The House of Broken Angels

As the family prepares for the funeral of Mamá América, perspective shifts between Big Angel; Minnie, his daughter; and Lalo, his youngest son. Big Angel reflects on his working life as the network manager of a gas company. He prided himself not on his work but on his status: “A Mexican doing what these rich Americanos couldn’t was the point” (15). His siblings mocked him for wanting to “be a gringo” (14). Both Big Angel and Lalo reflect on time and how it continues to slip away from them. Lalo speaks more casually, using slang that reflects his ex-military background and tentative sobriety. Minnie wishes someone would find her sexy again, noting the way her father flirts with her mother. She has a roaring hangover and resents her father for always preferring her brothers, dead and alive, to her. Finally, the family piles into the minivan and pulls into dense traffic. Big Angel realizes that his tardiness is just another way he has failed to prove himself to his mother. 

It becomes clear that Big Angel has postponed his mother’s funeral to coincide with his birthday party, an event planned many months in advance, to avoid asking the family to take two trips to San Diego. Little Angel flies in from Seattle early and drives around the city looking for record stores now long out of business. He parks for a while in the lot of the club where his father used to play piano and reminisces on his father’s dual lives—piano bar playboy and married janitor. Perla then steps in to narrate Big Angel’s heroism while visiting his dying mother. She remembers leaving La Paz with her two fatherless sons to marry Big Angel. She rode on a bus with little food for four days, was groped by policemen, and ended up in Tijuana, land of rabid dogs and rich gringos.

For Perla, Big Angel will always be a hero because he saved her, though the rage that allowed him to rescue her came out on her children. She thinks, “Families came apart and regrouped […]. Like water. In this desert, families were like water” (36). In the final scene, Perla and Big Angel’s sisters watch over their dying mother in the hospital. They call in Big Angel to preside over her death in her final moments. He arrives, looking close to death himself, and forces himself to walk without aid to his mother’s room. When he announces to his dying mother that he has come, she chastises him and then dies. Big Angel pays the priest and leaves.