Eddie Chavez

Eddie Chavez is Ellie Chavez’s son and Delia Cachora Ortiz’s younger brother. Taken back to the reservation by his father when he was six, Eddie is separated from the mother and sister who had raised him in Tempe. His later life, as Delia understands it, turns the child’s eager departure in a shiny pickup into a lasting family rupture: he grows up in Big Fields, leaves school after eighth grade, and returns to his sister’s life mainly when he needs money.

Childhood and Return to His Father

Eddie first appears in the account of the family’s arrival at Ruth Waldron’s house. During the storm, he is asleep in the back seat while Ellie Chavez brings Delia to the porch. Ruth asks after him, and Delia explains that he is sleeping. The small detail places Eddie within the care of the household Ellie and Ruth are making for the children, though at this point he is too young to take part in the exchange that will later alter his life.

Four years after leaving Sells, Eddie is six and Delia is twelve. One spring afternoon, Delia returns from the library with books and her younger brother beside her to find an unfamiliar pickup in the driveway. Manuel Chavez is on the porch, shouting at Ellie Chavez and Ruth Waldron. Delia recognizes him as the drunken, angry father she remembers. He demands his son back and insults the household, invoking the fear that Eddie will be made into an Anglo and a queer.

Eddie, however, has no memory of the man claiming to be his father. A loud stranger offers the prospect of going somewhere in a shiny pickup, and the boy is eager to leave with him. That contrast matters: the decision is consequential for the adults and, eventually, for Delia, but Eddie is too young to understand its stakes. While the children watch, the argument continues until Ellie agrees that Eddie will return to the reservation with Manuel Chavez.

Separation and Adult Life

Delia cannot make sense of the handover at the time. She believes that Ellie has sent Eddie away with a near-stranger without a fight, and fears that once his father drives off, Eddie will be absorbed into his father’s family and lost to them. The account confirms that he does not return to Ellie’s household. His grandmother in Big Fields spoils him, as Delia sees it, even more than Ellie and Ruth had done.

As he grows up, Eddie’s life takes a direction sharply different from Delia’s. He becomes fat and lazy and, like his father, a drunk. After graduating from eighth grade, he quits school; Manny Chavez makes no effort to change his mind. Eddie contacts Delia intermittently, not to rebuild a close relationship but when he needs practical help: after wrecking another pickup, after being released from jail, or when he needs money to get by until he can find day work. These repeated requests define the adult contact Delia describes, linking his precarious circumstances to the family separation without suggesting that she can undo it.

Delia’s Questions and Changing Understanding

As a seventh-grader, Delia judges Eddie as a stupid, spoiled brat. From that perspective, the porch scene appears especially unfair: why did their father come to Tempe for Eddie rather than for Delia, who earned straight As? Why was Eddie, who had repeated kindergarten, considered worthy of being taken back to the reservation while his sister was not? Her questions are not simply about which child was more successful. They register her bewilderment at the different choices made for two siblings in the same family.

Delia’s understanding changes with age. In high school, she begins to comprehend the relationship between Ellie Chavez and Ruth Waldron, who had been lovers nearly from the time Ruth welcomed the family into her home. Both women were exiles in different ways: Ellie from the reservation, Ruth from her convent and disapproving family. What Delia had experienced as an inexplicable surrender of Eddie begins to sit within a wider arrangement of loyalties and vulnerabilities, although that knowledge does not erase her sense of loss.

The Pressures Behind the Handover

Only later, while in law school, does Delia understand the risks Ellie faced. Lesbian mothers had no rights in that period, and if Ellie had resisted Manuel Chavez’s demand for Eddie, she could have risked losing both children instead of one. A custody fight might also have jeopardized the postgraduate fellowship she had been offered. Public exposure could have damaged Ruth Waldron’s career in the Tempe public schools, where gay and lesbian teachers would not begin coming out openly until decades later.

This later explanation reframes the handover as a choice made under severe legal and social pressure, not as proof that Ellie did not care about Eddie. It also clarifies why the adults’ argument held consequences that six-year-old Eddie could not recognize and twelve-year-old Delia could not yet interpret. Eddie remains the child carried away in the pickup and the adult whose subsequent contact with his sister is largely need-driven; the fuller context belongs to the family around him, whose constrained choices shaped the separation that defines his place in the story.