Where It All Goes Down
Central California
This story takes place in the middle of California. But honestly, we don't hear much about California. Or the town where Manny and his family live. We know it has a couple of schools, rich-looking houses, and low-income housing projects. And that's about it.
But there is one place that we hear a lot about: the Hernandez home. But even though Manny spends a lot of his time at home, we don't get a ton of description of this place—we probably hear more about how much Mom cleans the house and Dad complains about it being dirty than anything else. But we do know that most of the drama in the book goes down inside these walls, and that makes it an important location for our main man.
There are really two sides to this setting. On the one hand, it's a place where we have lots of fighting, including multiple gunshot incidents. This is also where Magda gets super sick, and where Dad throws lots of fits. So yeah, the Hernandez home can be a super depressing setting.
But on the other hand, this place is also comforting. So when Manny comes home after deciding to leave the gang and sees his sisters lying on the couch together, he has some pretty intense emotions:
And it wasn't just them but the whole room: the squiggly TV, the lumpy cherub angels on the frame of the painting, the glass-top coffee table, my mother's animals, gleaming in the sunlight. This room was what my mother spent so much energy cleaning and keeping together, and what my father spent so much energy tearing apart. And it was wondrous, like a place I was meant to be. (11.92)
Manny tells it like it is, and he knows that his house isn't perfect—after all, it's a place with some major tension between his parents. But he also says it's a "wondrous" place where he "was meant to be." It may be flawed, then, but it's still where Manny feels he belongs.