Here's to You, Jesusa!

Rating:
Summary: Realistic and poignant, though narrative is a bit lacking
Review: First published in Spanish in 1969, Here's to You, Jesusa! is the fictional autobiography of a poor Mexican woman. This Latin American classic has recently been translated into English.

Jesusa's life is fraught with hardship and grievous injustice. Mistreated by her stepmother and abandoned by her father, fourteen-year-old Jesusa is forced to marry an abusive army officer who, out of jealousy, takes her with him to war. When he is killed a few years later, a corrupt government denies her the small compensation of the widow's pension it owes her. Still very young and left alone with neither income nor skills, Jesusa nearly starves.

Experience teaches her toughness, and her personality is as fraught with contradictions as the political milieu of the Mexican Revolution in which she fought. She is a loner who lets friends exploit her. Outwardly she is cold, yet she raises a motherless child whom no one wants. Despite her insistence that the child means nothing to her, her pain at his desertion is obvious. When he returns years later, she takes him in, knowing he intends to steal from her. His greedy quest amuses her, for she has nothing for him to steal.

Ms. Poniatowska spent several years getting to know the woman she based her character on, and it shows. However, first person narration by an inarticulate protagonist weakens the story, making it a tedious and sometimes obscure read. It might also be that something is lost in translation.

Here's to You, Jesusa! provides rare insight into what it was like to be poor and female in early twentieth-century Mexico. Jesusa is too complex to be fictional and her story too poignant not to engage even the most dispassionate reader.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent book
Review: Here's to You Jesusa is an excellent book with a story of bravery, history, despair, adventure, survival - everything except love and that is what made it such a sad story. The
author did an excellent job of creating a real person with very human faults and weaknesses, but also incredible strengh. It
was a story and a character that I kept thinking of long after I had finished reading the book. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Enter the world of Mexico
Review: Jesusa is a soldadera, a woman soldier, in the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917. She describes her experiences in life
from childhood to old age-- the choices she made and the problems she had-- the effects of chance and fate.

She is the wild woman who drinks in bars, the suffering laborer and servant. She is a spiritualist right under the nose of the Virgin. She occupies a Mexico few tourists have ever seen, a terrain of wonder and terror and the shocks and blows of the unexpected events that make up her life.

Rating:
Summary: Enter the world of Mexico
Review: Jesusa is a soldadera, a woman soldier, in the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917. She describes her experiences in life
from childhood to old age-- the choices she made and the problems she had-- the effects of chance and fate.

She is the wild woman who drinks in bars, the suffering laborer and servant. She is a spiritualist right under the nose of the Virgin. She occupies a Mexico few tourists have ever seen, a terrain of wonder and terror and the shocks and blows of the unexpected events that make up her life.