Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa

All the major relationships in Rigoberto’s life, except for his connections with his schoolteachers, are characterized by violent behavior. As a child, Rigoberto endures this violence, as he is powerless to fight back. Over the course of the text, Rigoberto comes to see the violence inflicted upon himself by his father as part of a cycle of violence that his father himself endured. As an adolescent and young adult, he sees violence, and in particular sexually charged violence, as a sign of affection and its acceptance as his own form of power. The erotic element of violence, as well as the suffering it causes in Rigoberto’s adult life, is psychologically complex.

When describing his young life, González reflects on numerous examples of violence inflicted upon him, primarily by his father and grandfather. As a small child, when he falls and hits his head, he is more scared of his father beating him than he is of the injury. When he acts too feminine, his father beats him with a belt. In one scene, his grandfather beats him badly as a small child with a metal hoe. This scene is described in graphic detail, with Rigoberto experiencing a kind of disassociation during the event, explaining, “At the moment of the beating, all the other beatings came back to haunt me, as if the pain were stimulating memory” (74). This reinforces the text’s idea that violence is not an isolated event but is rather cyclical and attached to violent systems such as patriarchy and forced poverty.

The violence directed toward Rigoberto by his father and grandfather is not the only violence in the family. Rigoberto’s grandfather beats his grandmother, and his aunt beats any child she can get her hands on when she’s angry. The family expresses only a limited amount of affection toward one another but freely uses violence to maintain control. Despite this violence, Rigoberto loves his family and continually returns to them because they are his family. This pattern is somewhat repeated in the abusive relationship he is in with his lover.

As Rigoberto becomes more sexually active, he begins to equate pain with pleasure and sexual desire. An early example of this is when another boy at school tweaks his nipple “so tightly it bruised” (150). Rather than being upset about this, it is a moment of self-discovery for Rigoberto, who wants “to recreate that sensation of pain and pleasure—that gift given to me by another boy” (150). Reading pain as a form of desire is a way for Rigoberto to regain some degree of control over the violence inflicted upon him by others. While there are safe ways to enact and explore this desire, the violence inflicted by his older lover on him as a young adult is non-consensual, amounting to abuse. Due to the shame and the familial abuse Rigoberto has experienced, he feels that this form of violence is warranted. Upon return to his lover after his trip to Zacapu, they have rough sex that leaves Rigoberto “crying out in pain for a merciful release, especially when he penetrates [Rigoberto] without lubrication […]. As his heavy breathing grates against [his] ear, somewhere in the back of [Rigoberto’s] mind [he] hear[s] [him]self think: I deserve this” (198). When Rigoberto realizes at the end of Butterfly Boy that he does not, in fact, deserve this kind of treatment, he is able to liberate himself both from the violence of this relationship and the burden of his familial past. This suggests a breaking away from cyclical violence.

Rigoberto’s family and his own life experience is characterized by their constant migration back and forth across the US–Mexico border. The structure of Butterfly Boy is emblematic of this: Rigoberto recounts his family’s life story and his childhood while on a long bus ride from Riverside, California, to Zacapu, Mexico, and back again. Rigoberto describes in detail the internal conflicts and challenges of the immigrant experience. He is constantly moving between worlds and between languages, never feeling entirely at home in either.

The metaphor of the annual migration of the monarch butterfly, which travels from central Mexico to the United States, is used to characterize Rigoberto’s family’s experience. As González notes, “[I]t is not out of the ordinary to witness entire communities of farmworkers migrate back and forth between the two countries—an echo of the region’s famous monarch butterflies who do the same for survival” (55). As migrant farmworkers for “four generations” (55), Rigoberto’s family adheres to this model. For this reason, Rigoberto and his grandfather are United States citizens, while his father and great-grandfather are Mexican. They are a family split between the two nations because of the necessity of traveling to find work and survive.

Rigoberto is already an isolated child due to his non-conformity to the gendered expectations of his community. This isolation is further compounded by being split between different cultures and worlds. Rigoberto is born in the United States, but his family moves to Mexico soon after he was born. Around the age of seven, his family moves back to the United States. His lack of “proper English” is seen as a problem by the educators in his American primary school and he is obligated to take “speech therapy” lessons. He makes enormous progress in his mastery of English, even winning the school’s spelling bee, but no sooner is he comfortable in this language than his family relocates once again to Mexico, where he is teased at school by his classmates for being too American. As a high school student, he has some stability in his paternal grandparents’ home in Indio, California, but even there he feels isolated from the white, upper-class students in his college prep courses, around whom he feels obligated to obscure his working class, Latino background. By narrating these experiences, González suggests that the experience of migration in a hostile environment causes to people to struggle with their sense of home and identity.

Rigoberto has to move between English and Spanish to communicate with those around him. When he arrives at his paternal grandparents’ house at the beginning of his journey to Zacapu, his brother pulls him aside to show him the photograph of his parents which was water damaged. González notes, “My brother and I are the only ones who communicate in English, which we only speak when we’re alone” (14). English is an intimate language for them and a way that they can have privacy in a crowded home. This bifurcated identity, characterized by language-switching, is reflected in the language of Butterfly Boy itself, which is often sprinkled with words from Spanish, such as when Rigoberto calls his lover “querido,” which means “dear” (38). The memoir’s diction exemplifies its perspectives about the disorienting nature of migration.