"I always felt her gray eye on me. It made me feel, in a strange way, safe and guarded and not alone. Like God was supposed to make you feel"

In Helena Maria Viramontes' "The Moths," the 14 year old female narrator finds peace and love with her Abuelita. Having been raised in a catholic home by a father who enforced the gender roles and oppressive morals of the religion, she viewed catholicism with sad and cold eyes. When she visits the chapel by Jay's Market, she feels alone and cold, preluding to how dispirited she became with catholicism. Because she finds "God" in her Abuelita--the true benevolent and cultivating figure of the story--the catholic culture that she knows and learned as child dissolves into an idea of oppression, fear, and solitude. Her father's dissapointment in her upbringing and her mother frustration with her lack of assimilation show us how her only real place for growth was with her grandma. She finds what "God was supposed to make you feel" in her grandma, and, ultimately, shows us that a young woman's individuaity prospers when she feels "safe and guarded," and able to be herself.

Juan Contreras