Colima

Colima is remembered as a place of dependence and uneasy hospitality in the history of Juan Preciado and Dolores Preciado. There, mother and son lived at the expense of an aunt who made clear that she considered them an extra burden; the recollection turns the city into a setting for the strain of having shelter without welcome.

Family Life in Colima

Dolores’s aunt urged her to return to her husband. Dolores answered that she would not go unless he sent for her, explaining that she had come to see her aunt because she loved her. The exchange exposes the distance between that affection and the aunt’s insistence that it was time for Dolores to leave. Dolores’s unfinished response suggests reluctance, but the account does not say what happened next in Colima.

Narrative Significance

Colima enters the narrative through Juan’s recollection rather than a description of the city itself. Its significance rests on the family’s circumstances there: dependence, rejection, and Dolores’s refusal to return to her husband without being summoned. The remembered conversation also gives Juan’s account a personal measure of what his mother endured, without presenting the city as a fully depicted setting.