A Place Where the Sea Remembers by Sandra Benitez

A Place Where the Sea Remembers by Sandra Benitez

In, A Place Where the Sea Remembers, several events take place to describe the little city of Santiago, Mexico. This town is just south of the border by El Paso, Texas. The book focuses around a lady known as the Remedios. She is a very old healer that helps people with their problems of love, hate, etc. She is the “good” in the book, whereas El Brujo, the warlock, is the bad man in the book. This book’s other strong point is that it has several short narratives that focus on one, or a few citizens of Santiago. A few examples are, Candelario (the salad maker), Marta (16 year old that’s pregnant), Fulgencio (the photographer that loses all of his equipment) and Don Justo Flores (left his wife and kids and now it haunts him when one of his daughters die). In these stories, these people go threw hardships and ordeals that teach us, the readers, how to or not to deal with life when it isn’t looking UP.

This novel really stirred my emotions, especially in the beginning. For example, Candelario works at a restaurant owned by a man named Don Gustavo. Candelario is the salad maker and what taught, by Don Gustavo himself, how to make a perfect Caesar salad for his customers. The doctor and his wife came in and both ordered salads and Candelario made the salads exactly to Don’s instructions, but the customers were not pleased. Since they were not pleased Don fired Gustavo on the spot that night. This made me very angered with Don and people like Don. It sucks when you do something right but then someone is displeased so all of a sudden it was the wrong thing to do. In this situation, Don was definitely the bad man and people should learn from this. The second example is when Candelario, even after being fired, wants to take Marta’s baby, since his wife is not able to have one. Chayo, Candelario’s wife was not able to have a baby so he thought that since Marta is Chayo’s sister then he would love to raise her baby. This really shows how good of a guy he is. Right when I heard this I felt all warm inside, because there is still hope for humans and being the caring and loving type of people we should be.

There were a few points in this book that taught me about life and how crazy it can be sometimes. The photographer named Fulgencio was very afraid of hitch hiking to Mexico City with a stranger, especially with all of us expensive equipment. On the ride, Fulgencio is so paranoid that the guy is going to kill him, he grabs a machete out of the back of the truck. In doing so he gets kicked out of the car and loses all of his photography equipment anyways. This taught me that we need to trust each other more, Just because there are a few crazy people in the world, we shouldn’t let them give us all a bad name. I mean, the guy picked Fulgencio up when he was in desperate need of a car, and gives him a ride. He should have been thankful, not picked up a machete and threaten the guy. Another thing this book taught me was that just because your sister doesn’t want your kid anymore because she is pregnant, doesn’t mean you should try and have the baby killed. Even if Marta was just having a sorcerer use magic to rid Chayo of her baby, killing is killing. There is no excuse for