with dirty feet. All of the children were looking on as she stood atop an alley fence. Everyone was shouting, “Speech! Speech! Let Chonita make a speech! Talk in English Chonita!” She yelled out, “Give me the hammon and the beans! Give me the hammon and the beans!” Every evening Chonita would make her speech as the young boy waited until they could go play.One day the young boy fell ill and when he was cured Chonita was not around. As he grew through the 1930s he thought of her and the hammon and the beans often. Eventually, he learned that Chonita had passed away from an illness.The night of Chonita’s death, everyone was really sad, but the young boy just felt strange. The doctor told the boy’s father that Chonita’s father was in a rather joyous mood. The boy’s father told the doctor that the man was not Chonita’s biological father and that her real father had been shot and hanged. The two men proceeded with a conversation about radicalism, and came to no significant conclusion. The young boy headed off to bed at his mother’s request. As he lay there not fully asleep, he thought about Mexican hero Emiliano Zapata. He heard the bugle blare at the post and thought of Chonita in heaven shouting, “Give me the hammon and the beans!” He began to cry, and not knowing why he was crying he felt better.Using “The Hammon and the Beans” Amrico Pardes described the Brownsville of his youth. Pardes wrote with a darkly tragic irony of a young boy’s first encounter with death. I believe Chonita was a symbol. A symbol of how Mexican-Americans struggled against poverty, prejudice, and loss of cultural identity....
