The Wind Knows My Name

As Samuel arrives in New Orleans, the text focuses on the contrast between Samuel’s experiences in the Caribbean cultures of New Orleans and the Caribbean community he left behind in London. In both cases, he’s entrenched in cultures foreign to his own, but in London he doesn’t explore these cultural differences in London. In New Orleans, he has the motivation of learning more about jazz music, which leads him to meet Nadine. She operates as a foil, or opposite, to Samuel, as she’s open and willing to experience and mingle with other cultures, even when it’s detrimental to her standing in New Orleans society. In fact, Nadine’s interest in other cultures seems largely performative, highlighting a trend of allies who “virtue signal,” or pretend to care more about the issues facing marginalized communities in order to gain social clout. When Nadine “discover[s] that her husband wasn’t English, but an Austrian Jew,” she’s excited by the “scandal this news [will] cause among her racist relatives” (107). To some extent, Nadine’s investment in foreign cultures results more from a desire to rebel against her family than from genuine compassion or interest. Her excitement at the scandal of marrying a Jewish person raises questions about her motivations later as she starts weaving fabrics and participating in protests: These too could be driven by the desire to rebel against her upbringing.

Samuel continues to search for a new family, having failed to integrate into the communal family that Nadine created for them in California. However, in the present, Anita, Selena, and Frank continue to investigate their own sense of family, foregrounding the theme of Family as the Greatest Strength, as Anita laments her separation from her mother and grandmother and Selena invites Frank to her family’s home in Los Angeles. Doña Eduvigis reveals that Claudia, whom Anita talks to in her chapters, is Anita’s younger sister, which positions the chapters focusing on Anita’s perspective as an expression of familial loss. Claudia isn’t physically with Anita, but Anita frames her thoughts as a conversation with her sister to retain a closeness with her family. When she’s punished, Anita remembers how her grandmother dunked her head in water to calm her down, noting that in the US one would likely be jailed for doing so and thus linking familial practices with a broader cultural awareness. Frank and Selena, through discovering Marisol’s story, uncover more evidence supporting the theme of The Gendered Differences in Violent Oppression, as they create links between the El Mozote massacre, the refugee crisis, and the dangers that Marisol and other women face on the journey to the US. In El Salvador, Doña Eduvigis explains how people can’t trust the police and military, noting how Carlos Gómez was formerly a police officer and how his connections with the police prevent him from being prosecuted for his crimes. Lola links this further with the information that Carlos’s father was the commander in charge of the El Mozote massacre, opening the discussion to encompass oppression on a broader scale. While corrupt policing allows interpersonal violence, military brutality allows larger attacks on entire communities.

Discussion with Lola also reveals another side to the theme of Denial in the Face of Atrocities, as she explains, “Most of us are peaceful, happy people. Here, any excuse is good for a party” (135). Although the novel’s depiction of El Salvador thus far has focused on violence and oppression, Lola dispels some of the overarching sense of danger by noting how the average person still lives life normally. This acknowledgment reveals another aspect of denying atrocities: These people are making the best of a trying situation, but at the same time, they’re effectively pretending that the danger doesn’t apply to them or that they’re inherently safe from the violence affecting their peers. The challenge in analyzing the situation in El Salvador is similar to that in Vienna before Kristallnacht. As the Nazis increasingly denied rights to Jewish communities, this didn’t stop them from having dinner together or, in Rudolph Adler’s case, playing poker with Peter Steiner. A resilience underlies this denial because people refuse to allow oppression to entirely take over their lives.