Mirrors Beneath the Earth (1992)

Ray González's anthology of Chicano short fiction, published by Curbstone Press in 1992, gathers thirty-one stories by writers including Sandra Cisneros, Rudolfo Anaya, Denise Chávez and Ana Castillo, alongside, as its jacket notes, writers never before published in book form. Castillo's "Subtitles" is told by a woman who narrates her life as a foreign film, from the day her sister first left her in a classroom where the new language appeared as subtitles at her feet to a solitary adulthood in the desert. (Open Library)

Watches

Gucci (unidentified model): In "Subtitles", the narrator, who calls herself a self-made star and writes the first-person pronoun as a lower-case "i", lives alone in the desert, where in the plaza she looks like any of the women stocking up on cheap cola and blue corn atole. She is not one of them: she drives a red sports car with the licence plate TOLTECA, drinks brandy with supper, plays Astor Piazzolla as she cruises up I-40 and wears to the supermarket a gold-plated Gucci watch that she says a secret admirer sent her. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: i drive a red sports car with a license plate that reads: TOLTECA. i wear a gold-plated Gucci watch — sent to me by a secret admirer, of course — nouveaurichely to the supermarket where i buy my cola and atole. (Ray González, ed., Mirrors Beneath the Earth, scan cataloged as Curbstone Press, 1992, p. 175, in "Subtitles" by Ana Castillo, which the contents page lists from p. 166; Internet Archive scan OCR)