Prayers for the Stolen

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-6

Part 1, Chapters 7-11

Part 2

Part 3

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

The Absence of Men and Female-Only Worlds

Content Warning: The Theme entry on Revenge and Retaliation contains references to sex trafficking and rape.

At the start of Prayers for the Stolen, Ladydi describes a key feature of Chulavista: “On our mountain there were no men. It was like living where there were no trees” (8). Her mother also describes the absence of men “like being a person with one arm… like being asleep without dreams” (8). These words capture part of the strangeness and difficulty of life in their small village. With sons and husbands emigrating to the United States for work or being recruited by traffickers, Chulavista is left as an exclusively female world. The absence of men presents many challenges, including increased vulnerability to attacks by the drug traffickers. Without the traditional protective role assumed by men in such places, the traffickers have even more license to operate with impunity. The women must devise ingenious methods to hide and disguise themselves, since they are regarded as easy prey. As seen with Paula and Maria’s mother, these methods are, tragically, not always successful.

The absence of men also has an impact on women’s romantic and sexual expression and development. Ladydi’s mother asks, lamentingly, “Why the hell can’t this place have a bar full of men so that you can get drunk and get yourself kissed?” (54). Rita feels that her life is diminished in the absence of men, seeing herself as deprived of a source of excitement and joy. On a deeper level, it also makes it harder for to move on from Ladydi’s father, because she can’t find a new partner. At the same time, the typical absence of men means that the occasional arrival of any man generates an overreaction. This is seen with the arrival of the new teacher, Jose. As Ladydi says, “I watched as our mothers fell in love with this young teacher” (46). Due to their situation, they want his attention too much and often leave themselves exposed as a result. As Rita says, having passed out in front of Jose, “I was just turning inside out, turning inside out so that my bones were on the outside and my heart was hanging here… he could’ve just leaned over and plucked my eye off of my face” (54). While Jose does not exploit this, the general absence of men leaves her vulnerable to him emotionally and physically.

Further, this overreaction and vulnerability is repeated in the case of Ladydi. She admits that the first man she meets outside the village, Julio, “walked right into my body” (130). Longing for male attention in the absence of her father, she falls in love with Julio before they have exchanged a single word. Unlike Rita’s infatuation with Jose, Ladydi’s relationship with Julio has serious repercussions; her infatuation with Julio blinds her to the encroaching danger and precariousness of her situation in the house.

However, the all-female world also offers certain advantages. The women and girls of Chulavista are resourceful, self-reliant, and strong in a way that they may have not been with the presence of more men. They develop a capacity to cope with and overcome dangers, such as scorpions, snakes, and traffickers. They also foster new forms of solidarity that might not otherwise exist in a world with two-parent families and men. This is witnessed in the sense of community found in the female prison. It is also evident at the novel’s end when Ladydi, Rita, and Maria forge a strong new family from the adversity of their all-female worlds.

Revenge and Retaliation

When Ladydi is riding in a taxi with the injured Maria to a hospital, the taxi driver makes a series of callous and abusive remarks. First, he accuses Maria of being a “bad girl” (96), as he assumes that a man shot her, and she must have done something to deserve it, before stating with glee, “I bet it hurts” (96). Then he makes a sexual comment to Ladydi (96), whose silent response is to urinate, without him noticing, over the seat of the car. Thus, her retaliation against the driver for his comments is comical and repays his lack of respect with her own show of disrespect. Ladydi’s mother’s peculiar “hexes” on her husband offer a similar type of humorous rebellion. As she says to Ladydi, “May a gigantic termite grow in his navel, or an ant in his ear… May his penis be eaten by a worm” (11). These fantastical imagined retaliations seem to serve as a useful means for Rita to deal with the mental anguish of being abandoned.

However, Clement also suggests that revenge and the desire for it can go too far. Rather than being an immediate and proportional reaction to harm caused by another, or a short-term coping mechanism, it can become a dangerous obsession. This is also seen in Rita’s case. While some of her revenge fantasies regarding her husband are harmless, they devolve into a pathology that harms her and others. As Ladydi says, for her mother, “Everything was his fault” (36), from the hotness of their house to leaks in the roof when it rained. Worse, she drags her daughter into this mindset, projecting her resentment of her husband onto Ladydi by imagining shortcomings in her and then associating them with her husband. For example, Ladydi says, “If I talked too much, I was exactly like him, I never shut up. If I was quiet, I was just like him, I thought I was better than everyone else” (36).

Conversely, Rita tries to revenge herself on Ladydi’s father by ruining Ladydi’s impression of him. When her daughter is still only 11, Rita explains all of Ladydi’s father’s affairs to her and thereby, as Ladydi says, “killed my daddy for me” (42). Further, these projective and substitute acts of vengeance reach a peak when Rita shoots Maria. She almost kills Maria because she looked like and, and thus represented, her husband and because Rita sought a means of hurting Maria’s mother for sleeping with him. As Ladydi notes, “this was retribution” (103). The prison context parallels this one: Many of the women there were physically abused or, in Aurora’s case, raped. Yet, as with Maria, the violent acts they commit for vengeance often harm innocent people and destroy their own lives in the process by leading to their imprisonment.

Stealing Objects and People

While she is talking to her mother from the house in Acapulco, Ladydi’s phone goes dead, and she has to call her back. As Ladydi explains, this is not accidental. Rather she describes it as the reason “Carlos Slim, the man who owned the phone company, was the richest man in the world. He made sure everyone in Mexico always had to call back” (123). She describes the Mexican phone service as deliberately designed to be unpredictable and expensive, forcing people to spend more money to talk with absent loved ones. This type of incident recurs throughout the novel. Whether the theft is implicit, as in this case, or explicit, people taking what does not belong to them is a ubiquitous part of the world Ladydi inhabits. This is clear in the case of Lourdes Rivas, whom Ladydi briefly sees in prison. The wife of a politician, she stole millions of dollars from the Red Cross while she oversaw it, and “thanks to her theft, thousands of ambulances were not purchased and hundreds of health clinics were not built” (186). As with Slim, theft is presented as inextricable from corruption and power. Most extremely, this is evident with the drug traffickers who openly use their power to steal doctors, workers to pick their drug crops, and young women to sexually exploit. Like Rivas, they also steal lives. Their actions, as seen with Paula, Ruth, and Chulavista, destroy childhoods and entire communities. They take what they want without any concern for whom it belongs to or the impact it will have on ordinary people.

However, stealing is not always cast negatively in the novel, nor are the powerful the only thieves. Ladydi’s mother, for example, constantly steals. As Ladydi explains, in their shack in the village they lived “surrounded by all the objects my mother had stolen for years” (11). These include “dozens of pens and pencils, salt shakers and eye glasses…” and “one large plastic garbage bag filled with little sugar packets she had stolen from restaurants” (11). This is a means of supplementing paltry wages, in addition to being a response to the trauma of abandonment brought on by Ladydi’s father. This penchant for stealing is passed on to Ladydi, who steals from her employers’ house in Acapulco. As she says, “Under the sink I found a box of jewelry…and a ring with a very large diamond. I placed the jewel on my ring finger and it fit perfectly” (137). She also, in a technical sense, “steals” accommodation in the house, living there rent-free after her employers die. At the same time, this kleptomania forms a strange but powerful bond between mother and daughter. Ladydi gives the ring to her mother, saying, “I stole something for you. I opened my hand and took off the diamond ring and gave it to her” (221). Conversely, Rita sells all the things she has stolen over the years to pay to travel to see Ladydi and for them to emigrate to the US. As Rita says when they are forced to flee, “Thank God I’ve been a thief all my life” (178). Rita’s stealing becomes a means to liberation and escape.