“Man, you don’t even see it. You’re so, so unaware. Look, look at this picture. Latino Style Vegetables, they have the vegetables cut up all small. Like, what’s that supposed to mean? Like, little food for little people, little minds, little significance?...And this Malibu kind, the broccoli, the carrots, are cut up large, all big and grand like `of great worth,’ or something. The cauliflower, which is WHITE, is the biggest vegetable in the picture, overpowering all the rest.”
This quote is significant for a number of different reasons. It takes place in a Ralph’s supermarket, features the narrator and her classmate Martina and references two different bags of frozen vegetables being sold there: Malibu Style Vegetables and Latino Style Vegetables. The first item of significance is that it stands out from most of the rest of the fiction of Serros in that it does feel like it is an entirely fictional episode. For the most part, it is difficult to determine if Serros is writing a story from pure creative imagination or one that is deeply steeped in autobiographical truth. Martina’s deconstruction of the packaging of frozen vegetables reads like something out of a text by Roland Barthes; it is missing the authenticity of dialogue which characterizes her other stories.
Which leads to a second significant aspect of the quote: the repetitive use of “like” by Martina. That kind of everyday conversational writing of dialogue is very much common to the author’s other stories, but it produces the opposite effect in this case, seeming to have been inserted in an attempt to make Martina’s textbook deconstruction of the packaging sound more realistic, but not succeeding. While the trademark of the fiction of Serros is a blurring of the lines between fact and fiction, autobiographical memoir and short story, there is another kind of writing that is represented by a fractional minority of her work: the transformation of outrage into literature. “Attention Shoppers” belongs to that group. What it sacrifices in realism it gains in its expression as social commentary.
The next day Gary told me there was a call for me.
“Is this Michele?” the voice asked.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know if you remember me. I was in the store yesterday. I have a Florence Henderson haircut, not when she was in the Brady Bunch, but rather—”
Okay, so she didn’t really say the last part.
This is another illuminating quote for a variety of reasons. First and foremost: the name of the narrator. The narrator is named Michele and she bears a remarkable resemblance to the author. And yet, this story is from the collection titled How to be a Chicano Role Model which is classified as fiction. So, the clear suggestion is that this is a work of fiction, yet it reads very much like something that could actually have happened to the author before she became a successful writer. In that sense, it is the opposite of the above example which doesn’t really feel like it could have happened and does read like something the author invented. That example is the exception; this example is the rule. Reading the fiction of Serros becomes an exercise in trying to determine how much is invented and how much may be based at least in part on real life incidents.
Also of note in this quote is that strange part about Florence Henderson. It is actually only strange when taken out of context; when the narrator first meets the woman who has called her, she describes her having a haircut like Florence Hendrson sported in her series of Wesson oil commercials rather as Carol Brady. This is significant because the stories of Serros are peppered with such pop culture references, most of which would never have made it into a novel written by an immigrant or even a first generation offspring of an immigrant. The sheer volume of such references becomes a testament to the overwhelming pressure of the need to assimilate fully into American culture.
Evie Gomez woke up on Saturday morning with two things on her mind. The first was that her best friend, Raquel Diaz, was definitely no longer just that, a best friend. Raquel had proven herself to be, as of 10:32 A.M. that late September morning, a 100 percent pinche beyachee. And why? Because after two weeks of no phone, no friends, basically no life, Evie wasn’t under her mother’s house arrest anymore for coming home a piddly-ass twenty (okay, maybe it was forty) minutes past her curfew.
Honey Blonde chica is a young-adult novel by Serros. The backstory to this particular example of the fiction of Serros is important. The genesis of the book lay not in the formulations of her own creative mind, but in response to a work-for-hire offer from the publishers of the Gossip Girl series of YA novel (which in turn inspired the popular television series). The result is that unlike the two collections poems and stories which established her literary reputation, her foray in the longer form fiction of the novel was transactionally inspired rather than organically engendered by her own imagination. Just reading these first lines are indicative of the difference in quality. She works more freely and expressively within first-person narration rather than third-person which is curiously lacking in her natural ability for realism. There is nothing technically wrong with the above quote…it just does not jibe with any of her previous writing, feeling sterile and inexplicably out-of-tune.
