Throughout all Tomás Rivera’s short works, there is a common unifying theme of the “suffering and the strength and the beauty . . . [of] the migrant worker[s]” that he best knew. Sometimes realistic and grim, other times charming and uplifting, Rivera’s writings look at the difficult or beautiful aspects of migrant worker’s family lives that we might not notice. One of the best examples can be found in The Night Before Christmas, which follows Doña María struggling to buy Christmas gifts for her children. One of the greatest ways Rivera gets us to relate to Doña María is actually by his lack of physical characterization. All the readers know is that she is a mother who wants to use the little money they have to buy gifts for her children. We know nothing of what she looks like, but we know everything about her fear of the world and how she wants to overcome it for her love of her children. Any reader can relate to that motherly love regardless of their demographic. We understand what she feels when the children ask, “But why doesn’t Santa Claus bring us anything?” and the determination she has when she tells her husband she’ll venture downtown herself. We sense the poverty they live in as well the motherly instinct she still has throughout their hardships.
The next device Rivera uses is the plot, the sequence of events that play out for Doña María and how they are laid out for the reader. We start in a comfortable environment for Doña María where we are focused on her and her desire to buy gifts for her children. The next scenes build in a climactic way as we learn that she never leaves the house and gets anxiety outside of it. As someone with a Mexican migrant mother, I have seen this with family members and understand the anxiety they get in a new country with bigger things moving all around them. But even any other reader can understand this fear that this woman has when she ventures out in a whole new world where she knows nothing of how it works. And the way the events play out, the readers dread what happens next as things get worse until she’s arrested. In the final scene, we are shifted to the children who do not fully understand what has happened but instinctively know something. It is a great plot that goes from a mother to her children and shows an inner aspect to a migrant family’s struggle and how they grow from it.
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