides this woman narrator with the only tiny bit of justice she gets throughout the entire story. Assuming her son is in fact already dead, she will indeed be joining him very soon. The alternative is almost too sad to contemplate: that her son is out there alive somewhere, waiting for her to find him. As terrible as this would be, it would not be surprising given the previous events of the story and how this woman can never have what she wants- and thinks she deserves.