Curly Velasquez: What makes a house a home?

For me, it's photos of my ancestors, and anything to do with La Virgen de Guadalupe, and of course food. Pupusa, Menudo, Yuca Frita. But I go off topic. 

Houses can be more than just a place to decorate, sleep, and eat your mom's empanadas.

Hi, I'm Curly Velasquez, and this is Crash Course Latin American literature. 

[Theme music]

A person's home can tell you a lot about them. Their art, their knick-knacks, the way they arrange the furniture. It can all give you hints about their innermost self. 

So, it makes sense that in literature, where characters live can be key to who they are. 

But not only that, houses in Latin American literature are portals into diverse identities, cultures, and even political conflicts. The trick is knowing how to read them that way. 

Let's look at Sandra Cisnero's 1984 novel, The House on Mango Street. It tells the story of a 12-year-old Esperanza Cordera and her family in a working-class Chicago neighbourhood. 

Having grown up in an apartment, Esperanza is thrilled to put down her roots in her family's new home. "I knew then I had to have a house," she says. "A real house. One I could point to." 

But her family's dilapidated house is not the vibe. And also, it's not really about the house. Or at least, not only. 

See, Esperanza's discomfort in her house mirrors her discomfort with her own identity. Like Cisnero herself, Esperanza is Chicana, which means she comes from a Mexican family but was born in the US.

So her identity exists somewhere between the two places and cultures. She tells us, "At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth." 

Like the house on Mango Street, Esperanza's Spanish name feels like the wrong fit for the person she wants to be.

On top of all that, Esperanza inherited her name from her great-grandmother, but she doesn’t want to inherit the life her great-grandmother lived.

She was married against her will as a teenager, a lack of agency based on her gender.And when Esperanza imagines this, she pictures her ancestor trapped within the walls of her home.

"She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow."

Notice how Esperanza makes the connection between her great-grandmother and countless other women looking out their windows.

With this inside looking out image, she's evoking a long-standing association between houses and homes with women and femininity. And by rejecting her house, Esperanza is also rejecting her picture of traditional femininity. 

Throughout the novel, the house on Mango Street literally hangs over Esperanza's head as she contemplates all the pieces of her identity and who she wishes to become. 

By the end of the novel, a now 14-year-old Esperanza finds a new way to define herself as a storyteller.

Her writing lets her escape from the house's grasp and creates a new, more comfortable home in the heart. She knows someday she'll grow up and leave for real, but she also recognises that the house will always be a part of her story.

Now, houses in literature don't only represent our personal identities. They can also represent larger political and national identities, too.

And I'm not just talking about sticking a sign in your yard to endorse Dolly Parton for president. Though, anyone who gives free books to kids has my vote. 

Let's get the Curly Notes on Isabel Allende's 1982 novel, La casa de los espíritus — The House of the Spirits — which uses the house as a symbol to address the politics of her native Chile.

[Curly Notes]

Isabel Allende is no stranger to politics. Her father's cousin, Salvador Allende, was the president of Chile until he was assassinated by Augusto Pinochet's coup and her family was forced to flee the country. 

So, she knew firsthand the challenges of sharing this house we call a nation, especially when our fellow citizens and leaders aren't always the best room-mates. 

The House of the Spirits focuses on the Trueba family who live in an unnamed country usually understood to be Allende's own Chile, and the action moves between not just one house but two as a way of portraying the conflicting political perspectives in Chile at the time.

The big house on the corner is built for the Trueba matriarch, Clara, by her husband Esteban. Clara represents the liberal left-wing preaching ideals of equality, justice, and respect for everyone.

She presides over the big house, which is filled with students, artists, spiritualists, and and even a few literal spirits. 

Sounds like my house, to be honest. 

Esteban, on the other hand, is a wealthy right-wing senator who exploits his workers, hits his wife rigs election through threats and coercion, and is generally an all-round bummer of a guy. 

While his wife presides over the home, Esteban's domain is Las Tres Marías, a hacienda in the countryside, which he runs like a dictator. 

So, the vibes of both houses are very different, even down to the design.

Clara constructs a world of freedom and imagination with long, twisting passageways and whimsical stairways to nowhere, while Esteban furnishes the Las Tres Marías with heavy, severe furniture that mirrors his politics. 

But the family drama doesn't stop with the blueprints,  and let me tell you, it's juicy. Just like houses are often handed down through generations for the Truebas, political tensions are handed down too. 

Esteban's grandson inherits his grandfather's politics and violent tendencies. He goes on to become a police officer and later a colonel, playing a key role in torturing liberal revolutionaries, including his own cousin, Alba. 

And you thought you and your primos had beef. 

Alba, in contrast, carries on her grandmother Clara's liberal traditions. After the Conservative Party seizes control of the government through a military coup, Alba uses the twisting passageways and secret doors of her grandmother's house to harbour socialist fugitive. 

Notice how purposeful Allende is about placing her female characters right in the middle of the nation's political drama. 

She even starts off the novel by introducing us to Clara's older sister, Rosa, who is all things traditionally feminine, graceful, beautiful, obsessed with romance novels, and on her way to embroider the largest tablecloth known to man, as you do. 

But then, tragedy strikes. Rosa dies after drinking poisoned brandy meant for her politician father.

From that moment on, Allende shows us that despite their exclusion from form of political leadership, women affect and are affected by politics, in the sphere of the home and beyond. 

I won't spoil the books ending for you, but let's just say there's hope for the Trueba family and for Chile. 

Now, that focus on family —

Oh. Its my mom. 

[On phone, in Spanish] Mom? Yes? And what happened with the neighbour? Nooo! 

[Chisme break]

That was good and juicy. 

Like I was saying, that focus on family brings me to my last example. 

Families aren't always a husband, a wife, and 2.5 kids. They can look a lot of different ways,and literature helps to broaden the picture of what home and family life can be. 

Argentine writer Camila Sosa Villada explores a broad view of family in her 2019 novel, Las malas — Bad Girls. 

It follows a group of trans women who find community in a large pink two-storey building that looked like a rundown but welcome them with open arms. 

This fabled pink house in Cordoba, Argentina is run by 178-year-old la tía Encarna, picking up on some magical realism vibes, and it serves as a landing place for young women who have been turned away by their biological families. 

At the pink house, the women find sisters in their housemates and an auntie in la tía Encarna. And when la tía Encarna finds an abandoned infant in the park and brings him home, he too becomes a part of the family. 

But despite the safety they find in each other, the residents still face the dangers of the AIDS epidemic and their transphobic society.

As the novel goes on, the condition of la tía Encarna's  pink house mirrors their own, becoming vandalised, choked by vegetation, and falling into disrepair. 

In this way, the house itself becomes a reflection of the women's ongoing plight. 

In Sosa Villada's words, the pink house is "the queerest boarding house in the world," one that complicates our preconceived notions about home, family, and belonging. In literature, like in life, houses can hold all the nooks and crannies of who you are as people, cultures, and nations.

And in some ways, sitting down to read a book is a little like an invitation into an authors home. So, we can all become chismosos.

You can peer out the window of Sandra Cisneros's childhood home, meet Isabel Allende's family of politicians and revolutionaries, or stay up late talking with Sosa Villada and her friends.

And when you're done visiting, you can say your goodbyes, close the book, and return to your own house with your own family drama, but also a new perspective about how other people live. 

Personally, I can't wait to get back to my mom's empanadas.

Next time, we're diving even deeper into family bonds. See you then. 

Thanks for watching Crash Course Latin American Literature, which was filmed at the Carlos Hernandez studio in Indianapolis, and was made with all the help of all these homebodies. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever, you can join our community on Patreon.