80
The most important symbol is that of the carreta. whose off stage ru~ling leads the characters to a point of severe anguish and brings on-stage action to a stand sti 11. The lm'lly mode of travel points up t'he level to which their unsuccessful efforts to live on the land have reduced them. The groaning sounds of the carreta are magnified in the heartaches caused by leaving the fam1ly home. The good things of that home are perpetuated in the miniature cart "1hich Juanita's friend, Higuel, makes and presents to her in San Juan. And as the original carreta had brought the family from the village to the city, Juan1ta's deci~ion to accorr~any her mothlS back to Puerto Rico is set in the image of the carreta. At the closing of the play. dona Gabriela asks her daughter Juanita: " You"
You too?
But you always said that from now on you were gonna
drive the oxcart of your life wherever you wanted?" Juanita replies, "For that very reason, ~tama, for that very reason!
•Cause I do drive
it wherever I want. "19 Juanita then decides to return to Puerto Rico with her mother to start life over again.
The oxcart becomes life
itself: the life that transported a poor peasant family away from the country, because the mountains were too stifling, into the slum where the sea also became a stifling force and further into New York where buildings that resemble oceans and mountains kept them isolated-the isolation of the migrant in a foreign land.20 The most notable
ther.~s
of the play are the salvation of the
national soul by adherence to the land, pleading for¡a return to the "land which gives life" 21 as opposed to the falSe values. of a mechanized 18Jordan Phillips, Contemporary Puerto Rican Drama, p. 95. 19r-tarques, ~ The Oxcart, p. 154. 20Agust1n del Saz, Teatro social hispanoamericano {Barcelona: Editorial Labor, 1967), p. 21 The Oxcart, p. 154.