Manny Chavez

Manny Chavez is the estranged father of Delia Ortiz and Eddie Chavez, a volatile alcoholic whose return fractures the siblings’ childhood and whose later disability places him in Delia’s care. For Delia, he first represents abandonment and the loss of her brother; only years later does she begin to understand his history as more complicated than the damage he inflicted. Her growing patience does not excuse Manny’s behavior, but it changes the terms on which she sees him.

Family Background and Separation

Manny is remembered by his children as a drunk and an angry presence. After Ellie Chavez left Sells with Delia and Eddie, the children lived with Ruth Waldron while Ellie pursued her undergraduate studies. Manny did not see them for four years. By the time he reappeared, Delia was twelve and close to entering eighth grade, while Eddie was six and had no memory of the man who claimed to be his father.

Manny arrived at Ruth’s home in a pickup truck and shouted that he wanted Eddie back. He accused Ellie and Ruth of turning the boy into an Anglo and a queer. Eddie, who did not recognize him, was nevertheless eager to leave with the stranger in the shiny truck. With the children watching, the argument continued until Ellie agreed that Eddie would return to the reservation with Manny. The handover took place without, as far as Delia knew, a divorce, custody order, or exchange of legal papers.

Delia could not understand her mother’s decision. She believed Ellie must have known that Manny would take Eddie into his family on the reservation and that she might never get him back. That fear proved accurate: Eddie grew up in Big Fields with his paternal grandmother, left school after eighth grade, and became a heavy drinker like Manny. As an adult, he generally contacted Delia when he needed money, including after wrecking a pickup or being released from jail. Manny’s return thus separated Delia from her brother in a way that endured well beyond the argument on Ruth’s porch.

The Father Delia Resents

For years, Delia’s account of Manny is inseparable from that childhood loss. When she returns to the reservation as an adult, she is still angry with him and regards him, like Eddie, as a worthless drunk. Her resentment also sits alongside the betrayal she has recently experienced in her marriage to Philip Cachora. At first she is ready to write off both her father and brother rather than reopen old injuries.

The novel later gives Manny’s marriage to Ellie a context that Delia had not understood as a child. In a conversation with Julia Joaquin about men who resent women who love women, Delia begins to see that Manny had married Ellie expecting one kind of life and found himself in another. That mismatch does not undo his anger, his drinking, or the consequences of taking Eddie away. It does, however, allow Delia to recognize that her parents’ marriage, like her own marriage to Philip, had been shaped by a painful distance between expectation and reality.

Injury and Dependence

Manny is later brutally attacked with a shovel. Medical professionals attribute his paralysis to spinal-cord damage, while Julia offers a traditional explanation: she says he has Staying Sickness, specifically Turtle Sickness, an illness associated with rudeness. The accounts differ over cause, but the practical result is the same: Manny becomes a helpless invalid who needs constant care and supervision.

Eddie cannot take on that responsibility. He spends much of his life drinking, while Manny’s care falls to Delia despite their stormy history. When she moves from her aunt’s home into a house in the former Bureau of Indian Affairs compound in Sells, Leo Ortiz helps carry in the furniture and builds a wooden wheelchair ramp so Manny can visit after his release from a rehabilitation facility in Tucson. Leo also helps Delia find a suitable caregiver and transports Manny to medical appointments. The ramp and the repeated trips to the hospital make the change in their relationship concrete: the father who once took Delia’s brother away now depends on Delia and the people who stand beside her.

Delia’s Reassessment and Narrative Role

Manny’s disability does not produce Delia’s forgiveness by itself. She initially cares for him because she is his daughter and, with no one else available to do it, someone has to take responsibility. Julia’s counsel prompts a deeper change. She urges Delia not to blame Manny for everything and to recognize that looking at only one side of a situation is itself a mistake. Delia comes to see that the disappointment in Manny’s marriage is not wholly unlike the disappointment in her own.

From then on, Delia becomes kinder and more patient with her father, and eventually forgives both Manny and Ellie for the unwitting mistakes they made. She does not extend the same forgiveness to Philip: unlike her parents, he knew what he was doing. The distinction preserves the limits of Delia’s new understanding. Manny is neither absolved nor reduced to the worst moments of his life; he is a damaged, damaging father whose dependence gives Delia the chance to revise her judgment. His story helps mark her movement from anger toward a more complex account of family responsibility, without requiring her to pretend that betrayal and loss did not happen.