Chapter 11 Tim Z. Hernandez’s Mañana Means Heaven: Love on the Road and the Challenge of Multicultural Hospitality1
In: The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality in U.S. Literature and CultureSearch for other papers by Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger in
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Abstract
Tim Z. Hernandez’s Mañana Means Heaven is a critical rewriting of a biographical episode in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road featuring the relationship between Sal Paradise and a Mexican girl, Terry. Based on documentary research and on his interviews with Bea Franco after Hernandez tracked her down alive in Fresno in 2010, the novel appeals to truth by referring to real people, places, and facts occurring during the two weeks that Bea Franco spent with Kerouac “on the road” in Los Angeles, and in the agricultural towns of Bakersfield and Selma in the San Joaquín Valley. The story also deals with Franco’s trip to Denver in which she tried to locate Jack some months after his departure. Both as a counternarrative of Kerouac’s version of the story, as a road narrative (Brigham), and as a counter romance narrative (Illouz 1997, 1998, 2012), Mañana Means Heaven focuses on the difficulties of incorporating and relating to difference and contrasts with the ideal of an inclusive, heterogeneous America embodied by the experience of Sal Paradise in Kerouac’s novel. The novel is built on both the silence of the literary character of Terry and on the historical silence of Bea Franco who, as Hernandez reveals in a closing narrative frame, denied ever having met or ever welcomed or hosted Kerouac in her hometown. Led by the imperative to respect Franco’s memory and that “memory belongs to the rememberer,” Hernandez negotiates extensive research, documentary evidence, and the writers’ interpretation to construct Franco’s hypothetical memory of that episode and reveal the ensuing emotional dilemmas and development of a young migrant woman of Mexican origin. Told from the perspective of Bea Franco, the story reveals the gender, class, and cultural conditions that restrict the protagonist’s access to the masculine realm of relative freedom and privilege of Sal Paradise/Jack Kerouac, as well as the gender norms and social prejudices that make it difficult for Jack to be hosted as a migrant worker. Drawing on Ann Brigham’s considerations on the road narrative as a genre where the self seeks to reinvent himself through mobility by engaging with other places, regions, and identity, I will approach the road as a “contact zone” (Pratt) where one’s status of guest, host, or stranger is related to one’s position or one’s understanding of self in relation to place, identity, and culture. The understanding of the road and mobility itself also play a role in the understanding of hospitality, as they may be associated to the transgression and overcoming of boundaries, or to the presence of boundaries and the difficulty of incorporation. In the corresponding episode in Kerouac’s work, hospitality is at the expense of the misrepresentation of the other and serves the reinvention of the male character (Brigham, 61). Contrarily, in Hernandez’s work, class, racial, and gender boundaries challenge narratives of love, geographical imaginaries, and myths of social mobility, and draw attention to the difficulties of hosting and welcoming the Other. Given the social and gender rift between Jack and Bea that Mañana Means Heaven illustrates, Franco’s silence may be read as the “emotional residue” of the crude, painful fact that theirs is a story of failed hospitality.