Mercado de la Merced

Setting and Activity

The Mercado de la Merced is presented as an enormous fruit and produce market, alive with color and performance. Its stalls display desert oranges, avocados of many shapes and hues, and chilis in an array of colors and forms. Alongside the sellers, people turn their work into spectacle: a woman juggles guavas, an old man rolls across watermelons, and a boy tosses small red peppers into the air and catches them.

The market’s hawkers are largely children, from teenagers down to five- and six-year-olds. They sell goods as varied as single cloves of garlic, empty flour sacks, mushrooms, and peyote. This busy trade makes the market a place where a child can be difficult to distinguish from the crowd—and where Mike Milo’s search for one particular boy can easily go wrong.

Mike Milo’s Mistaken Identification

The day after an unsuccessful attempt to find a child who could run an errand, Mike Milo visits the market with renewed hope. Among the hawkers, he spots a boy who looks remarkably like the child in Rafo’s photograph. The seller is offering lottery tickets, and his clear, piercing Spanish pitch draws Mike’s attention. The boy appears to be about eleven, the age Mike expects Rafo to be.

Mike approaches him in English, but the boy does not understand. After buying a ticket, Mike gestures toward the outdoors, hoping they can speak away from the market noise. When Mike suggests that the boy leave with him, the seller’s family closes around them: his parents, an imposing man Mike takes to be an uncle, and an older woman. The crowd makes clear that this child is not the abandoned Rafo Mike seeks but a cherished member of a large, protective family. Mike squeezes through the gathering and flees.

Consequences for the Search

The encounter teaches Mike that the resemblance to the photograph is not enough to identify Rafo. He also recognizes a flaw in his reasoning: the lottery seller cannot speak English, whereas Rafo, having lived in the United States until age six, should know at least some of it. The market therefore yields not the boy Mike is seeking but a sharper sense of how easily his assumptions can mislead him.

Mike expects further mistakes and doubts that he can find Rafo alone. The failed encounter pushes him toward seeking assistance from Howard Polk. In this way, the market scene marks a turn in the search: the crowd that briefly seems to deliver Rafo instead exposes the need for help.