BUTTERFLY BOY

Butterfly Boy

Butterfly Boy

Introduction

Heartbreaking, rhythmical, as well as strongly personal, Butterfly Boy is a only one of its kind coming out and coming-of-age narrative of a first-generation Chicano who sells one life for another, merely to discover that history as well as memory are not negotiable or undistinguished (Anderssen, Amlie, Ytteroy, 2002, 335).

Discussion

Growing up among poor migrant Mexican farmworkers, Rigoberto González also faces the pressure of coming-of-age as a gay man in a culture that prizes machismo. Losing his mother when he is twelve, González must then confront his father's abandonment and an abiding sense of cultural estrangement, both from his adopted home in the United States and from a Mexican birthright. His only sense of connection gets forged in a violent relationship with an older man. By finding his calling as a writer, and by revisiting the relationship with his father during a trip to Mexico, González finally claims his identity at the intersection of race, class, and sexuality. The result is a leap of faith that every reader who ever felt like an outsider will immediately recognize.

"Joto, puto, marica, maricón, margarita" are the most common Mexican words for a gay man ... according to González. He likes "mariposa" most of all, "an allusion to the feminine fluttering of eyelashes." (Boswell, 1994, 21)

He neglects to mention "lilo" (purple) and the current favorites, "maricornflay" (a strange marriage of "buttterfly" and "cornflakes"), and "Gaytorade," from the drink of the same name. "Gay" is equally common, pronounced as in English.

As he makes clear, to be gay in Mexico and among Mexicans is different than to be involved in gay life to the north. The Macho world makes more room for non-gay men who indulge in a quick hop in the sack. Before he was a full adult, he had experienced several sessions. "I was no stranger to sex with men ... I had been experimenting with closeted older men I had met working in the fields." (Dexter, 2003, 21)

Despite these diversions, most of Butterfly Boy is the story of one who grows up poor in both Mexico and the United States, works from age eleven in the fields, sleeps twelve to a room with his brother and cousins, lives with his mother or grandmother who buy all his clothes at the tiangis, moves about with his family from job to job, both in the north and to the south. (Gonzalez, 2006, 1)

His great misery as a youth is not so much the fact that he is gay --- although he likes to paint his face with rouge and wear his mother's high-heels when no one is around --- but instead, the fact that he suffers from being so fat that they hide him at the back of the school chorus. He also has to live with the taunts and insults from his grandfather, watching his father come home shit-faced, and, worst of all, when he is twelve, seeing his mother die. She had, he says, literally worked herself to ...