Blog Entry #2

There is a scene in The Flowers where Sonny is told to paint the apartment sign and he doesn’t seem to mind doing it because he says that he would much rather do that than continue to cut the weeds. Cloyd tells him to be extra careful so that he wouldn’t splatter black paint on the rest of the painting. Sonny is aware of the fact he has to do things cautiously but the sign itself seemed to confuse him. He was accepting of the sign itself and he tried to follow instructions without showing much care but he was bothered about the los part. He then asked the twins and got them to explain to him about the difference between Los and Las. “Los Flores: It’s that I really wasn’t sure one way or the other, because I wasn’t any expert on the Spanish language… there are words that seem like they should take a la and don’t… (75).

I can relate back to this quote because I remember I used to feel the same way about certain Spanish words. I remember I had a Spanish class back in High School but there were times where to me, the wrong pronoun was the word that seemed to be the right one. Unlike Sonny, I am more familiar with speaking Spanish, but I am used to speaking Spanglish so trying to focus just on Spanish and using the right pronouns confused me too sometimes.

The author’s intention towards this scene can be to show that there are less and less younger people speaking Spanish. Like Sonny and Sylvia, she appears to have been brought up in a Mexican culture and she speaks a lot of Spanish throughout the book but Sonny in the other hand, struggles to speak much Spanish, especially when he wants to translate words so that Nica could understand him. The author could be trying to point out the fact that there are more families like Sylvia and Sonny. This scene follows up on my thought that Sylvia never really did much to teach Sonny about their Mexican culture or to try to interact with him at all. I mean she has told him that she loves him but there isn’t a lot of communication between them.