64 pages • 2 hours read
Kirstin Valdez QuadeThe Five Wounds
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Personal Growth and Identity
Content Warning: The source text and this section of the guide discuss substance misuse, addiction, and domestic violence.
Personal growth and identity development are key focal points within the narrative, and Amadeo and Angel both show significant emotional growth over the course of the story. Amadeo is initially selfish, self-serving and attention-seeking. These qualities characterize all of his familial relationships to some degree. Angel begins the story further along her journey of self-knowledge than Amadeo, but still mired in uncertainty about the future and anger for her mother.
It is largely through his increased contact with Angel that Amadeo begins to grow and to discover that he actually does have the makings of a responsible father. One of the first moments that readers can see evidence of this growth is the scene where Angel swerves to miss what she thinks might be a coyote in the road. In this moment, notably, she is driving because Amadeo’s license is suspended; she is once again a young person wrestling with an adult responsibility. In the aftermath of her mistake, Angel panics, realizing that she could have caused an accident. But when she cries “I’m a horrible mother,” Amadeo calmly tells her that “every parent makes mistakes” (198). In her moment of need and vulnerability, Amadeo comforts his daughter, living up to his role as a parental figure. This empathy was never possible in the past, because Amadeo was so self-involved that he viewed each interaction with Angel as a burden.
One of the keys to Amadeo’s personal growth and identity development is his increasing ability to see Angel as a complex, intelligent individual. During the years when he regularly shirked his parenting duties, he didn’t really know his daughter. When Angel shows up on his porch, he sees her through the framework of her appearance, judging her harshly based on her low-cut top and tight-fitting jeans. The more time he spends with her, however, the more he sees her actual personality. He finds himself increasingly struck that she is emotionally intelligent, mature, determined, and responsible. He is so invested in the Angel whom he has gotten to know that he even attempts to talk Brianna into allowing Angel back into the Smart Starts! program. The resulting conversation makes clear that Brianna, in a parallel of who Amadeo once was, sees through the lens of first impression and stereotype.
Angel, too, undergoes a process of identity development. In comparison to her father, though, her personal growth happens more as a result of thinking critically about how people see one another, learning to identify the sources of her coping mechanisms, and developing enough emotional intelligence to forgive her mother. Angel is an intelligent girl who, before the instability of her home life derailed her, was dedicated to school. She brings this same dedication to her GED program and always seems a few steps ahead of her father in this regard. Even after she is unjustly expelled, she cares for her son and for Yolanda, who has chosen to live out her last days at home. Angel becomes the backbone of the family and fully comes into her own as a caretaker. However, reflecting yet another way in which Angel may break the pattern of generational trauma, Angel doesn’t intend to lose her sense of self as Yolanda did during her (many, and still ongoing) years as a caretaker. Instead, Angel plans to return to school and finish her education. “Mother” will be only part of her identity.
Angel also shows remarkable personal growth in the ways in which she becomes aware of privilege and prejudice. Throughout the course of the narrative, she worries how she and her home are perceived by others. She does not want to be seen as slovenly, messy, or uncaring. But after Brianna expels Lizette, Angel’s mental gears begin to shift. In a conversation with her child’s father, Ryan, Angel wonders aloud why she didn’t try to challenge Lizette’s expulsion. Angel then realizes that Brianna kicked Lizette out of the program because Brianna couldn’t see past Lizette’s disruptive behavior to the underlying trauma that was causing it. Angel, in turn, realizes that Ryan has an implicit understanding of structures of power that she and her family lack. Both of these situations are caused by inequality, injustice, and prejudice. The scene during which Angel herself is kicked out of school reveals this newfound sense of understanding to the reader: With anger and pain in her voice, Angel tells Brianna in no uncertain terms that Lizette was the girl most in need of Brianna’s help, yet Brianna abandoned her. Angel has learned some difficult, unpleasant lessons, but she uses them as motivational forces. By the conclusion of the narrative, Angel remains focused on parenting, education, and ensuring that her son will have better opportunities than she did.
Redemption and Faith
As its title suggests, The Five Wounds engages with religion, redemption, and faith. Its title refers to the biblical story of the crucifixion, specifically to the wounds that Jesus Christ endured while on the cross. The first section, “Semana Santa,” focuses on Amadeo’s experiences preparing for and participating in the Holy Week Passion Play. Because Amadeo himself hopes to find redemption through his performance, readers are led to believe that redemption and faith will go hand in hand in this story. This is not exactly the case, however. Amadeo notes that Jesus “never had to face the long, dull aftermath of crucifixion” (294). Amadeo is also initially surprised to find that his portrayal of Jesus did not automatically wash away his sins. The performance did not bring him the level of admiration that he expected from the town. And it certainly did not seem to impress his family.
Amadeo does ultimately find redemption and faith, but his journey is much more through learning love and dedication to his family than through the performance of religiosity. Amadeo by no means loses his religion or abandons the church. More precisely, his journey toward redemption is much more reflective of his final observation that what Christ felt on the cross, and what Amadeo should have felt during the Passion Play, was love. For Amadeo, the love of Christ is best reflected in the love that he learns to show his daughter. The sense of responsibility that he feels is rooted in love, and he discovers the depth of that love during the moments when he is finally able to get to know and understand Angel. Amadeo’s own desire for attention, recognition, and even redemption is rooted in trauma. The author’s depiction of these qualities in Amadeo should, in the end, elicit empathy. Importantly, though, Amadeo shifts his focus from himself to Angel in a way that allows him to care more about Angel’s wellbeing than whether or not he is recognized for his parenting abilities. This shift is how Amadeo finds true redemption: When he stops seeking everyone’s approval, he actually attains it, because his quest for approval becomes a sincere effort to put Angel’s needs above his own. It is interesting that Amadeo’s reflection about Christ feeling love and not pain on the cross comes at the end of the story. The positioning of this lesson shows that it was good deeds, responsibility, and a renewed sense of duty and obligation that led him to understand God, not the vice versa.
Even in the work that Amadeo comes to do with the other Hermanos during the novel’s second Passion Play reflects how he has found redemption through love rather than religious performance. The new actor playing Christ is the troubled Isaiah, and Amadeo is now a mentor within the community. Amadeo has long searched for the approval of Tío Tíve. Although his great-uncle has never judged him for any of his wrongdoings, Amadeo never felt recognition from the man whom he viewed as a surrogate father. By the conclusion of the novel, Tío Tíve does seem to recognize Amadeo’s changes, and it is with the help of Tío Tíve that Amadeo comes to play such an active role in the community organization.
Generational Trauma and Healing
The impact of generational trauma on the communities in northern New Mexico and the possibility of healing are key focal points within the narrative and one of its most important themes. Early in the story, Yolanda muses on what her daughter, Valerie, has to say about generational trauma: Valerie believes that “somewhere buried in the past someone committed the first act of violence, and every generation since has worked to improve on that violence, adding its own special flourish” (80). Yolanda pictures this violence in the context of history, adding vivid imagery to the often-invisible brutality of generational trauma:
[Yolanda] thinks of that first man, a conquistador, here in this dry new land for the purpose of domination and annihilation, yanking on the arm of his newly christened Indian wife and from that union a son was born. Generations of injury chewed like blight into the leaves of the family tree: shaken skulls, knocking teeth, snapped wrists, collisions and brawls and fatal intoxication (80).
Yolanda is not entirely sure that she agrees with her daughter. Nonetheless, this passage speaks not only to the presence of generational trauma in families and communities but also to its origins in colonization. The fact of colonization as trauma is part of why this text has such a fraught relationship with Catholicism. That is, the Catholic Church supported the intense and traumatic rupture that severed Indigenous peoples from their original culture and spiritual identities.
Within the present-day era shown in The Five Wounds, addiction is a major source of generational trauma. Addiction interferes with a parent’s ability to care for their child. It can, as in the case of Amadeo and Valerie’s father, Anthony, even take parents away from children. Addiction is certainly a crippling social issue within northern New Mexico, the setting of the novel. The author strives to treat those characters struggling with addiction with care, refraining from shaming or stigmatizing those individuals, instead portraying them in a humanizing way. The Five Wounds also grapples with the root causes of addiction: Anthony’s own struggles with alcohol and heroin probably began with his realization that he was gay and could never fully live his truth. The sources of addiction are complex and myriad, but once substance misuse takes root within a family, Valdez Quade depicts how they typically perpetuate addiction: Amadeo’s primary coping mechanism is alcohol, a trait that he inherited from and observed in his father.
Another key source of generational trauma is violence, as captured in Amadeo and Valerie’s father, who was prone to fits of volatility and violence when his children were still very young. In Amadeo, this aspect of generational trauma manifests in his own predilection toward violence, and in Valerie, it manifests as attraction to violence: She married a violent man. There is, however, room within this story for healing. Valerie has divorced her abusive husband and returned to school by the time the narrative begins, and Amadeo conquers both his alcohol addiction and fits of rage. Angel, although she does make her own mistakes that echo those of her parents, has profound inner strength and access to resources and role models that her parents did not. The end of the narrative thus suggests that Angel will manage to provide a good life for her son, Connor. She is already a kind and attentive mother, even during his early stages of infancy depicted in the latter half of the novel.
Another important source of generational trauma that reveals itself only in the final scenes of the story is the impact of inequality, prejudice, and racism. So many outsiders see the inhabitants of Las Penas and Española through the lens of stereotype. There is a reason that Valdez Quade chose Las Penas, meaning “the miseries,” as the name for her fictional town. Angel realizes the role of institutional injustice both through talking with the white father of her child and through thinking critically about the interactions between Brianna, who is also white, and Lizette. Angel can see how inequality and prejudice disempower people like her and her family: She is struck by how easy Ryan thinks it must be to self-advocate, and how assured he is that if he were to speak up on his own behalf after a perceived injustice, the injustice would be corrected. Angel understands that part of why people remain in poverty, beyond their lack of money and resources, is lack of knowledge. They do not understand as well as privileged groups how to navigate various systems of power. This realization is why Angel’s decision to re-enter high school is so important: She realizes that in addition to gaining financial stability, she has to grow her intellectual capital and learn how to move through a middle-class world designed to exclude people like her and her family. Furthermore, Angel wants to pass that knowledge on to her son in addition to love, education, and stability. Here, too, the novel argues that healing from generational trauma is possible, and the story thus ends on a hopeful note.
