The Wedding by Mary Helen Ponce
"The Wedding" by Mary Helen Ponce is a novel that explores the life of Blanca Munoz, a young Mexican American woman navigating the challenges of living in a impoverished Chicano neighborhood near Los Angeles. The story begins with Blanca's struggles, including dropping out of school and working various low-wage jobs, from a flower shop to a turkey processing plant, as she dreams of a better life. Her relationship with Samuel "Cricket" Lopez, the leader of a local gang, is characterized more by circumstance than genuine affection, as both focus on their upcoming wedding as a status symbol rather than a true union.
The wedding serves as a critical event, reflecting their desires for social advancement; Cricket seeks to elevate his standing among gang members, while Blanca aims to uphold her family's pride and fulfill cultural expectations. The narrative also addresses deeper themes of gender roles and societal pressures, as reflected in the priest's commentary on the double standards between married men and women. As the story concludes with a violent gang confrontation, both characters face dire consequences, leaving Blanca with lingering hopes for a brighter future despite the turmoil they encounter. Overall, "The Wedding" presents a poignant look at the interplay of dreams, social identity, and the harsh realities of life in a marginalized community.
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Subject Terms
The Wedding by Mary Helen Ponce
First published: 1989
The Work
The Wedding, Mary Helen Ponce’s only novel to date, is dedicated to “the chicks and guys from the barrios who remember the big, fun weddings . . . and fights.” The book follows a young Mexican American woman’s life from jobs to meeting the young man she will marry to the wedding party and gang fight.
Blanca Munoz lives in Taconos, a poor Chicano neighborhood not far from Los Angeles. Like many of her peers, Blanca lives in a single-parent home and drops out of school to look for work. She works in a Japanese flower shop and then in the fields picking lettuce and tomatoes. She tries to find a better job, but she is young, uneducated, and without skills, so she finally takes a job at a turkey processing plant, picking the feathers off turkeys while she imagines a better life.
She meets Samuel Lopez, or Cricket, the twenty-two year old leader of the local gang, the Tacones, who constantly tests the limits between his gang and the neighboring gang, the Planchados. Although she calls him honey, their relationship seems based more on proximity and chance than on love. Blanca and Cricket focus much more on the impending wedding as a social symbol than as the symbol of their union. Each wants a splendid wedding for different reasons: Cricket wants to raise his status among the gang members, and wants his wedding to be one that “would outclass all others”; Blanca wants to salvage the family’s pride, increase its social status and, consequently, please her mother by having a big wedding in the Catholic tradition.
Father Ranger, the parish priest, reluctantly agrees to perform the wedding, which will fulfill Blanca’s destiny as yet another woman subject to the double standard. “Married men come and go at will,” says Father Ranger. “They are free to find other women, abandon wives and children at whim, then return to claim their rights.”
Blanca constantly acquiesces to Cricket. She hopes for even a single night of honeymoon at a local hotel, but Cricket refuses, explaining that first he has to take care of the dance. On the way to the dance, as his new bride leans against him, Cricket admonishes her not to wrinkle his clothes. He knows he will be facing the rival gang and must look his best.
As the novel closes, Cricket is carried to the hospital in an ambulance after the rumble, and Blanca is taken to the hospital suffering a miscarriage. She still has hopes for a good future with Cricket. Her last words before passing out are “the best wedding, in all of Taconos.”
Bibliography
Gonzalez, Ray. “Hoyt Street: An Autobiography.” The Nation 256 (June 7, 1993): 772-774. Gonzalez presents a reading list of modern Chicano writing, briefly commenting on a number of books, including Ponce’s autobiography Hoyt Street. Although his article does not specifically mention The Wedding, it offers a useful perspective of the body of Ponce’s work in relation to other Chicano authors.
Hernández, Guillermo. “Satire: An Introduction.” In Chicano Satire: A Study in Literary Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. Hernández examines pachucos as historical and literary figures. Originally often seen as comical, this urban counterculture gradually became seen as threatening. Hernández discusses the pachucos’ trademark “zoot suit” as a distortion of mainstream culture’s business suit.
McCracken, Ellen. “Subculture, Parody, and the Carnivalesque: A Bakhtinian Reading of Mary Helen Ponce’s The Wedding.” MELUS 23 (Spring, 1998): 117. McCracken argues that Ponce’s novel has earned a place in the late twentieth century canon of novels written by Mexican American women even though it does not fit the mold of critically popular work of the 1990’s. She maintains that since the critics have lauded the exotic nature, rich language, and magic realism of Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, and others, they should also appreciate the humorous insider’s perspective of Pachuco culture offered by Ponce.
Magnarelli, Sharon. “Taking Control.” Hispania 71 (December, 1988): 844-845. A review of Ponce’s 1987 volume of short stories. Magnarelli focuses on the characters’ ironic inability to “take control,” a theme Ponce reinforces in The Wedding. Magnarelli discusses the characters’ “paradoxical combination of insight and blindness,” a paradox underlying Blanca’s character.
Vallejos, Tomás. “Social Insights.” American Book Review 11 (January, 1990): 13. Vallejos explores sexism in Chicano culture and associates the structure of Ponce’s novel—thirteen chapters in part 1 and nine in part 2—with an Aztec prophecy of thirteen time periods of heaven followed by nine periods of hell. He notes that the novel sets the “heavenly” illustrations of the traditional Chicano wedding against the “hellish” reality of the Chicano working class.
Vásquez, Mary S. Review of The Wedding, by Mary Helen Ponce. Hispania 73 (December, 1990): 1005-1007. Vásquez focuses on Ponce’s skill with dialect and on the wedding, which as spectacle fulfills Blanca’s dreams. She comments that the “poignant tension between too much and too little” informs the second half of the novel.