The Wind Knows My Name

 “‘Papa’s not going to be able to find us when he gets home,’ said Samuel.

‘It’s only for a little while. There are some bad men in the building, but they’ll leave soon.’

‘They’re Nazis, aren’t they, Mama?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are all Nazis bad, Mama?’

‘I don’t know, son. There might be good ones and bad ones.’

‘But there are more bad ones than good ones, I think,’ the boy said.”

Based on this passage, Rachel’s efforts to hide Nazi occupation from Samuel haven’t entirely worked. He seems to understand that the Nazi agenda is violent, though Rachel assures him that the Nazi party likely has some good people. This perspective runs counter to the Nazi perspective on Jewish people, which asserts that the entire Jewish community is evil, and it shows a double-sided tolerance in which Rachel essentially tolerates intolerance. Unfortunately, this faith in the goodness of some in the Nazi party is unrewarded, and Samuel makes a well-balanced statement in noting that most of the people in the Nazi party are “bad.”

“There was an order to deport all Jewish men and long lines of prisoners advanced toward the trucks that would drive them to the concentration camps, while their families bid them sobbing farewells from the sidewalks. Most Viennese residents chose to remain shut inside their homes, but there were some who spit at and insulted the lines of detainees, either out of racist hate or in order to ingratiate themselves with the Nazis.”

The government is lying: Instead of Jewish men being deported, they’re being sent to concentration camps. Although these men are innocent, many Austrians and Germans during were led to believe that Jewish people were the reason for economic and social failures of the time. Importantly, the text notes that some people likely go along with the insults and spitting to appease the Nazi party members doubtlessly present throughout the crowd and the town. More importantly, though, most people seem to act as if no grievous event is happening at all, closing their doors as though that will make the crimes disappear.

“Rachel, desperate, consulted with her father and brother, in the hopes that they would be able to come up with some alternative, but they both insisted that she should try to secure the boy a spot on the Dutch woman’s train with the other children. England was close, they said, she could visit him. They were trying to get to Portugal and from there to any other country that would accept them; the exodus of Jews from Germany and Austria was escalating rapidly and it was ever harder to obtain visas.”

Although Rachel hopes her father and brother will agree that the family unit must remain intact, they’ve already begun making plans to leave the country without her. The idea that they’ll meet up later represents still more denial of what’s happening in Austria, so a parallel exists between Rachel refusing to ship Samuel to England and her father and brother insisting that they’ll all be able to visit each other. In both cases, these characters haven’t yet accepted that the Nazi party intends to keep them in Austria and then send them to concentration camps, and, if they can escape, they’ll likely be separated for a long time. The difficulty of acquiring visas exacerbates this issue, making it both less likely that the family will be able to leave and that they’ll be able to go to similar areas of the world.

“The Evanses became his family. They sent him to a Quaker boarding school, but he spent weekends and vacations with them. Conscious of his origins and eager to give him a background in religion, they enrolled him in classes at the local synagogue, but the effort lasted only a few months. Samuel felt he no longer belonged to that community, and religion in general did not interest him, despite the rabbi’s best efforts. He was not attracted to Christianity either, but the school was liberal in that respect and did not force him to convert. His reserved nature fit perfectly with the Quaker values of simplicity, peace, truth, tolerance, and the power of silence.”

Although the Evanses become Samuel’s family, he has lost a critical component of the family structure that he had in Austria: religion. While Samuel, like Rudolph, could have grown up without an inclination toward religion despite Rachel and Leah’s influence, it’s much more likely that Samuel would be invested in his heritage had he been able to maintain a direct connection to the family members that make such an investment worthwhile. In England, Samuel has no real motivation to embrace his roots because doing so won’t bring him closer to his family and friends there, nor does he have any motivation to abandon his heritage for new traditions, which leaves him in a kind of cultural limbo in which he’s neither himself nor someone else.

“There were no guerillas in El Mozote, only farmworkers from the village and surrounding areas who flocked there in search of safety when the soldier flooded in. But there was no safety to be had. That day, December 10, the soldiers of the Atlacatl Battalion arrived in the remote region by helicopter and occupied several villages in a matter of minutes; the objective was to terrorize the rural population to keep the people from supporting the insurgents. The following morning the soldiers began by separating the men to one side of the village and women to the other; the children were sent to the rectory, which they called ‘the convent.’”

This passage highlights the similarities of the tragedy at El Mozote to Kristallnacht in Vienna. In both cases, the goal of the aggressors was to terrorize the inhabitants; the Nazi group sought to frighten the Jewish members of the community into submission, while the Atlacatl Battalion sought to scare the impoverished villagers away from leftist ideologies. Additionally, in both cases, the aggressors were government-funded; in fact, the Atlacatl Battalion was funded by both the US and El Salvador, while the German officials led and partly composed the Kristallnacht rioters. This connection illustrates how policy and politics, not the individual feelings of the aggressors, often fuels oppression.

“The soldiers had orders to sow terror but since those poor farmers’ lives were of little value and no one was keeping count, they went overboard. ‘Why did they kill the children? Even the most savage beast in the jungle isn’t that brutal. And these crimes were committed by men just like the victims, people from the country, poor people,’ he said. In El Mozote, Leticia found no traces of her past. No record that her mother, brothers and sisters, or grandmother had ever existed.”

The use of “overboard” here implies the possible existence of a middle ground in which the Atlacatl Battalion could have scared the villagers without harming them. However, such a middle ground doesn’t exist, and the text draws attention to this phrasing as the perspective of a detached outsider. This perspective underpins the ways in which Leticia and her guide view El Mozote as a scene of terrible and cruel violence, while outsiders might simply see the attack as a type of accident in which the soldiers involved went further than was intended.

“He began to think it was a mistake to volunteer for extra responsibilities and another mistake to ask this woman out to lunch, but he was now locked into both decisions. He’s acted on impulse, spurred by his sexual attraction to Selena, hoping to show her he was a generous man of principles. Inviting her to lunch, he’d hoped would lay the groundwork for a more intimate encounter in the near future, when he returned from Brooklyn. I’m an idiot, he thought, more amused than annoyed. But after a few minutes of conversation his doubts faded.”

Frank’s initial perspective on Selena and the Magnolia Project exemplifies how many allies are converted to a cause. The appeal of the project was clout, essentially that Frank could brag about his philanthropic actions, while an ulterior motive was to sleep with Selena. The text later reveals that Selena is engaged, but Frank assumes, as many do, that as a woman Selena is available to claim or possess. Much of Frank’s interior thought focuses on judging and valuing Selena, much as one would value or weigh an object, and this objectification likely reflects the perspectives of many people dissociated from crises related to sex, race, and class, in which oppressed people are conflated with objects that may or may not be worth saving.

“The youth shelter that Selena drove Frank to was one of the best in the country. Group homes normally housed between one hundred and four hundred children, but this one had only ninety-two. The children were all assigned a number, because the staff was often unable to pronounce their names or remember them, but for Selena it was a point of pride to call each and every child by their name. ‘They’ve lost so much, it’s terrible to think they have to lose their identities too,’ she told Frank.”

The text describes the detention center where Anita is held as “one of the best.” However, this center referred to the children it held by numbers instead of names, which is typically associated with dehumanization, the process through which people are made to feel inhuman, or by which those in charge of others see the people in their care as less than human. Selena’s calling each child by name retains a sense of not only identity but humanity. A large part of Selena’s contribution to the Magnolia Project centers on human rights, and dehumanization, both in small settings like this center and in media and politics, is often a method of excusing human rights violations.

“Of course I remember when they took Mama away in shackles, but that’s what they always do to the people in the hielera. It’s just for a little while, then they take them off. It’s nothing to cry about, Claudia. I could hardly see anything, but I heard the officers and the sound of the chains and how Mama and the other women in the hielera with us started to shout and ask why the officers were treating them like that, that why were decent people, mothers with children, not narcos or criminals. But they wouldn’t listen to them.”

Anita’s conversation with Claudia uses language like this paragraph, in which something terrible is reversed by the insistence that Anita and Claudia not cry or feel too distressed. Crucially, Anita apparently understands that the officials who detained her and her mother are indifferent to what they’ve endured. Following up on the idea of dehumanization, these officials project a view of refugees as being less than human, so when the other parents yell that they’re good people and not criminals, it’s irrelevant to the official view that all refugees aren’t real people who deserve basic courtesy or respect. Anita endures the experience and keeps anguish at bay through rationalizations, such as only being shackled for a period of time.

“From one day to the next, ‘the feral one,’ as her siblings had dubbed her and as she even described herself half in jest, half seriously, transformed into another person. Back home in New Orleans, she had been a member of a large clan, a network of family and social connections that provided support and protection. She’d never had to think about money, because she’d always had it. She could get away with being irreverent and even rude, because the privileges of her class afforded her impunity. But upon marrying that poor musician in a foreign land, she was forced to face the difficult reality of the other immigrants who lived all around her.”

Despite Nadine’s wealthy upbringing, this passage shows how immigration is an equalizing experience in many ways. Even though Nadine is accustomed to certain lifestyle elements in New Orleans, such as comfort with her neighbors, a reputation in town, and a mastery of local culture, moving to London removes these comforts, leaving her isolated, at least initially, among people she doesn’t know. While this is only one aspect of the experiences of those immigrating across cultural and physical borders, Nadine illustrates how anyone can experience these challenges.

“And what about Gusano de Caca? That brat is the violent one. You know I’m not a crybaby, but I threw such a huge fit I could hardly breathe and if Miss Selena hadn’t shown up and fixed everything, I’d probably be dead by now. A lot of people drown in the water and die, but people can also drown from swallowing too much air. It took me a long time to calm down. If I’d have had a fit like that at Tita Edu’s, she would’ve stuck my head in a bucket of cold water and that would have been the end of it, that always worked.”

Anita notes that she’s blamed for Gusano’s offense. He attacked her, and because she defended herself, she’s being punished. This passage is a microcosm of the refugee crisis along the Southern US border, as the text observes how the US destabilized countries south of the border, and now the US legal system is punishing those who endured that destabilization. Likewise, Anita’s appeal to customary practices in El Salvador comments on both homesickness and the benefits of a diverse cultural background.

“The Duráns—Mamagrande, Dora, Cassandra, and Selena—reminded Frank of his own family, except for the fact that they were all women. They treated one another with the same brusque tenderness as the Angileris, the same unconditional loyalty, total trust, and zero sentimentality. The Duráns, although very different from the Angileri women, shared certain traits: They were strong, practical, direct, and hospitable, just like his mother and sisters. The Durán residence in Los Angeles even looked similar to his parents’ home in Brooklyn: small, crammed with furniture and cheap knickknacks, warm and inviting, filled with the smells of cooking and coffee.”

This passage again draws links across different cultures of people who have immigrated to the US. Although the US is more accepting of Italian culture, Frank realizes how his Italian American upbringing doesn’t significantly differ from Selena’s Mexican American upbringing. His thoughts allude to the strength of women as a key element of family, emphasizing the importance of femininity and family at the same time.

“‘She told me that it was normal, that Anita was fine and that they’d soon be together again, but I know she was just saying that to put my mind at ease,’ the grandmother explained. ‘Here we all know about how they separate families in the North, they show it on TV. Just yesterday, we saw a toddler no more than three hugging his father’s legs and crying, poor thing, and then they grabbed his arms and pulled him away. And we also saw about the kids that the coyotes abandon in the desert. Some of them are tiny!’”

Doña Eduvigis’s comments on the refugee crisis highlight how people in South and Central America know the dangers of migration. Her use of the collective “we” to express how everyone sees the tragedies unfolding on television underscores the desperation of those who undertake the trip North in light of their willingness to accept the enormous risks. However, Marisol’s assuring Doña Eduvigis that familial separation is “normal” points to an unhealthy acceptance of abuse: The people who migrate north expect and accept some violence and danger, just as many US citizens accept the abuses perpetuated along their Southern border.

“‘With good reason, Marisol feared for Anita,’ she commented. ‘That man is a bad seed, evil. Not surprising, since the apple never falls far from the tree. His father was a military officer during the dictatorship, infamous for his cruelty. He’s old and retired now, but everyone knows him for commanding the troops at the El Mozote massacre. They burned people alive there, even the children, can you imagine? That psychopath never had to pay for his crimes and Carlos Gómez won’t pay for his either, you can bet.’”

Lola creates a link between the El Mozote massacre and Anita’s detention as she reveals that Carlos, who shot Marisol and spurred her journey to the US, is the son of the commander who led the El Mozote massacre, which led to Leticia’s journey North. Crucially, Lola’s use of the term “evil” recalls Samuel’s comment to his mother, Rachel, about the Nazi party. In an earlier chapter, Samuel accepts that some Nazi party members might not be evil but asserts that most are, just as Lola asserts here that some members of the military and police are evil based on the widespread damage done by such groups.

“‘Migrants will pay coyotes up to ten thousand dollars and sometimes more to be taken illegally into the United States. Some are fairly trustworthy, but others will abandon them halfway there or extort them for more money. When they or their families can’t pay, many of them simply disappear. Marisol couldn’t afford the amount they were asking so she had to go alone.’ ‘She managed to cross Guatemala and Mexico without their help,’ Selena said. ‘Women face a lot of danger on the road—they can be raped, kidnapped, killed. No one investigates the crimes, as if these women were simply disposable. I warned my sister what it would be like.’”

Through Genaro, the text again emphasizes the dangers and costs associated with migration north to the US. Specifically, Genaro highlights how coyotes, or people that guide others north, are often another danger despite their role. Everyone involved in the refugee crisis may try to harm or extort those who make the journey, and Genaro particularly emphasizes the increased danger for women. This hierarchical structure in effect condemns citizens of Central or South American countries who try to immigrate and further condemns women.

“She was an exception, because she didn’t care about politics one way or the other; no matter who was in charge at the top, nothing would change for people like her, struggling to earn a living on the bottom. For much of her life, she’d managed to barely scrape by, washing dishes in cheap restaurants, taking care of children or the elderly, washing dogs, selling eggs and cheese door-to-door, and other, more grueling jobs.”

The intent of the El Mozote massacre was to dissuade the residents of a politically neutral village from leaning into leftist politics, which one might expect to backfire: In response to oppression on that scale, most people might expect survivors like Leticia and her father to gravitate more toward leftist ideologies and away from the right-wing ideology that led to the massacre. Instead, ironically, Leticia has removed herself from political affiliation altogether, resolving that poverty is a fact of life for many people. A further point of irony is that the reason for the lack of progressive change is a lack of invested voters.

“Mr. Bogart liked to have a little more formality at dinnertime, to keep from becoming savages, he joked. The British colonizers had adopted this custom when they traveled to the more remote corners of the empire, dressing in their finery to eat lentils and stewed tiger meat under a canvas tarp, served by native people in white gloves. Too often, however, that had not stopped them from behaving like savages.”

The comparison of Samuel’s desire for formal dinners and British imperialist notions of “going native,” a process through which colonists might become “savage” in response to long periods away from their home country, connects with his desire for company and his tenuous position regarding privilege. While he’s no longer the target of radical violence, as he was as a child, he can help or harm modern marginalized communities like Leticia’s. The fact that Leticia cooks and serves the meals, while also participating in them, subverts the idea of subjugation to allow Leticia both a physical and metaphorical “seat at the table.”

“At the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, during an exhibition on migrants. The artist had hung plastic bags from the ceiling filled with things they’d fished out of the river, left behind by people, including children, who’d crossed it to reach the shores of the United States. Many of them had drowned in the process. Nadine was very moved by a baby shoe floating in some dirty water inside a bag. We started talking […] That must’ve been at least a year before she hired me to the work on her house.”

The artist’s piece is fascinating on its own, incorporating artifacts from real tragedy to spread awareness of it. However, of greater importance is that Nadine likely attended many such exhibitions, and she seems to have had a legitimate interest in aiding those seeking asylum in the US. The beginning of her affair with Cruz Torres is thus grounded in a mutual desire to provide aid to those who migrate to the Southern US border. Critically, Nadine didn’t begin her relationship with Torres as the rugged construction worker but as a fellow activist and ally.

“But we can never go invisible if Mr. Rick or one of those bigger boys or any man tries to touch us down there, like Carlos did that one time. No one can touch us. Tita Edu taught me that. If anyone touches me, I have to scream as aloud as I can. You too, Claudia. Do you promise me? Mr. Rick doesn’t have any business anywhere near my bed. I stay awake as long as I can to watch out, because my guardian angel needs help with that. If I see Mr. Rick or any of those big boys near my bed, I’m going to scream and scream. You have to do the same thing. It’s not true that if we scream or we tell someone what happens they’ll kick us out.”

Anita seems to have an advanced understanding of sexual assault in this passage, which becomes relevant because Mr. Rick does attempt to assault her. Two elements stand out here: Anita is realistic about her inability to be invisible in a situation of threatened assault, yet she reassures herself that she won’t be punished for defending herself. Generally, Anita tries to avoid notice because this is the best way to avoid abuse of any kind, but she understands that she can’t stay silent during abuse because doing so would allow the perpetrator to escape blame. Likewise, she knows that she shouldn’t complain because she must maintain a good relationship with her foster parents and siblings, so she needs to convince herself that she won’t be punished, such as being locked in the closet at Maria’s home, if she alerts others to an assault.

“He spent the next ten minutes persuading Leticia that they had a duty to help that little girl, who had already experienced too much suffering in her short life. Whether she was a relative or not, it didn’t matter. Fate had presented them with the opportunity to do something for her and it would be unforgivable to sit comfortably by without doing anything.”

This passage is, in effect, a call to action in Allende’s rhetoric. Many people are in a similar position, where they could help with this crisis, though it might be inconvenient. For Samuel, his past reliance on the kindness of strangers, like Volker, Steiner, and the Evans family, has instilled a sense of needing to help others like Anita. Interestingly, though, Samuel specifically opposed Nadine’s efforts to help those around them by letting them stay in the house, but Anita’s youth and struggle likely resonate specifically with Samuel.

“For Samuel, that painful pilgrimage was inevitable. His roots had been amputated the moment he’d set foot on the Kindertransport train. He had lost his parents and grandparents without any proper goodbye or logical explanation. He had grown up waiting. Nostalgia and anguish were the most overarching emotions of those years. He lived a fragmented childhood, divided between the harsh present that he wished to escape and the nebulous fantasy of a family and home, which nourished his ever-fading memories of a mythic past.”

Although the text usually presents Samuel as ignoring or suppressing his past, this passage explains how he resolved that trauma, in part, for himself. Clearly, he didn’t speak with his daughter or grandson about his time in Vienna, but his trip to the Holocaust Museum every day for a period shows how that trauma remained with him internally and is likely responsible for much of his despair and anguish over the years. His going to the museum parallels Leticia’s returning to El Salvador, and both hint at Anita’s eventually returning to El Salvador.

“The atrocity shook the country, despite the fact that gender violence was so commonplace that it was no longer newsworthy. The press published regular updates of the body count. They had to isolate Carlos Gómez and his associates in prison to keep the other inmates from massacring them. The president promised that justice would be served, and announced the creation of a special unit dedicated to crimes against women and children.”

The creation of a unit for crimes against women and children runs counter to the assertion that gendered violence and crimes against children are commonplace in El Salvador. Although Carlos’s crimes are extreme and affect many families, Doña Eduvigis’s comments make it clear that multiple people across multiple families have perpetuated such crimes for decades. The sudden desire to resolve these issues is clearly a matter of public relations, or placating the public, which justifies Doña Eduvigis’s desire to protest violence against women. The novel itself expands this criticism of society to multiple countries given that crimes against women are prevalent around the globe.

“I pray that my granddaughter will see her mother again, but I also pray that she will be able to stay with her aunt in the North if Marisol has been killed. What do I have to offer her here? My love, that’s all. I can’t protect her from the violence all around us or provide her with a decent education. I can’t afford her eye surgery. And I’m not as young as I used to be; this tragedy has aged me. What would become of my granddaughter if she had to come back here?”

Just as Samuel doesn’t want to lose his connection with Anita, Doña Eduvigis wants Anita to have a better life in California than she could offer in El Salvador. However, neither of them wants to wish for Marisol’s death, even though they know it would ultimately benefit Anita. This passage points to the difficulties in the immigration policies of the time, in which people need to endure horrible losses in order to gain even basic entry to the US.