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elate to the past She takes it upon herself, with all her technological wares, to
investigate and construct that past and the memory she is lacking. The way in
which Muñoz weaves technology into the fabric of this novel, both as a thematic
element and a narrative device, provides the reader with a very special way of
“seeing” Gina’s identity conundrum.
Photography and Video
In her California home, Gina Domingo has many technological devices at
her disposal. There is hardly a page in the book without an allusion to a medium
of recording life, be it a video camera, a computer, or something as simple as a
tape recorder. In the very first page of the novel the narrator mentions “some
fading photographs” (3) of Gina’s parents when they were young, alluding to the
scarce evidence of a past that Gina needs to reconstruct. We see an immediate
contrast between parents and child: “But her parents don’t take photos anymore;
they haven’t in a long time. Now they own a video camera which is solely Gina’s
responsibility. It has also been the girl’s job (her folks don’t have the time) to put
all the pictures into albums. These yellowing images are helpful. As primitive as
they seem to Gina, they fill in some of the gaps” (4). The first chapter, which is
titled “The Truth,” portrays Gina’s obsessive recording and collecting of images
as her quest for the truth about her family’s past life. This obsession is also
linked to her search for authenticity, which in this novel, is often pitted against
what is fake and inauthentic. Paradoxically, Gina loves the artificial world of
malls, gadgets, and films. Since she sees these as part of her world, the world in
which she grew up, she does not view the artificial elements of modern life as
“fake,” and there is no contradiction for her. She sees the technological media at
her disposal as a means by which she can more effectively capture reality. At
one point early in the book, she compares the scratchy voices heard in an
antiquated tape recorder to the efficacy of a video camera: “Family
conversations. In the old days, her parents’ youth, one had to use a tape
recorder. Sound but no image. Nothing to grab onto but empty, scratchy voices.
Boring. Better to be a child of the Nineties (or the Eighties, which were fab). In
this era you can get a much more accurate copy of reality. High resolution,
digitally-mastered duplicates. And it can all be yours instantly” (8).
Totally enamored of the art of copying reality, Gina embarks on her search
for “the Truth.” She spends her time following her parents and her grandmother
with a video camera. She interviews them, but also turns the camera on herself:
“Weird to see yourself on the screen. You look bigger than you are, your outfit
doesn’t seem as rad, the voice is much too high. You act and sound like a
syndicated geek. That’s what you get for putting yourself in front of the camera
instead of behind it, where you belong. Suffer!” (8). Gina admits there is a
distorted sense of reality caused by the images on the screen. Who is the real
Gina, the one behind or the one in front of the camera Her grandmother, on the
other hand, completely rejects this perceptive instability caused by the camera.
Refusing to be “duplicated,” Estela . . . “would see herself captured on film
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