Summary

In this first section of this essay, Leslie writes about Frida Kahlo who wore plaster corsets after a streetcar crash weakened her spine to the point where it could no longer support itself. She decorated them and they remain on display in her house. Later in life, Frida lost her leg which had suffered polio and eleven fractures in the streetcar crash. Frida thanked her doctors many times in her diary and kept a collection of ex-votos paintings in thanks to saints. In her diary, there are the contrasting words: "Don't weep to me" opposite "I cry for you" (153).

Under the subheading Servicoi Supercompleto, Leslie writes about Joan Didion's Salvador, a 1983 account of civil war in El Salvador. Didion writes about being at a shopping center in El Salvador, which Leslie contrasts with her own experience of being in a Bolivian supermarket...