Last of the Menu Girls

In her semi-autobiographical collection of inter-related stories, The Last of the Menu Girls (1986), Chicana author Denise Chavez explores her own adolescent and young adult years in New Mexico through the story of the fictional protagonist, Rocio Esquibel. The term "menu girl" refers to a worker at a hospital who takes patients' food orders.

In the first story, "Willow Game," Chavez describes Rocio's neighborhood in Las Cruces, the second-largest city in New Mexico. Rocio and the other neighborhood kids divide their street into two sections: "up" and "down." The dividing line is a tree growing in a vacant lot. Rocio lives on the "down" part of the street. Despite the fact that the other kids prefer the "up" section, Rocio likes to stay in her own "down" section surrounded by neighbors and family members with whom she is more familiar. Her favorite spot is the willow tree in her yard, around which her friends gather to play and families take photos of themselves. As Rocio and other neighborhood kids grow up, the apricot tree and willow tree remain for some time. One day, however, a teenage boy named Billy kills the Esquibel's willow tree; Rocio witnesses the incident, causing her a measure of trauma.

In "The Closet," Rocio and her sister, Mercy explore their mother, Nieves's closet while they are supposed to be taking a nap. There are many treasures in the closet, including a sliding picture of Jesus that features alternate depictions of him as a man and as a shadow wearing a shroud. There are also a number of shoes Nieves wears when she goes to work as a teacher. The greatest treasure, however, is a photograph taken on the day of Nieves's wedding to her first husband, Juan Luz Contreras. Juan is the father of Rocio's half-sister, Ronelia who is grown and out of the house. Three days after her birth, Juan died from drinking acid. While some attribute it to a mistake or even an intentional act by the local druggist, others wonder if Juan committed suicide. Rocio comes to believe she was born in this closet.



"Evening in Paris," takes place in 1960, around Christmas when Rocio is 12-years-old. She has three dollars to spend on a Christmas present for her mother. At Woolworth's, she decides to buy her mother a perfume set called Evening in Paris. On the way out of the store, Rocio stops to look at herself in the mirror at the makeup counter. She doesn't like the look of her face and wishes she was beautiful and rich enough to routinely spend her own evenings in Paris. At home, most of the presents are gifts to Nieves from her students. The best of these gifts will be carefully rewrapped as gifts for Rocio and Mercy's teachers next year. The smells of roast chicken and empanadas remind Nieves of her youth. Later, the perspective shifts in time as an adult Rocio visits Paris and is reminded of the Evening in Paris perfume which her mother ignored.

In "Shooting Stars," Rocio visits her grandmother, aunt, and cousins in Texas over the summer. There, she meets a distant relation, Eloisa, a pretty and fashionable 16-year-old girl. Rocio idolizes Eloisa's beauty and perceived purity while envying her freedom. Rocio's idolatry of Eloisa is shattered, however, when she sees her at the movies, smoking cigarettes and laughing as boys paw at her. When Rocio returns to New Mexico, she meets a "purer" version of Eloisa in Diana who is just as beautiful as Eloisa but is still a virgin. Some boys mock her because of her speech impediment.

The title story, "The Last of the Menu Girls," concerns a job Rocio takes as a teenager at a hospital taking food orders from patients. Rocio is a bit mystified at her own decision to work at a hospital. She recalls the terrible experience of watching her Great Aunt Eutillo die. In addition to the horrible odors associated with her death, Rocio was disturbed by her aunt's increasing dementia. She is particularly haunted by a memory of Eutillo playing an imaginary piano. Despite her negative associations with the elderly and dying, she forces herself to work at a hospital, achieving a great deal of emotional growth through the experience. As time goes on, her duties expand to helping nurses with their ward duties. She also finds herself unwittingly forging emotional connections with many of the patients, increasing her capacity for empathy in the process.



Rocio leaves home to study drama in college in "Space is a Solid.” While at school, she works in the theater department teaching an acting class for children and maintaining the costume room. In the class, Rocio has the children do exercises like pretending to be molecules or attempting to slice through the air with their bodies as if space is solid. Meanwhile, Rocio is in a romantic relationship with a graduate student but feels unfulfilled by it. She suffers a mysterious debilitating illness that she later suspects was psychosomatic in nature. Nevertheless, it causes her to take a two-week leave of absence from her work and studies.

In the final story, "Compadre," Rocio moves back home to New Mexico after completing college. She feels stagnant at home with her mother and sister and decides she wants to be a writer. Nieves counsels her to write about the places and people she knows in order to forge a unique identity. Rocio realizes that while her mother is right, she needs to leave the places and people she knows in order to write about them more effectively.

The Last of the Menu Girls is an emotional and evocative look at one girl's Chicana upbringing in the mid-20th century.