Vida By Patricia Engel: Chapter Analysis

Vida, the nine chapter collection of memories that are not placed in chronological order, by Patricia Engel gives a bicultural perspective of the contradictions and complexities of growing up Columbian in the United States. Throughout the novel, Sabina floats from her twenties in New York and Florida and her youth and adolescence in the suburbs of New Jersey to in the last chapter, Madre Patria, a family vacation in Colombia when she was seven. Sabina illuminates her growth as the protagonist throughout the novel. Each chapter the reader gets to witness Sabina being a person who can endure pain or hardship without showing her feelings or complaints since childhood. Her maturity of this grows as we get to read these collections of past hurts. Although the novel seems to be narrated by Sabina, she really features the voices and experiences of so many such as the immigrants in the U.S, the lives of people born in the US but belonging to different cultures, the world in Columbia and the worlds of young people …show more content…
Their family felt as though the United States changed them and feels they need to be reassured by Emilio, their uncle “this is your country…for better or worse you carry its salt in your blood.” (179). We experience how her mother wants to move back to Columbia because “she felt disappointed by her American life” she felt she was “somebody” (171) there. “How can you be happy, the man challenges, when you’re invisible?” (170) is a question that reiterates in many situations of Sabina’s life from age seven to about her mid twenties. Sabina, a troubled second generation Columbian-American girl, shows a variety of personalities throughout the story. She is desperate, depressed, faithful and impressionable, more like human. As the protagonist Sabina grows up, she has relationships and tries to make sense of her life and