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The study deals with Demetria Martínez’s Mother Tongue (1994), which is a love story between a Mexican American woman and a Salvadoran refugee. The female protagonist, Mary, delves into connotations of love, expanding it to understanding of the other. The story deploys politically imbricated religious practices in relation to the U.S. Sanctuary movement in the 80s. Mary’s amorous encounter with the other leads her to discover the expansion of friendship and solidarity and, ultimately to rediscover religiosity based on reawakened ethics. This study argues that the melodramatic mode employed in this novel implicitly reveals an inherent aspiration for the sacred, albeit not fully representable. The author’s involvement in the genre of romance and the melodramatic mode ironically attests to her striving for the spiritual ideal and ontological answer. In the end, this essay reveals that drawing on the popular melodramatic narrative, the romantic engagement with the alterity can be more efficiently introduced into the ontological quest for the absolute presence.

The Melodramatic Narrative and Ontological Quest in Demetria Martínez’s Mother Tongue