Plants and Babies

In The Plum Plum Pickers one of the recurring themes seems to be the association of children with plants.  On page 63, Lupe is looking at one of her avocado plants, thinking, “Like herself.  Another child.  A child of the Earth.  An Earthling.  This treelet would ever reach maturity.  She knew that.  She’d lost too many others.  It would never bear fruit.”  And on page 64, “so much like small children, those little plants.”  Lupe has a very strong concept of how much her family’s livelihood relies on the crops, and I think that fuels her association.  There is also the aspect of a person living off the Earth.  It seems unnatural to her on some level that you can pick fruit for a living and still struggle to feed your family.  This is emphasized by the fact that she cannot sustain her own plants enough to grow food.

Avocados in particular are important to Lupe.  They are something she associates with her home in Mexico and the greater fertility she knew there.  She even describes a pregnant woman as being like an avocado.

There is even a later, less direct reference to this mindset.  In a later scene, on page 97, she has lost her children, and fears that they’ve been run over by a tractor.  Out of the context of the rest of the novel, it wouldn’t seem like much, but there’s something to be said for the fact that she is digging in the dirt for her children, like they returned to the ground they sprouted from.