Buried Onions

Coach is a lifelong supporter to Eddie. With his base at Holmes School, Coach’s mission has been to help kids who are entrenched in difficult and often directionless lives. He helps them in ways large and small. He organizes softball and ping pong. He talks to them as individuals and delves into their problems. There seems to be at least a grudging respect for Coach from the majority of the youth he encounters. Eddie respects him implicitly, and seeks him out at the playground when he is most troubled. Coach gives Eddie the idea of joining the military as a way to get out of Fresno.

Angel embodies the criminal lifestyle inherent in Eddie’s neighborhood. He admits to stealing cars and committing other crimes to get by. Eddie knows him primarily through his cousin Jesus, who was friends with Angel.

Angel is the first one to urge Eddie to seek revenge on Jesus’ killer. The story about the murderer wearing yellow shoes originally comes from him. Later, Angel picks up that Eddie does not like him much, and Angel begins to hate Eddie in return. The reader is never told for certain if Angel killed Jesus or not. We also are given precious few details about Angel as a person. We are told he looks small. One of Soto’s closing images in the novel shows Angel above Jesus’ body, as Eddie visualizes Angel and Jesus in the field of onions. This closing image may hint that Angel was the murderer, but Soto lets us see that logically speaking it’s not always so simple to discern or declare truth based on human knowledge. Angel symbolizes the complexity of evil, and suggests evil as being a process or erosion rather than a condition.

Jose is the friend most important to Eddie in the novel. He is on leave from the Marines. He, like Eddie, tries to stay away from gangs and drugs. He is a good friend to Eddie, giving Eddie one of his own clean shirts when Eddie is bleeding, on arrival at Jose’s mother’s home, after the fight with Angel. He helps Eddie with the truck, and it leads to him being knifed. He is one of the two that Coach takes with him fishing, and he, along with Eddie, is one of the two Coach says have been his success stories. Jose comes on strong at first, putting Eddie in a stranglehold to show his strength when he arrives home, but is ultimately on Eddie’s side. He and Coach are the two most positive influences in Eddie’s life.

Mr. Stiles lives on Fresno’s north side and employs Eddie. The landscaping job from Mr. Stiles gives Eddie hope, but the rifts between the two come to symbolize class and race issues in America. Mr. Stiles is a doubting Thomas: he wants to trust Eddie but never trusts him one hundred percent, and that failure eats at Eddie and damages the relationship. 

While functioning more as symbol than fleshed-out character, the child can be seen as representative of Anglo coercion and distrust. He lives on Mr. Stiles’ block, and when Eddie explains to the child that he is planting a birch, this youngster says Eddie shouldn’t use bad language like “bitch.” Eddie explains to him that he had said “birch” not “bitch.” Later, the boy’s mother contacts Mr. Stiles about Eddie’s swearing. The boy seems to want to get Eddie in trouble. and when the police pick up Eddie for a crime he didn’t commit, the kid on the tricycle is right there, gleeful that Eddie has been wrongly accused. 

Lupe is a friend to Angel and an acquaintance of Eddie’s. He is Samuel’s older brother. Soto uses him to flesh out the grouping of male characters in the novel and to show an “in-between” type of character who is not as responsible as Eddie but not totally invested in gang culture, either. Lupe fronts for Angel and delivers his messages while also being concerned about Samuel’s emulation of a criminal lifestyle.