Light of Dawn

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At first, I did not find “Aurora” romantic. Though Lucero clearly had strong feelings for Aurora, I was not convinced that those feelings qualified as love. Throughout the story, Lucero casually talks about the abuse that occurs in a nonchalant way so that the reader gets the impression that this behavior is a regular occurance. This disturbing aspect of their relationship makes it very difficult for me to label the nature of their relationship as one of love. It can be argued that the story is about an abusive relationship but that the characters still love one another, however, I do not believe that people who truly cared for one another would beat or scar one another, even when they are angry.

Lucero and Aurora’s relationship also seems based on a dependency for one another rather than affection. At many points many points in the story, the nature of their relationship is compared to a drug addiction. Lucero even describes Aurora’s personality as “addictive”. The relationship is clearly not good for either of them, emotionally and physically, yet they are still drawn back to one another by dependency. This makes their entire story less about love and more about a mutual need for someone to exist.
That being said, the author as well as the characters themselves seem to want this to be a love story. Diaz’s use of the names Lucero and Aurora really struck me as a powerful message. He is clearly trying to convey that there cannot be one of them without the other in that there cannot be dawn without light. At first I found this to be an extremely romantic sentiment, however, I realized that this could also be tied back to the characters’ dependence on one another. There’s also the important detail that Lucifer, where Lucero’s name comes from, fell from Heaven. While Aurora is purely the dawn, Lucero is the light that fell. Taking a step back, he also seems to be the more violent individual in this relationship. He mentioned that Aurora left scratches on his arms with her fingernails after he attacked her. Her actions are in general much easier to pass off as self defense, it seems, than his. It is possible the author could be making a comment that Lucero is bad for her, that he is the fallen star who could bring the dawn down with him.
An important detail about this relationship I failed to acknowledge at first is the setting in which this all takes place. In class, someone mentioned that this relationship, it’s good and it’s ugly parts, fits as a love story in the context of the world these characters live in. As someone pointed out, this story is the definition of “squalor”. The characters live in a world so different from our own that it’s hard to remember to look at the relationship through the lense of their world, not ours. I got the impression that the kind of abuse they experienced was not uncommon and that even though it was not viewed as a positive thing, it may not have discredited the relationship as it would in our society.
Even though Lucero and Aurora’s relationship was problematic in so many ways, they clearly still had something between them. The most striking scene for me was the small section entitled “Lucero” in which Aurora tells him that she would have named their son after him. This moment just felt extremely sweet and untainted by negative dynamics in their relationship. In that moment I could see that there was something genuine between the two characters, and while I still hesitate to call it love, I do not deny the intensity or the genuineness of such emotions. On the other hand, the ending felt wrong to me. The casual mention of violence interlaced with the characters’ desire to stay together made me need to label their relationship as abusive.

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