47 pages • 1 hour read
Cristina HenríquezThe Great Divide
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Panama Canal
The Panama Canal is the novel’s most overt symbol. It represents the way that imperialism in Latin America adversely impacted local and indigenous populations and the idea that outside “investment” in the region is self-interested in nature. Billed as a marker for “progress” in a country that most US personnel (including the fictional John Oswald) characterized as a “backwater” or a “swamp,” the canal was supposedly built to bring economic development to Panama and the surrounding region. In reality, the United States financed the canal not out of an altruistic desire to help the Panamanians but rather because the waterway would make trade easier for the US and its partners. The canal thus speaks to the theme of The Negative Impacts of Imperialism in that it illustrates the extent to which the canal represented a disingenuous promise to the Panamanians.
Cristina Henríquez explores both the human and environmental impact of this imperialist project. When Francisco sees the work on the canal for the first time, he is shocked and thinks that the earth has opened its mouth. This creates an image of nature being ripped apart to make way for humankind. Furthermore, whenever the setting is the canal construction site, Henríquez portrays death and hard labor, associating this symbol with destruction and exploitation instead of progress.
The Town of Empire
Many of the spaces in this novel are symbolic, and the town of Empire is another place with an important symbolic function within the narrative. The word “empire” refers to a political unit, often a nation state, whose territory extends far beyond its own borders. Although the United States did not directly invade Panama or install its own government there, it intervened on Panama’s behalf during the push for Panamanian independence with the express purpose of gaining influence in the country. The town that is the basis of operations for the canal project is named “Empire” in this novel, which symbolizes the United States’s imperialist position within Latin America as a whole. The town is a marker for the narrative’s politics of place. It speaks The Negative Impacts of Imperialism in that it embodies the US’s imperialist aims in Panama and beyond.
The Sugar Estate
The sugar estate on which Ava and her mother Lucille began their lives symbolizes Racism and the Legacy of Enslavement. Although not born into enslavement, Lucille and Ava are nonetheless born into a society that is deeply divided along racial lines and characterized by prejudice and inequality. Options are so few for Black citizens in Barbados that many, like Lucille originally, remain on the plantations and estates where their ancestors had been enslaved. Their lives in these places are without real possibility, and they continue to be exploited for their labor. Additionally, the interracial romantic relationships that occur between Black women and white planters create their own kind of inequality: Although Lucille’s relationship with Henry is an open secret, Henry is not part of his children’s lives. He does not help Lucille to raise them, nor does he support them financially with any regularity. Although colorism means that the girls will have better life and career options because of their lighter skin color, they also bear the stigma of their illegitimate birth. Lucille is able to leave the estate only because Henry, its owner and the father of her children, helps her to do so, but her flight from the site of her ancestors’ enslavement is as an act of agency. Lucille understands that in order to give her daughter options and the ability to live independently, she must move away. On the sugar estate, they will always be the undesirable descendants of the enslaved, but on their own they have a chance to forge their own paths and to achieve economic independence.
