The People of Paper

The opening section of The People of Paper begins with an allegorical Prologue detailing the creation of the paper woman, Merced de Papel, and then turns to the numbered chapters. In this opening section, Plascencia immediately signals that his project will disrupt readerly expectations in many ways, as well as commenting on Cultural Identity and the Immigrant Experience.

Magical Realism and the Blurring of Fiction and Reality figures thematically throughout the novel, beginning with the Prologue. Magical realism creates fantastical events and descriptions and places them into otherwise realistic details. Antonio’s training as an origami surgeon is one such example: “After five years of medical school and lab experiments with series of radial pleats and reversed folds, Antonio became the first origami surgeon” (12). Plascencia writes that the origami organs perform well in real people, as reported in medical journals. The details of medical practices laced with the creation of folded paper organs blurs the boundary between reality and fiction. Likewise, Plascencia blurs fiction and reality in Chapter 3 with the invention of an alternate, magically real biography for real-life American film star Rita Hayworth.

Chapter 1 introduces another formal innovation in Plascencia’s use of experimental typography and visual elements. Rather than arranging the text in typical paragraph form, Plascencia spreads the story across the open book in three columns. Saturn’s narration occupies the far-left column, visually placing him in the position of most power on the page since the text is read from left to right. Additionally, the use of omniscient third-person narration for Saturn’s sections underscores his power as a storyteller. Little Merced’s position in the middle column, on the other hand, visually suggests her middle position between her father and Saturn and between her father and their new home.

Another textual disruption appears on Page 23. The third column bears the label “Baby Nostradamus,” but the entire column is nothing but a large black rectangle, obscuring any additions to the story the Baby Nostradamus might have added with his narration. His mother predicts, “The universe whirls around in his head, and one day he will be able to tell us about it” (23). While his mother attempts to explain the absence of narration, the absence itself violates reader expectations. The visual fragmentation, proliferation, displacement, and literal obscuring of narrations also underscores a thematic concern with The Ethics of Authorship and Narrative Control. In the case of Baby Nostradamus, Plascencia the author controls his narration, preventing him from giving away details of the future.

While love and heartbreak are familiar themes in fiction, Plascencia disrupts expectations with his thematic emphasis on The Responses to Loss and Sadness. For Federico de la Fe, the “cure” for sadness becomes an addiction to self-harm: He burns himself nightly with fire. That he hides this practice from Little Merced suggests that he is ashamed, but the practice is so effective at alleviating his pain that he continues it throughout the rest of the novel. Other characters also self-medicate their sadness through addiction and self-harm. For example, Little Merced describes the Glue Sniffers, an Indigenous tribe, thusly: “When the world was poor and starving they became sad and stopped pounding and stitching leather and sniffed glue instead” (29). The comment suggests that the pain of poverty is so great that the only response possible is to escape the pain through addiction.

In the very first sentence of the Prologue, Plascencia subverts traditional readings of the biblical creation story of Adam and Eve: Referring to the creation of Merced de Papel, the paper woman, the narrator says, “She was made after the time of ribs and mud” (11), alluding to the story from the Book of Genesis in which Eve is created from one of Adam’s ribs. The linkage of these two stories points not only to God as the creator but also to “creators who bring life from the dead” (12), such as Antonio. There is also an allusion to Victor Frankenstein from Mary Shelley’s novel, who creates a monster out of dead human flesh. In addition, as creation stories proliferate throughout The People of Paper, they also spill out into reality, demonstrating that Plascencia himself brings life to his characters from nonliving paper and ink.

Cultural Identity and the Immigrant Experience also play an important role in the opening chapters of the novel. Plascencia uses many untranslated Spanish terms in the novel, highlighting the multilingual nature of the borderlands. The narrator describes El Monte in terms of its geographical distance from and cultural closeness to Mexico:

El Monte was one thousand four hundred forty-eight miles north of Las Tortugas and an even fifteen hundred miles from the city of Guadalajara, and while there were no cockfights or wrestling arenas, the curanderos’ botanica shops, the menudo stands, and the bell towers of the Catholic churches had also pushed north, settling among the flowers and sprinkler systems (34).

Plascencia neither translates nor italicizes the Spanish words here, emphasizing that Spanish is as at home in the borderlands as English. As Latinx immigrants make their way to California, they bring the artifacts of their culture with them, and the result is that some of Guadalajara—its food, its religion, and its memories and stories—takes root in Southern California (a region that, it’s worth remembering, was part of Mexico before it became part of the United States). Plascencia’s description of the immigrant experience in these early chapters largely focuses on Little Merced rather than on El Monte in general. She stands in for all Latinx children who make their way north. She endures the racism of her classmates when they laugh at her for thinking a typewriter case is a lunch pail. She also suffers from the insensitivity of her teacher when she contracts lice and must endure the difficult treatment. Little Merced’s experience highlights the absurdity and frequent cruelty of the artificial divisions that characterize life in the borderlands.