“Shower Power Hippie Man”
The title character of this story in the collection Chicana Falsa is described physically as being different from the men the nine-year-old narrator knew in her neighborhood. Where they had short greased-back pompadours, he sports the shoulder-length hair of the hippie. Where they are dark-skinned, he is pink and freckled. Where the are short, he is tall. Where they are clothed, he is completely nude. This funny yet sort of terrifying story is about the narrator and some of her fifth-grade girlfriends daily 6:45 ritualistic act of voyeurism: watching the unnamed man through the open window of his bathroom taking his second shower of the day. Only this time, he does something unusual there which the girls see for the first—and last—time.
Yvonne Serros
The narrator’s sister Yvonne becomes a contestant on The Price is Right. Along with the three others who have been asked to “come on down!” Yvonne gets the chance to bid her way onto the stage. In a story short on length but filled with insight into the way economic disparity that penetrates deeply and invisibly into America, the sister never makes it up to Bob Barker because she makes the same $1000 bid on a top of the line washing machine, a microwave and scuba gear.
Sheila Emmerson
Chicana Role Model Rule Number 6 is titled “Live Better, Work Union” and is a little tale about how the narrator meets an artist named Sheila Emmerson while working in an art supplies store. She sports a post-Brady Bunch Florence Henderson hairstyle, and wants to hire her as a portrait based on an initial assumption that the narrator might be a Native American. Which is the worst possible assumptions at the time. In a story that alludes to What’s Happening! and Marie Claire, Emmerson becomes the central figure in a tale about that special brand of soft racism known as exoticizing.
Stephanie Kendall
Stephanie Kendall teaches at an elementary school and has invited Michele Serros—“a Mexican-American writer”—to speak to kids about writing. Because Stephanie majored in English with an emphasis on Latin American policy, she has decided that she is qualified to offer the writer who is not from Latin American but was born in California some suggestions on improving her stories. The event does not go well to the point that Michele is thinking to herself that there is no possible way on earth Stephanie Kendall “can make up for her evil.” And then smell of miniature chicken pot pies just like her mother used to make wafts in from the cafeteria and the server behind the food counter compliments the writing she heard her speaking and suddenly Stephanie Kendall isn’t so much evil as she is a necessary conduit for writers to connect with readers.
