6/01/01 

One of the central dilemmas running through Denise Chávez’s novel Loving Pedro Enfante is the question of how a woman can be highly perceptive about her town, culture, and self, and yet still get into the same old man trouble. Heroine Teresina (Tere) is in her thirties and dissatisfied with small town life in New Mexico: "When you live in a place named Cabritoville, it seems the caca is all around." Tere’s escape and pleasure comes from watching old movies starring her hero, Mexican icon Pedro Enfante: "He’s the man we want our men to be. And he’s the man we imagine ourselves to be if we are men." Throughout the novel, Tere breaks down for the reader the main themes and characters of Pedro’s films, seeking parallels in her own life.

Looking for a love that somehow lives up to expansiveness of the silver screen, Tere instead becomes torturously involved with Lucio, a handsome and selfish married man. As a reader, one quickly comes to feel sympathy and kinship, but also immense frustration with Tere, much like Tere’s long-time friend Irma, who wisely tells her comadre "There are so many men who are gentle and loving. You don’t have to settle for anything less."

The pleasure of Chávez’s writing is in her details, which are often wonderfully poignant and bawdy at the same time. Recalling her first sexual encounter with Lucio, Tere reflects on the dryness of her feet: "If I’d known I was going to make love to Lucio I sure would have thought about my feet," and the neglected maintenance of her body hair, realizing she hadn’t plucked her "chin hairs or the one black one that grows on the right side of my face near my sideburn, that one wild hair I have to keep checking on." The El Colón move theater, which Tere frequents with the other members of the "Pedro Enfante Club #256" is brilliantly described as a place where:

The married men wander down to the concession stand to get a Coke and stare hard at the young girls, chiflando in that soft appreciative way with their breath, a small outtake of air releasing the sexual tension, while their wives slink down in their seats, grateful for a little peace as they pull down their bunched up panties. Someone takes out a much-used plastic bag full of tortas, someone else a crinkly paper bag full of ripe mangos.

In passages such as these, Chávez well captures both the dissatisfactions and trials of relations between the opposite sexes, and the pleasurable and mundane qualities of everyday life.

Of course, Lucio is never going to leave his wife, and little is done in the novel to help the reader understand what Tere sees in him, beyond her desire for domestic bliss with a loving husband and children. Tere’s truly satisfying companionship is with Irma, with whom she shares the great intimacy lacking in her relationship with Lucio. In a chapter entitled "Another Pedro-athon", the two women enact their weekly evening ritual of lounging in pajamas on "ten fuzzy pink pillows" and on "the world’s largest sofa", while watching numerous Pedro movies. Loving Pedro Enfante explores the intricacies of a close friendship between two women with great skill and insight.

Loving Pedro Enfante is highly enjoyable and well written, and Chávez’s use of the themes of Pedro Enfante’s films is an inspired technique for tying the novel together. Tere is a likeable and entertaining heroine, and when her continuous lamenting of her role as "the other woman" wears thin, the vivid Cabritoville landscape and depictions of small town inhabitants more than make up for it.

Denise Chávez. Loving Pedro Enfante. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.