Family, Friends and Foes

Book excerpt: Jigsaw puzzles' notorious complexity and mega-multiple, amorphously-shaped pieces provide an appropriate metaphor for the navigating and maneuvering necessary throughout all aspects of human dynamics. Involvement comprises not only efforts by an individual personally trying to fit together a life of relationships with Family, Friends & Foes within complex categories and different levels, but the efforts by groups of individuals within those categories, progressively, by those groups within a larger society and/or societies, and then, across so many so-called boundaries: geographic, ethnic, linguistic, artistic and more. Such is the starting point for this particular collection of essays, which focuses on the human dynamics in cultures characterized, mostly linguistically, as Hispanic worlds, and those cultures both in real life and in terms of cultural productions such as movies, visual art and literature. Unlike jigsaw puzzles with their convenient guiding box-cover representation of the finished "product" once the pieces are correctly assembled, human dynamics' "pieces" are more like amoebas, ever changing size and shape, multiplying and dividing, sometimes fitting in with other pieces, sometimes not, sometimes overlappingin short, frequently unpredictable and always challenging for the would-be "assembler(s)." Thus, the title of this book could easily morph ad infinitum with the three elements of Family, Friends, Foes reflecting an enormous and unwieldy range of relationship, emotion and viewpoint. Mixed messages abound. And as can be seen from the individual chapter titles and content so-called successful relationships may be fleeting or unattainableor may match the imagined, hoped-for "picture" of a working relationship dynamic.