Character Analysis
Estevan and Esperanza are Guatemalan refugees, and together they stand as the book's clearest representations of the violence and injustice suffered by Central American citizens throughout the 1980s.
Estevan worked as an English teacher in Guatemala City, and was a member of an underground teacher's union. Esperanza, though not a teacher herself, also had a brother and other close friends in the union. As Taylor eventually learns, Esperanza's brother and friends were killed one night in a police raid on union members. That same night, Estevan and Esperanza's infant daughter Ismene was abducted. No, not the most uplifting of stories.
Life in Tucson, and Life Left Behind
Taylor meets Estevan and Esperanza in March, roughly two months after she arrives in Tucson. By this point, Taylor is beginning to understand more about the "sanctuary" that Mattie runs for Central American refugees. She still doesn't understand the whole political situation very well, but, through her budding friendship with Estevan, she begins to learn.
In the spring, Esperanza attempts to commit suicide. While Mattie rushes her to "a clinic in South Tucson where you didn't have to show papers" (9.3), Estevan and Taylor wait together. While they wait, Estevan tells Taylor about their lives in Guatemala: the teacher's union, the raid, the abduction of their Ismene…pretty much everything. When Taylor doesn't understand why the police would abduct their daughter, Estevan explains:
"Esperanza and I knew the names of twenty other union members [...]. Three members had just been killed, including Esperanza's brother, but seventeen were still alive. She and I knew every one of those seventeen, by name. Can you understand that this made us more useful alive than dead? For us to go after Ismene is what they wanted." (9.49-51)
Estevan and Esperanza's decision to flee Guatemala, leaving Ismene behind rather than give themselves up, is a decision that, as you may guess, causes some deep lingering pain to them both. As readers, we can ask ourselves whether their individual ways of handling that pain are convincing, or whether The Bean Trees leans a little too heavily on stereotypical gender roles.
Firm Father, Mourning Mother, Stern Stereotypes
Why is it that Estevan seems able to cope with their tragedy, whereas Esperanza attempts suicide repeatedly?
Throughout The Bean Trees, Estevan and Esperanza are differentiated by their physical appearances and their respective abilities to speak. Whereas Estevan speaks beautiful English, Esperanza barely speaks at all. This means that Esperanza remains a mute, beautiful woman throughout much of the novel—a silent, tiny figure whom Taylor thinks of as having been "shrunk," "[e]xactly like a wool sweater washed in hot" (7.20). Um, flattering.
By comparison, Estevan is an articulate, active character whose similarly small size gives Taylor the impression that he is "compact and springy, as though he might have steel bars inside where most people had flab and sawdust" (7.20).
Just let that sink in for a minute, Shmoopers: Esperanza is like a shrunken wool sweater; Estevan is like steel. What does this suggest about their respective levels of strength, determination, and agency? And while we're at it, what should we take away about Taylor's attitude to these vertically impaired immigrants since she connects them both to inanimate objects?
It goes on. Taylor's characterization of Esperanza also gives us reason to ask: in a novel that seems to be about women's strength and agency, why are all of the strongest women characters white? Why are Indigenous women—women like Esperanza and Turtle's nameless aunt—the weakest and most helpless women in the story? Why are their clearest and most significant acts of agency the moments when they give their children away?
Let the debates begin. And along those lines…
Interrogating Indigenous Identities
During their final days together, as Taylor drives Estevan and Esperanza to their new safe-house in Oklahoma, Taylor learns for the first time that her Guatemalan friends are Mayans. As Taylor makes conversation, she asks Estevan, "Do you miss your home a lot?" (14.26). In response, he tells her:
"I don't even know anymore which home I miss. Which level of home. In Guatemala City I missed the mountains. My own language is not Spanish, did you know that?" (14.27)
When Taylor tells him she didn't, he explains: "We are Mayan people; we speak twenty-two different Mayan languages. Esperanza and I speak to each other in Spanish because we come from different parts of the highlands" (14.29).
Taylor finds this fascinating. For her, the thought of so many languages accumulating "in a family, in a country like that" adds to her vision of Guatemala as a "storybook place," with "jungles full of long-tailed birds," and "women wearing rainbow-threaded dresses" (14.49). Yes, the ignorant and mildly racist trend continues.
But don't worry, Estevan soon corrects this romantic vision of the country. Taylor adds, showing us that she's learned a thing or two:
"But of course there was more to the picture. Police everywhere, always. Whole villages of Indians forced to move again and again. As soon as they planted their crops, Estevan said, the police would come and set their houses and fields on fire and make them move again. The strategy was to wear them down so they'd be too tired or too hungry to fight back." (14.50)
Although The Bean Trees doesn't devote a lot of attention to Estevan and Esperanza's identities and experience as Mayan people, the novel does draw strong connections between the Guatemalan and American governments' respective treatment of Indigenous peoples.
As characters who are only partially developed, problematic as that may be, Estevan and Esperanza make useful representatives of Central American Indigeneity so that the novel can make these connections clearer. It may be glossing over some stuff, but hey, if you're more aware of those oppressions than you were when you picked up the book, it at least did something to make you question those stereotypes. At least, that's what Ms. Kingsolver would likely hope of her readers.