The House of Broken Angels
The Angels in Luis Alberto Urrea’s
are far from ethereal-spirit types. Big Angel, his half-brother Little Angel, and their dead father Don Antonio, “El Primer Angel,” can be selfish or kind. Their bodies at times give them strength and at others betray them, through lust or decay. They must contend with the battles, grudges, and griefs that come with being part of any family. Urrea’s book is not a novel about divinity; it is a novel about humanity and all its marvelous mess.
Big Angel, Little Angel, and the rest of the De la Cruz family come together in mourning and celebration. Big Angel’s mother, América, has just died, and the family congregates in San Diego to attend her funeral. They are also there for Big Angel’s birthday party the following day. He is dying of cancer — a withered version of the family patriarch — and the birthday, his seventieth, is understood to be his last. As the family members come together, their ongoing history of interwoven love and hate is illuminated. “Allegiances shifted like the seasons,” the narrator says. “Rhetorical weapons ever at the ready.”
Central to that family history is where it has taken place: south of, north of, and across the U.S.-Mexico border. Big Angel’s grandfather came to California after the Mexican Revolution, but the family was deported in the 1930s. His father, Don Antonio, spent time in both Mexico and the United States; one of his biggest offenses was to leave Big Angel’s Mexican mother for a gringa named Betty, Little Angel’s mother. Big Angel crossed the border into California around 1970 and encouraged his love, Perla, to join him. “She wanted only to return to Mexico,” the narrator explains. “This was not a better life. At home, at least, there was community, laughter. Even hope.” But in the U.S., “She found loneliness and worse hunger than in Mexico — worse, because all around her people were rolling like pigs in huge piles of food and clothes and liquor.”
Big Angel’s children and stepchildren were born on either side of the border. One son has become the victim of a homicidal drug dealer in San Diego, and another, Lalo, is dealing with the psychological repercussions of having fought in Iraq for the country he grew up in. Despite what Lalo had been led to believe, his service did not give him citizenship, and his identity remains in crisis: “Dude grows up in Dago [San Diego], thinking he’s a Viva La Raza American vato, and finds out all of a sudden he has to hide from the Border Patrol. Ain’t that the shits.” He experiences flashbacks to bloody dirt in an Iraqi alleyway, and to the blood that pooled around his brother after he was shot.