64 pages • 2 hours read
Kirstin Valdez QuadeThe Five Wounds
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Five Wounds
Content Warning: The source text and this section of the guide discuss substance addiction.
Initially, this novel appears to be a meditation on faith and redemption, and the “five wounds” of the title seem to have great religious significance. However, the narrative’s relationship with religion is uneasy, and Valdez Quade has been vocal about her Catholicism’s role in the often-violent colonization of the region’s indigenous populations. Ultimately, Amadeo comes to find redemption through acts rather than faith, and his journey of self-discovery and growth is much more about embracing his family than embracing the church. The “five wounds” thus symbolize sacrifice and growth, but it is a sacrifice born out of forgoing individual desire in favor of doing right by one’s family.
During the weeks leading up to the procession and during the Passion Play itself, Amadeo is consumed by how he will appear to Tío Tíve and the rest of the attendees of the ceremony. He wants desperately to be seen as worthy of the role of Jesus, and he asks to be nailed to the cross rather than tied to it so that everyone will see the depth of his commitment. And yet, his desire is for recognition, not to truly know God. As a result, he does not find redemption after the procession. If anything, he is disappointed by how quickly his life returns to normal.
Amadeo finds redemption, instead, by embracing his role as father and grandfather. It is not until he fully sees Angel for who she is that he is able to locate his sense of familial duty and responsibility. At one point, when he has begun to play a greater role in his daughter’s life, he is struck by her “intensity of being” and by how fully she “inhabits her own life” (228). He does not ever recall feeling as though he fully inhabited his own life. Amadeo’s redemptive journey is therefore, at least in part, a desire to both emulate the self-possession of his daughter and to show her the care and respect that she deserves but has never received from him and only in bits and pieces from her mother. Amadeo is fully redeemed only at the end of the novel, when he has a job, is sober, and cares more about his family than he does about how others perceive him.
The Windshield Wiper Kit
Amadeo’s windshield repair kit is a symbol of his own immaturity and disconnect from reality, representing his faulty efforts along his redemptive journey. Amadeo is jobless at the beginning of the narrative and has never been steadily employed. He still lives with his mother Yolanda, and it is Yolanda who gave him the money it cost to purchase the kit. While it seems obvious to those around him that Amadeo could just get a real job (Lowe’s is hiring), he prefers the excitement (and unreality) of a series of ill-planned and ultimately doomed “business” ventures that, in his mind, will allow him to be his own boss and “get rich” quickly. It is Angel who points out that there might not actually be a need for windshield repair in their immediate vicinity. Because of her comment, Amadeo realizes that he hadn’t actually stopped to consider whether or not people would pay for his service. Rather than considering the reality of the job, Amadeo had been self-congratulatorily thinking about all of the money he would make and how grateful his customers would be for the service.
In the end, Amadeo does put legitimate effort into the business. He and Angel drive around, pass out flyers, and he even tries to repair Yolanda’s boss’s BMW. That he fails at the business becomes not so much an indicator of where he is in life, but of the journey that he has undertaken toward responsibility and stability. Amadeo is trying, however poorly, to repair the chinks and cracks in his perspective; to do so, though, he needs to apply more than another quick fix. When the business fails, Amadeo does indeed get a “real job” at Lowe’s, and the work brings him happiness in his newfound ability to provide for his daughter and grandson. In this way, the windshield repair kit’s meaning shifts along with Amadeo’s identity, becoming emblematic of his journey toward growth and redemption.
Heroin
Heroin, often referred to in the novel by its street slang name “chiva,” is a pervasive presence within the narrative that speaks to the theme of Generational Trauma and Healing. It is both a painful fact of life for the Padilla family and a major part of the cultural backdrop against which the characters, both those in Amadeo’s and Angel’s generations, come of age. The opioid epidemic is both a source and result of generational trauma in northern New Mexico; Española, with the state’s highest rates of use and overdose, is the epicenter of the crisis in the state. Amadeo’s father and uncle both struggled with addiction, and Lizette and her family also succumb to the influence of “chiva.” Opioids are a powerful drug often used by individuals struggling with poverty, violence, and family trauma as a coping mechanism, a way to self-medicate. That is certainly the case for the characters in this story, and in shining a spotlight on the crisis in northern New Mexico, Valdez Quade takes care to humanize addiction for her readers.
One of the major barriers to treatment for many is the stigma attached to opioid addiction. In recent years, new culturally responsive measures to fight the epidemic, especially those enacted by local residents who are in recovery, aim to remove that stigma. In depicting characters who turn to heroin out of deep-seated inner pain, Valdez Quade encourages her readers to see those struggling with addiction as complex, multifaceted humans worthy of not only sympathy but also respect. Lizette’s character is complicated and not always entirely likeable, but those characteristics are deeply mired in the pain of generational trauma. Her narrative arc can be understood in this framework: Lizette turns to heroin out of a sense of unresolved anguish and hopelessness. Angel models an empathetic response to addiction by refraining from judgement, even though her last interaction with Lizette was by no means healthy or positive. Tío Tíve also models empathy, providing love and support without judgement to his family members in spite of their struggles with addiction.
