Vea employs the carnivalesque because La Maravilla is a novel that refuses simple truths. The reader is thrust into the world of people discarded by society -- bums and alcoholics, prostitutes and poor Indian spiritualists -- but linked as well to the recognizable themes of a young boy coming of age, of familial loyalty and love between this boy and his grandparents, and of the conflict between conventional (Catholic) and non-western (Yaqui mysticism) spirituality.  Yet the polyphonic inconclusiveness of it all allows no easy answers.  As readers, we explore this world exposed and highlighted by the carnivalesque and inhabited by "people of the gaps," knowing that "the gaps are where life really is" (221).

            In another moment of carnival magic, Ed Vega's Sinfo (like a Juan Peron figure) speaks to an adoring crowd ("Que Viva Don Sinfo...Que Viva Puerto Rico") and when he raises his hand in salute, lightning and thunder and "a tremendous downpour" send the crowd for shelter.  The rain cleanses the people of their "pent-up anger" and washes away their resentments.  Momentarily released, they commence a celebration, "a ribald fantasy" where the "Bermuda socialite does a topless dance, and the solemn Frances ends up in the cellar with one Don Cipriano, minus his accordion ("The Pursuit of Happiness" 230-232).  It is a moment when "young and old, cop and militant" are joined in laughter.  Washed clean of his capitalistic schemes, the protagonist finds the love of Elissa.  Even the "tantalizing" music itself, a Puerto Rican "plena," displays a political reversal, because the song "tells of the demise of a U.S. strike-breaking lawyer whose disappearance was attributed to a female shark" (232.  The workers, the marginal outsiders, the Puerto Ricans in general, gain the upper hand for a festive moment.  Once employed in a novel, however, the carnival atmosphere remains throughout, permeating the entire text since the reader, having glimpsed the other side -- that which negates the practical struggles of life -- can never again completely accept the status quo.  Neither Vega, nor Vea wish the reader to return to the norm.  Rather, the carnivalesque instills in the work a necessity for the reader to perpetually question the laws and restrictions of society. 

            The search for such holiday times, and the extent of the desire for them, can be viewed negatively from the perspective of practical law and authority and positively from the view of communal liberation.   Celebration of carnival in Latino fiction is either humorously and positively subversive or destructively deviant, depending upon the situation, the author, and the characters.  Thus, Latino carnivalesque is ambiguous; rather than set up a new "truth," it serves to "consecrate inventive freedom...to liberate from the prevailing point of view...from conventions and established truths" (Rabelais 34).  A dual perspective often forces the reader to see, among other things, images of the carnivalesque as representing either happy release, melancholy self deception, or a combination of both.  In either case, the reader recognizes that the overall function of carnival is to free the human consciousness from restricting, unconditional values in order to allow the imagination to contemplate new potentialities, to "escape the false 'truth of this world'" (Rabelais 49).   The desire on the part of these writers, both male and female, to exhibit what Debra Castillo has labeled a "willed undecidability" (Talking Back 69), and their refusal to accept absolutes manifests itself in the narrative use and the language of the carnivalesque.  Because the carnival is always in flux, combining opposites, inverting hierarchies, and abandoning etiquette, no one truth holds, and the reader is left with ambiguity and potential.  It is to see things upside down, like Vernetta in La Maravilla, who, looking at an abandoned house feels strange, "as though she were suddenly privy to a contrary world of houses where the people burned down instead" (254).  These sorts of inverted perspectives and humorous distortions fill Latino fiction with a polyphonic uncertainty where altering views of life compete endlessly.     

           The carnivalesque, in its overt form, has been recognized by Latino critics in the early Spanish novels of the Cuban writer Roberto G. Fernandez.[63]   Setting aside Fernandez's elaborate use of language and styles of discourse (an essential part of his carnivalesque idiom) discussed above, one festive scene early in the novel will throw light upon various thematic complexities.  The comic reversals and twists of the Christmas dinner scenario help instill in the novel as a whole a "topsy-turvy" atmosphere of transformations and inversions in such a way as to complicate the simplistic view of party as mere release and freedom.  The scene begins with Mima's kitchen preparation which, contrary to general opinion, she hates: "Every year, the same old people, the same old shit" (39), she grumbles.  Beneath the superficial level of the festivities lie a multitude of disparate voices reflecting the actual feelings (usually negative) of these Miami Cuban exiles at their Christmas eve dinner.  There is gossip, anger, fighting, and resentment under the gaiety of the dancing, the wine, and the food.  The whole scene is watched carefully by a dead pig on the grill whose perspective may be the only one of objectivity and balance.   A neighbor brings .99 cent wine disguised with fancy labels; a son involved in drugs lies about his Colombian "business trip;" Barbarita refuses to talk to the hostess because she's convinced Mima is making her husband Jacinto a cuckold; someone complains about the "American custom" of leaving the TV on all the time; the pig is too big for the grill; it rains; a child dressed as Balthasar explains mid-recital that no one in his family is really black -- in short the harmony of festival is actually a chaotic jumble of conflicting lives, and people's fears, prejudices, lies, distortions and sexism ("roll her in the flour and go for the wet spot ha ha ha" (39-52).  Fernandez's description turns into a series of snatches of dialogue, a list of angry emotions and outbursts which undermine any communal quality to the holiday party.  Despite the music, the dancing, the food, there is no humor shared by the characters, perhaps because the social codes and family roles are not, in fact, reversed.  Fernandez displays his characters ranting and complaining as the party unhinges their inhibitions, but nothing is drastically inverted for them and their attitudes remain selfish and antagonistic. 

            More often than not, the carnivalesque signals a release from authoritative rigidity.  Judith Cofer's town of Salud is transformed during carnival week from a "dusty hamlet" into a colorful festival "eclipsing the countryside and even the church, a massive white structure sitting on its hill like a reproving matron, dim and dowdy" (Line of the Sun 66).  It is only fitting that the carnival provides Guzman with the opportunity to meet the object of his fantasies, Rosa, for the second time.  Disguised as a gypsy, she reads his palm, and they embark on a passionate affair that leaves the "Ladies Civic Council and Holy Rosary Society" scandalized.    The servants of El Topaz estate in Castedo's novel Paradise use their "peasant" festival to counter the repressive laws of their wealthy employers (217-219).  Solita joins the "soul-raising event," because she relishes the freedom of those people, who, like her fellow refugees were noisy, "didn't do prearranged things," who were "cheerful" and "comfortable" (59), and who sang the songs, like the songs of Spain, the "pieces of Spain" (39) with unrestricted emotion.  A similar scene occurs in  Pineda's The Love Queen of the Amazon when the convent girls go down to the river for their bath.  Having arrived, they pass through an "astonishing transformation" during which "pandemonium" breaks out," and there is "no longer any way of civilizing them" (8).  Their recess becomes a release from the "stringent oppressions" through "all the canonical hours" (11).  The effect of the scene is consequently to juxtapose their laughter and freedom with the hollow threats of a disciplinary nun beating on her frying pan.  The frying pan itself suggests Pineda's commentary on the renowned women protesters who carried pots and pans up and down the streets of Santiago during the Allende government.  Though decorum will be restored, the interval provides one of the novel's many reversals of perspective.  Later, at Ana Magdelena's wedding reception, the father of the bride commits adultery, local prisoners do the cooking and then escape, kidnapping the bride, while the drunken armed guards sleep.  The sequence of bizarre party events will lead the reader down a twisting path of inversions in which his or her fairy tale expectations will be rearranged.  This Cinderella (Ana Magdelena) wants no part of marriage -- the contract for her own marriage is in fact too long to fit on any table and must be laid out on the piano (43).   After the kidnapping, Ana Magdelena winds up in a brothel (and leaves her slippers there the following morning -- slippers which magically appear at several times in the narrative 101).  Life in the whorehouse becomes the not unpleasant result of a marriage that instead of being a romantic happy ending turns out to be a happy beginning to Ana's life as a madam.    Inside the brothel (and Pineda makes it clear we are seeing the brothel from an insider's perspective), converted from a Capuchin convent, in the middle of the "vast ground-floor room," Ana finds a "circular settee...where people could lounge while admiring the surrounding splendor from various angles (102).  This "most curious" piece of furniture is suggestive of the lack of such perspectives in the outside world, and how limited are the angles of vision permitted women by societal controls.   "La Nymphaea" is run by her great aunt, her "protecting angel" Ofelia (171) and she and her "rainbow girls" supply Ana with "tears and laughter and companionship" which neither her "mummified in...flannel nightgown" mother, Andreina, nor her "exotic talking mummy from another world"  mother-in law (172) can provide.    In her more serious first novel Face, there is no capacity for women to unite in any way.  Not only held back by men, they must bear the burden of their male companions' frustration: Helio doesn't share Lula's ambition for him to get a barbershop of his own (19), and when she refuses to make love to the disfigured protagonist, he beats and rapes her (77).   

          Both Pineda and Fernandez, like Ron Arias before them, structure their novels around hyperbole and stretch the limits of plausibility for the sake of parodic humor.  Ron Arias once mentioned in a interview that the "best, most incisive most humanly appealing humor I've heard is from women -- but this is always in kitchens, classrooms, bailes [dances] or in stores. Not much in writing -- so far" (Bruce-Novoa Chicano Authors 248).  This prophetic remark made during the winter of 1978-1979 is now countered by the writings of  Pineda, Vega, Hijuelos, Cisneros, Garcia, and Roberto Fernandez -- writers who consciously distort perspective for the sake of inverting stereotypical ideas.   Pineda's tone and irreverence recall the narrative voice of Woolf's Orlando, a novel which paved the way for much of the sardonic humor found in The Love Queen of the Amazon.  Pineda's narrator's discourse, as Judy Little says of Woolf's, "often slides easily from the rhetoric of affirmation into comic doubt (181).  There is a similar twinge of the magically real in Ana Magdalena's mythic birth which echoes Woolf's elements of the bizarre such as the "Great Frost" where "birds froze in mid air" (Orlando (33).  A we have already noted, Pineda's scene in Federico Orgaz y Orgaz's literary salon owes a debt to Woolf's famous portrayal of 18th century British literary life.  Surely the discussion concerning the value literary gaps and "lacunae" amid Latin American writers alludes to the humorous gaps and omissions in Woolf's novel, (i.e. Pope's witty remarks are excised) and both pompous conversations leave both protagonists similarly unimpressed. 

            Pineda's novel deflates authority and the official in the tradition of Bakhtin's carnivalesque altering of hierarchical standards.  She switches around those categories within what Guillermo E. Hernandez outlines as the "Hegemonic Spectrum" of fiction.   She purposely confuses the whore with the wife, the husband with the fool; greed is associated with formal institutions like the church and the bank, and lust and sin with the heroine.   Breaking down the oppositions of the spectrum is an integral part of Pineda's deconstruction of her patriarchal fiction world.  On the physical level, we find City Hall "embellished by revolutions and pigeon droppings" (76).  Federico's massive "Casa Orgaz" (whose many rooms recall Bluebeard's castle  - 97, though Ana is no helpless young bride) is architecturally sterile and Ana Magdelena struggles to "soften the uncompromising granite columns of the courtyard" (178) much the way Isabel Allende's Clara from The House of Spirits struggles to alter the rigidity of El Patran Trueba's solid mansion.   The "gleaming white mansions" to which the convent girls aspire will, according to the narrator, become "their mausoleums" (10).  The structures of power rather than offering security and safety in wealth and privilege are seen as traps and prisons.  Often, male political authority is the target of Pineda's ridicule.  Toward the end of her novel, in a one farcical scene, she satirizes a wide range of the Presidents of both Americas.  George Washington, in a "crazy-looking boat" arrives at Ana's brothel with his son, George Junior, "as transparent as a fetus."  Teddy Roosevelt shows up boasting of his son, Ron, who has just "bagged his first mestizo."  Juxtaposing historical personalities, Pineda has the "not-yet-born" George and Ron (Bush and Reagan) playing with "instruments of torture," while Ana is unable to stop them because neither speaks Spanish and both are in favor of "a program of English only in utero" (227- 230).  The international monetary fund is debunked as the "International Fiduciary Fund" which is overly willing to loan money to a brothel, under the condition that it also be allowed to supply "Yankee" muzak which promotes haphazard indiscriminate buying (234), but turns out to be detrimental to the sex business (210-213). When Ana raises doubts about deceiving her new husband, Ofelia advises her that "respectable family men, the bankers, the lawyers, the doctors, [and] especially the politicians" are the most frequent customers (105). 

            The institution of marriage suffers extensive ridicule in this novel from the beginning.  When her friend Aurora gets married (her "reception more in the style of a wake" - 31), she explains to Ana the benefits of marriage, not for domestic reasons, but because having already given up virginity you are free to "do anything you want"(15).  Visiting her fiancee for the first time, Ana and her mother dress in mourning and Ana is told by Andreina to pretend there has been a death in the family.  In short, Ana can "hardly think of a single reason" for getting married and her life as a prostitute and madam frees her from domestic slavery where she'd "measure her life in rounds of baking, cleaning, and preparing sad little suppers" (172).