Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa

Both the author and his father are named Rigoberto González, but the similarities seemingly end there. González’s difficult relationship with his father is the primary organizing topic of Butterfly Boy and is explored most directly in the chapters in which he recounts their bus trip to Zacapu. González resents his father for drinking, for being physically abusive toward himself and his brother, and for leaving him behind to start a new family shortly after the death of his mother. Rigoberto’s father is also constantly borrowing money, from Rigoberto and others, with no intention of repaying. He is not very sensitive or reliable, as shown when he leaves Rigoberto’s mother alone in Mexico with two small children to care for without an income.

Rigoberto’s father is a short, strong, and handy agricultural worker who also has experience working in construction. He represents an idyll of masculinity that González cannot reach. He left school at a young age to apprentice as an electrician, but his own father forced him to leave his apprenticeship to work in the fields with the rest of his family. These details highlight the problems with patriarchy, as González traces a lineage of fathers being hard on their sons. Like many people in González’s family, the father is functionally literate but does not read for leisure. As a young man, he was a boxer, but he was not very successful. He also played guitar in a rock band called Dinastía, but after a period of hardship, the family was forced to sell the band equipment.

González and his father are very different. Rigoberto’s father is social and chatty, and this makes him popular with others; Rigoberto is shy and withdrawn, with few friends. Rigoberto’s father is a talented guitar player and learned to play so that he could seduce women; Rigoberto can barely play guitar and is not interested in women. Rigoberto’s father dropped out of school at an early age; Rigoberto is in college. The two of them struggle to connect and are virtually estranged. In a note at the end of Butterfly Boy, Rigoberto reflects on how he doesn’t even know where his father is at that moment.

Rigoberto’s lover is unnamed throughout Butterfly Boy. They have a passionate, volatile relationship characterized by his power over Rigoberto. Rigoberto’s lover is 20 years older than Rigoberto. He has disposable income that he uses to take Rigoberto to nice restaurants and on trips to Los Angeles. He is Mexican, but he isn’t Catholic, like Rigoberto and many other Chicanos. Rigoberto and his lover do drugs together, but Rigoberto implies that his lover’s meth and cocaine use is more extensive than his own.

Their sex life is portrayed as violent and aggressive. Rigoberto’s lover does not ask for Rigoberto’s consent in his violent sex acts, although initially, Rigoberto accepts some of the aggressive behavior in bed, such as when Rigoberto’s lover leaves hickeys all over his body, which they call “butterflies.” Eventually, however, the abuse escalates. As Rigoberto writes, “I don’t remember when those marks on my body became fiery bruises, when his fist against my skin became part of our lovemaking” (4). González often uses intimate and yet violent vocabulary when describing interactions with his lover, focusing on the color and tactile quality of skin, suggesting a danger that is hard to escape.

In one scene, Rigoberto’s lover reveals that his father raped him as a child. This reflects the abusive cycles that González portrays throughout the texts of fathers mistreating their sons. When Rigoberto asks him if he ever reported the rape, Rigoberto’s lover burns him badly with a cigarette, which implicitly highlights that he feels blamed for this assault.

During his bus trip to Zacapu, Rigoberto pines for his lover and briefly returns to him upon his return to Riverside. However, after being treated with disrespect and physically abused, Rigoberto resolves to leave him for good.

Rigoberto’s passion for his lover is complexly, Oedipally, tied in with his difficult relationship with his father. Like Rigoberto’s father, Rigoberto’s lover beats González and treats him with indifference mediated by moments of affection. Symbolically, Rigoberto exchanges his father’s watch for the one gifted to him by his lover, but he sees it as a “handcuff,” suggesting that he moves from the control of his father to his lover. In another moment that underscores the connection between Rigoberto’s lover and his father, Rigoberto awakes on the bus to find that his father is gone and he writes, “the empty seat saddens me because it holds the memory of my father’s body. Or is it, I fear to admit, my lover’s body I yearn for?” (49). The lover’s presence in the text highlights Rigoberto’s desire for love, which is inextricable from his relationship with his father.

Alexandro González is about two years younger than Rigoberto. He and Rigoberto are portrayed as having a cordial but not close relationship. Alex is rowdy, starts fights at school, likes to play outside, and has no interest in books; he is Rigoberto’s foil.

Alex first appears in Butterfly Boy warning Rigoberto that the trip down to Zacapu with his father might be difficult. He is closer to their father than Rigoberto. For example, when Rigoberto’s father tries to teach them both guitar, Alex quickly takes to it, “cradl[ing] the guitar with a gentleness that produced delicate sounds” (102), whereas Rigoberto quickly gives up because he is forced to play with his right hand. This suggests that Alex adapts to a version of masculinity that their father demands, while Rigoberto does not.

When Alex drops out of school and there is tension in their paternal grandfather, Alex moves in with Rigoberto’s father and works in agriculture with him. However, there are a couple scenes in which González describes a kind of allyship between the two boys. First is when the two are attending Vasco de Quiroga primary school in Mexico while their mother is dying in Zacapu. When the other students tease them for being “gringos,” Alex hides behind Rigoberto. This shows some vulnerability in Alex, which suggests that he also struggles with patriarchal expectations. However, Rigoberto feels unable to help him, noting, “I felt just as helpless then as I did at Vasco de Quiroga in general, unable to offer him a word of comfort” (123). Another moment of kinship is when Alex agrees to help Rigoberto escape through the window and steal his grandfather’s car to go to college in Riverside.

Rigoberto González’s 2018 memoir, What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth, explores their adult relationship in more detail.

Rigoberto’s mother, Avelina González, dies when he is around 12 years old. His mother is portrayed as kind, strong, warm, and hard-working. Although conforming to many of the gendered expectations of her community, she also has an independent streak. Avelina elopes with Rigoberto’s father at a young age, against her family’s wishes. Later, she attempts to learn how to drive and speak English, which represents her independence. Her marriage to Rigoberto’s father is plagued by his drinking and unreliability. Rigoberto bonds with her while they wait up late for him to come home from drinking.

Rigoberto’s mother suffers from a recurring heart condition. The hard work in the factory and fields to earn money for the family puts her fragile health at risk. One day, while harvesting grapes, she has a stroke, collapses, and is hospitalized. She is sent home and Rigoberto assists her with her physical therapy after her stroke. She dies soon after. This moment represents a loss of hope in the memoir as a caring presence disappears from Rigoberto’s life.

Rigoberto is close with his mother. When Rigoberto’s father abandons her without an income in Mexico, Rigoberto’s mother slips him, and not his brother, a sugar cube at night before bed as a treat. She is tender to him, such as when she gently asks him what is wrong when he is concerned about the sick man next door. However, the relationship is complicated. She discourages his effeminate or “sissy” behavior (108), sometimes with physical violence. Rigoberto writes, “my mother’s reaction didn’t make much sense to me in that moment” (108), but later he realizes that it is to protect him from the more violent “corrections” his father might dole out. This suggests that both Rigoberto and his mother are victims of patriarchal oppression, which is reinforced when González observes that “[i]n the absence of [his] father and brother, indeed the masculine element of the household, [he and his mother] got along fine” (111). There is a suggestion of hope for LGBTQ+ people and women in the absence of patriarchal oppression.

Rigoberto’s paternal grandparents live on the Fred Young Farm Labor Camp or “el campo” in Indio, California. Rigoberto’s paternal grandfather is a hard, difficult man. He is a skinflint. He wears his clothes until they fall apart and is proud of once being mistaken for a homeless man. Rigoberto’s grandfather berates the other members of the family relentlessly. When they express any hope or optimism, he contradicts them and tries to cut them down. He also attempts to control all the family’s finances and once raises his hand to Rigoberto’s mother to try to steal her earnings. When he badly beats Rigoberto as a small child for witnessing this, the family decides to move out of his house. He also controls and beats his wife, Rigoberto’s paternal grandmother. He is the patriarch who represents the cycles of abuse passed down from fathers to sons in the text.

Rigoberto’s paternal grandmother is a small, tough, hardworking woman. Despite her husband’s surly manner, she can hold her own against him, either overtly, by laughing at his eccentricities and calling him nicknames like “Diablocrú” (meaning roughly “rude Devil”), or covertly, by doing things behind his back. During one Christmas, when the family is particularly poor, she scrapes the money together to get all of the children bags of candy with bits of $5 bills inside, even though she knows that her husband wouldn’t approve. She is also “a skilled harmonica player” but “she was very private about it” (135), which indirectly characterizes the family environment as unsupportive. She likes to work in the garden and drink beer, emulating a sense of freedom in a cramped house. As a teenager, when Rigoberto goes to live with his paternal grandparents, they form a closer bond, joining forces against his grandfather.