If, as the European papers noted when the novel first appeared on the scene, Dos Muertes en una Vida was the most successful novel to come out of modern Ecuador, Mama Zoila establishes the reputation of Alfonso Barrera Valverde as a major literary voice in Latin America. As America Indigena said of Dos Muertes en una Vida, Mama Zoila "presents the social-economic reality of a marginal population," but whereas Dos Muertes en una Vida focused on indigenous peoples of rural Ecuador, Mama Zoila deals with the country's urban population that exists in the marginalia of an Ecuador that is finding its way through its version of social modernity. And by the time we have encountered and come to know the simple, sweet, fatalistic Mama Zoila and the sons who have embraced a more modern, more sour, and far less pure experience of reality, we have also come to know the psychological tensions and priorities that inform modern Ecuador and an elaboration of a modernist ethos.
The most important thematic achievement of Mama Zoila is that Barrera Valverde uncovers at once the mysterious bleakness and the almost mystical hopefulness of attitude, meaning, and experience in an environment hitherto unexplored by Latin American literature. The demanding pall of bleakness so overlays the action of the novel that one is surprised, at the end, at how seductively uplifting, almost comforting, the novel has been to read. We witness self-seeking, status-seeking civil servants unwittingly responding with courtesy, if not grace, to the dilemma of the widow whose late husband's bones are to be thrown into a common grave. We see the desertion of traditional familial love by sons who see enough of the modern world to know that tradition has confined them and left them somehow unsatisfied. We also see the moral imperative that family attachment exercises. And we see the severe limitations and unmerited suffering that a complex society imposes on the unworldly.
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