Dominican heritage

Angie Cruzs Soledad is a marvelous story of family and integrity, fiction and mysticism, racial identity, culture and chaos and various other themes. The background of the causality has deeply influenced the setting of the allegory as the story is deeply influenced by her Domini quarter heritage. Author herself has testified that her cultural upbringing highly impacted the unused. in time though she authored it with keeping community in her mind, the novel withal rancid break to be a story of family, relationships, girlhood, puzzlehood and extended to some(prenominal) other premises.The main voice in the story is that of an art savant Soledad who wants to fly to her sick contract to take care of her. She is well-nigh to break her likeness behind as only she can help her get under ones skin to recover from the emotional coma. Soledad also has her aunt Gorda, her wild cousin-german Flaca to spiritless in her family. As she comes back to her house, she is confronted with a big challenge to accomplish or forget the painful or chaotic one-time(prenominal) for construct her fellowship with her mother. Family and relationships become the centre theme of the story.Soledad had left her contentious family at the age of eighteen as she got fed up with petty fights, struggles and aeonian tragedies. She joined as an art student at Cooper sum total and also had a gallery job (along with a hip eastern hemisphere Village walk-up). Soledad was imminently cool, fine, peaceful being infinitely far from her belligerent, irrational neighborhood where she had her upbringing. Soledad however could not continue for a long time as she got call from Tia Gorda saying that her mother badly necessitate her as she had slipped into an emotional coma. Soledads return was the only solution to save her mother.The cheat that remained for her family made Soledad to return home though she was haunted with the terrible recollections about leering men, open hydrants, and dre adful slick-skinned teen girls with bawdy mouths and snapping gum. Soledad had much to facial gesture in her home at West 164th Street. She had to adjust with the raucous fashion of her cousin Flaca and had to keep her from falling for Richie, the neighbor. Soledad struggles and she falls into a big challenge. She was also disturbed by the memories and ghosts of her mothers past tense and also had to pertain their relationship so that she may recover.She had to fight the memories of all painful past experiences to help her love her mother. The story is all about the family burden suffered by young Soledad. Soledad always had strained relationship with the family members, especially her widowed mother Olivia. Much of the novel is about the family of Olivia, her female relatives. Soledad had her aunt Gorda who can conk out be called a witch. She opt ceremonies and home remedies for treating her sister. Soledad had much to suffer from the fiery adolescent Flaca her cousin. More t han all this was the nightmares, terrifying flashbacks and fearful memories.Soledad struggles being caught in the midst of two worlds for the sake of her family. The bad images of her mothers Dominican youth, Soledad returns to her family. Soledads responsibility for her family and love for her mother constraints her to forgive or forget Olivias past as a prostitute, her spurious paternity, and the death of her father in the render of Olivia. She says And when I surrender to the warmth of the water, I feel the past, present, and future becomes one. My mother becomes the ocean and the sky, wrapping herself around me. The family warmth engulfs Soledad as she gets into a eldritch epiphany.Soledad is found to be compelled by guilt and responsibility and a force truth and start to take care of the family that she once left. This forced loyalty or the love remnants make Soledad come back to the place that she longed to furnish and meet her family that she wanted to forget. Soledad t ook herself away from her collapsed family as she wanted to have a different future than everybody else. She separated from everything, explored new paths and found herself successful in her new world. However the little love residue that remained in her join made her sacrifice everything for the sake of her family (or her sick mother).She was back to her old neighborhood and finds something that longed for and that she did not expect. She finally recognizes that everything she was yearning for was there in front of her. We can say that the novel Soledad is all about family relationships. The news of her mothers sickness melted the heart of young Soledad and made her take the authoritative decision to leave her happy world and come to her family from which she was fleeing away. Even though Soledad was reluctantly returning to her family, her time with her family becomes too crucial in the novel that it occupies majority of the pages.Soledads plight was painful but her family membe rs turned out to be characters that made the whole story interesting, rather than Soledad. The background of the novel is in the family or cultural background of the author Angie Cruz. Authors childhood experience in the ethnic barrio of New York Citys Washington high school neighborhood highly influenced the story. The story more or less appears as an autobiography where the family of Soledad represents the entire women folk of the superstitious neighborhood.The bizarre mother, jealous cousin Flaca, her crazy Aunt Gorda, the entire family of Angie Cruz speaks of the predicament of the entire neighborhood. Even though the whole story intended to report the helpless womanhood of the undeveloped neighborhood, the novel turned out to be a tale of family relationships that sprang up from an extremely collapsed background. The family of Soledad, her mother, cousin and her aunt filled the novel making it a tale family story. References Angie (2001) Cruz Soledad, Simon & Schuster Trent M asiki (2001) Soledad Review Black Issues Book Review, Matthews & Associates.