ABSTRACT

Chavez's character Soveida is a waitress who is focused on explaining and celebrating service as part of a fulfilled life, a fairly typical expectation for women. Mora's text is also interested in service, serving the family and the continuation of culture through the mainly female symbols of gardening, cooking, and nurturing. On one level an author's use of the family tree is self-evident to visually represent and explain a family's genealogy and lineage, one person's relationship to another without having to resort to a biblical level of exegesis in their prose. Depending on the genre, fiction, or nonfiction, it can also suggest adherence to historical tradition and meanings. Chavez's Face of an Angel is identified as a novel on the cover, yet it includes a similar family tree after the title page. The unsuspecting reader might make the same assumptions as with Mora's text: the narrative to follow will be historical, biographical, or autobiographical in nature.