Spidertown by Abraham Rodriguez

First published: 1993

Type of plot:Bildungsroman

Time of work: The 1990’s

Locale: South Bronx, New York City

Principal Characters:

• Miguel, a teenage crack runner, the main character of the novel
• Amelia, Firebug’s girlfriend, a crack user and college student
• Cristalena, also called Lena, Miguel’s naïve girlfriend
• Spider, a young crack lord
• Firebug, a teenage arsonist, Miguel’s roommate

The Novel

Spidertown is a Bildungsroman that recounts the intellectual and spiritual growth of a teenaged boy. Sixteen-year-old Miguel falls in love with Cristalena, a preacher’s daughter who despises crack cocaine and the criminals who are terrorizing her neighborhood. Because he works for Spider, the local crack czar, Miguel fears that Cristalena will reject him. Consequently, he lies about his work, and his guilt and shame propel him on a journey of self-discovery and redemption.

As the novel opens, Miguel and his roommate, Firebug, are drinking and talking in their nearly unfurnished apartment. Firebug, a professional arsonist, invites Miguel to a “wienie roast,” which is a euphemism for the torching of a building. Though he agrees to escort Firebug’s girlfriend, Amelia, Miguel would prefer to stay home. He no longer enjoys the commotion of the crowd, the fire engines, and the flames. His relationship with Cristalena has shown him the perversion and ugliness of his world.

At the fire, Miguel and Amelia sit in his car and discuss his growing disenchantment with the drug culture. Amelia says that he has too much heart to be a criminal, confesses that she has fallen in love with him, and tries to explain her relationship with Firebug, who is incapable of love.

The next day, as he makes his usual deliveries for Spider, Miguel stops several times to call Cristalena, but she is unavailable to speak with him. Angry and dejected, he starts drinking heavily and gets behind in his deliveries. His tardiness almost costs the lives of several drug dealers, who have to dodge bullets to get to his car.

In the morning, Miguel visits Cristalena at the boutique where she works and learns the reason for her evasion. She has not yet told her parents about him, and they are very strict and watch her closely. Miguel proposes to Cristalena, and they make plans to celebrate her birthday in bed at his apartment.

At Spider’s request, Miguel delivers ten thousand dollars to a police car parked across the street from his apartment building. One of the officers sticks a pistol in his face and threatens him. After this humiliating experience, Miguel walks to his car and discovers that the tires have been slashed by Spider’s spies to prevent him from running off with the money. Enraged by Spider’s lack of trust in him, Miguel resolves to quit his job at the right moment.

Starting another day of deliveries, he meets with Spider to pick up the crack. When Spider asks him to deliver more money to the police, he refuses. He does not take Spider’s threats seriously because he intends to quit soon anyway. At his last stop, a group of street thugs, led by a boy named Richie, drag him from his car and beat him severely. It is Spider’s way of teaching him a lesson. When he returns to his apartment, only Amelia shows sympathy for his bruises. That night, she drugs Firebug and sleeps chastely with Miguel in his bed.

In the morning, Miguel telephones Spider and informs him that he is quitting, but Spider refuses to believe him. When Miguel picks Cristalena up that night, he starts to tell her the truth about himself, but he is interrupted by Spider, who emerges from the darkness and pounds on the windshield. Miguel gets out of his car, and they argue. After Spider leaves, Miguel tries to tell Cristalena the truth about himself, but she says he is too late and runs back into her building.

Upset by Cristalena’s reaction, Miguel visits Amelia; she takes him to her private apartment, where they finally have sex. Miguel still loves Cristalena, however, and resolves to win her back. Knowing that he must first straighten out his life, he goes to see his mother, Catarina, who is living with a well-to-do importer named Nelo. She agrees to let Miguel move in with them if he will submit unconditionally to their authority. He reluctantly accepts her terms. After begging for and receiving Cristalena’s forgiveness, Miguel takes Cristalena to his apartment, and they have sex.

The next day, he encounters Richie, who tries to persuade him to betray Spider. Miguel refuses emphatically. When he gets back to his apartment, he discovers that Firebug is moving out. Firebug gives Miguel a gun for protection, tells him to meet Spider at a bar, and leaves. Wanting to break with Spider amicably, Miguel foolishly goes to meet him, and he is shot twice in the back during an attack on the bar.

At the hospital, Miguel is questioned by a police officer named Sanchez and visited by Amelia and Cristalena. After his release from the hospital, he moves in with his mother and Nelo. He decides to burn his car as a symbol of his independence from Spider. Amelia, Cristalena, and Miguel create a funeral pyre for the car and set it ablaze. As the three friends walk away from the fire, Sanchez drives up, and Miguel hands him a tape of Spider’s life story, narrated by the drug lord himself.

The Characters

The main characters in Spidertown either strive to be like their fathers or struggle to be different. Firebug became an arsonist because his father revered fire, forced him to leap flames at community barbecues, and punished him by burning parts of his body. Amelia’s “masculinity” is at least partly an attempt to earn her father’s respect and love. She tries to be the son he always wanted. Cristalena is a victim of her father’s religious fanaticism. She rebels successfully against his effort to make her “a little child of Christ,” but she cannot completely liberate herself from his terrifying sermons on sin. Miguel reads voraciously because his father hated books. Spider strives to be the antithesis of his father, who plays dominoes outside the neighborhood market. Spider’s ambition is a rejection of his father’s mundane existence as well as a desperate quest for excitement and purpose in life.

The most corrupt characters, such as Spider and Firebug, have become insensitive to the suffering around them. Firebug contemplates Miguel’s bruises with stolid curiosity. He is incapable of feeling sympathy for a friend or love for a woman. Interested only in business, Spider betrays his associates coldly, without remorse. Other characters such as Amelia and Miguel are soft because of their compassion. Though she has learned to use people, Amelia still cares. Miguel, too, has too much heart to become a hardened criminal. He shows concern for Spider’s safety even after Spider has betrayed him, and he feels guilty about the harm he is doing to his neighborhood. His conscience prevents him from developing the indifference necessary to survive in Spider’s world.

Amelia and Cristalena function as reflectors for Miguel, who is both adult and child. Amelia, a twenty-one-year-old college student, represents the responsible, worldly adult, perhaps symbolic of platonic or intellectual love, while sixteen-year-old Cristalena represents the child in Miguel. Cristalena even refers to herself as a child. It is significant that the three characters walk away “arm in arm in arm” at the end of the novel. Amelia also functions as Miguel’s confidante and counselor, allowing him to purge his anxiety and fear. In her role as therapist, she guides him to redemption, undergoing a parallel transformation herself as she returns to college. Cristalena and Spider represent good and evil, respectively, locked in a struggle for Miguel. Cristalena’s name even suggests a divine being, capable of redeeming sinners. In his rhetoric, Spider is very much like the Devil, using flattery and deception to tempt Miguel to sin.

Rodriguez creates a colorful array of minor characters who give the novel depth and focus: giddy Rosa, Cristalena’s cousin, who serves as a liaison between Cristalena and Miguel; eighteen-year-old Careta, an independent pimp who peddles young flesh and marijuana but avoids crack; Catarina, Miguel’s mother, who yearns for a picture-perfect family; Nelo, Catarina’s middle-class boyfriend, who personifies dullness and complacency; Richie, one of Spider’s henchmen, who secretly despises Spider and plots to assassinate him; and Sanchez, the police officer who befriends Miguel after the bar massacre and tries to extract information about Spider.

Critical Context

Spidertown is Rodriguez’s first novel but not his first book. In 1992, he published The Boy Without a Flag, a critically acclaimed collection of short stories about Puerto Rican Americans in the South Bronx. Several of the characters in Spidertown have prototypes in the stories. For example, Spider is a minor character in “Birthday Boy,” and Careta makes an appearance in “The Lotto.” Miguel is similar in many ways to Angel in “Birthday Boy” and to the narrator of “The Boy Without a Flag.” Likewise, Cristalena resembles Dalia in “The Lotto.” It is obvious that Rodriguez borrowed situations and characters from his first book to create continuity between the works.

As a Bildungsroman, or apprenticeship novel, Spidertown is a descendant of such established novels as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-1796; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1824), Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849-1850), W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1915), James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel (1929). These novels all trace the youthful development of a male protagonist, often an artist or a writer.

By having his characters discuss Oliver Twist, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), and Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), Rodriguez creates another context for his novel. These works depict the underbelly of society and constitute sophisticated protest literature, of which Spidertown is an example. It is interesting to note that the literary tradition represented by these works is distinctly male, though not exclusively white or American.

Finally, Spidertown belongs to a body of recent literature by Latino authors. As a New York Puerto Rican writer, Rodriguez has an affinity with Nicholasa Mohr and Piri Thomas, who also write about Puerto Rican Americans in the South Bronx. Spidertown has been compared to Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets (1967), an autobiography of one man’s struggle with drugs and crime in New York. Rodriguez’s novel can also be grouped with the works of other Latino authors, such as Mexican American author Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1989) and Cuban American author Oscar Hijuelos’s The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), which won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

Bibliography

De Noyelles, Amy. Review of Spidertown, by Abraham Rodriguez, Jr. Hispanic 8 (March, 1995): 80. Praises the novel for its realistic portrayal of life on the streets of an urban center. De Noyelles describes the novel as “a true-grit, no-holds barred glimpse of life among Puerto Rican drug runners in New York City’s South Bronx.”

Dodd, David. Review of Spidertown, by Abraham Rodriguez, Jr. Library Journal 118 (April 15, 1993): 127. Highly recommends the novel. Dodd compares Rodriguez to Richard Wright and Fyodor Dostoevski because all three writers are willing to explore the darkest crevices of society. He praises Rodriguez’s authoritative voice and vision.

Ermelino, Louise. Review of Spidertown, by Abraham Rodriguez, Jr. People Weekly 40 (July 19, 1993): 27. Summarizes and evaluates the novel briefly. Ermelino criticizes the street dialogue for being repetitive but praises the repetitiveness of the plot for highlighting the tension and desperation of the characters. She accurately describes the novel as a personal look at “teenage angst” in a war zone.

Finn, Peter. “Tenement Romance.” The New York Times Book Review, July 18, 1993, p. 16. Finn commends Rodriguez for allowing his characters to evoke pity but complains that allusions to other writers tend to intrude upon the narrative.

Rivera, Lucas. “Bronx Author Shakes Up Latino Literature.” Hispanic 11 (April, 1998): 16. An interesting profile of Rodriguez that discusses his personal background, criticisms of other Hispanic authors, and his own experiences as a writer.

Rosenthal, Lois. “Notes.” Story 41 (Winter, 1993): 6. Rosenthal discusses her editorial relationship with the writer and reveals that she helped him find a publisher for his first book. She also notes that Columbia Pictures acquired the film rights to the novel.