Analytical Analysis Of Magdalena's Relationships

Magdalena begins and ends with the perspective of Juana, daughter of the title character and her American lover (a POW in Vietnam), who is herself pregnant and curious about her family history. Letters, diaries, and narratives from numerous characters help Juana reconstruct her maternal and, to a lesser extent, paternal lineage.

Stories of the women in Magdalena's family are woven together to demonstrate the dependency of the present on the events of the past. Magdalena's grandfather, a Filipino nationalist who fought the American military after the Spanish-American War, writes in his journal, "There must be two Americas, one that sets the captive free and one that takes a once-captive's new freedom away from him and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on, then kills him to get his land." Such interactions with the United States, and similar earlier experiences with Spain, emphasize the importance of power to some characters, who reject love matches for marriages with financial and social advantages. The broken romances of Magdalena's mother and grandmothers affect their treatment of their daughters, just as the entwined histories of the United States and the Philippines throw into relief the American involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s setting of the novel.
One of his remaining letters explains the patriotic impulses that led him to enlist but also records his disillusionment with the American war in Vietnam. Spenser's early idealism is juxtaposed with descriptions such as that of a U.S. colonel who gives a speech at a newly opened child-care center for prostitutes' children, many of whom are half-American, and begins to see Filipinos as more than "hearts and minds" to be won in support of the effort to spread American democracy in