The Mother Tongue of Demetria Martínez is divided into five sections and an epilogue. The first three parts of the text present the memories of Mary/María, the narrator, of the time when she was nineteen and first met José Luis, a refuge from El Salvador. The fourth and fifth parts, chronologically, return to her tragic experience at the age of seven, then to her trip to El Salvador with her son, the fruit of her love affair with José Luis, twenty years after her meeting with José Luis . And finally the epilogue consists of a letter from José Luis to Mary/María after his trip to El Salvador. The essay traces the development of Mother Tongue's main protagonists, María/Mary. By reading the text carefully, I explain how the fourth chapter, namely the scene of domestic violence, functions as a central point in the native language because it helps it define itself. In the first pages of the text, nineteen-year-old Mary lives alone in Albuquerque. Vulnerable to love, depressed and adrift, she longs for something meaningful to take care of her. As she "asks the universe if there was more to life than working boring jobs", she takes it upon herself to help an illegal (political) refugee, José Luis, who has been smuggled from El Salvador to the United States. United States, to adapt to his new life in Albuquerque. She instantly falls in love with him and hopes to start her life over with the new goal of "taking the war away from him." (p. 4) In offering him refuge, Mary, as Fellner suggests, “imagines herself to be whole and complete in the experience of love.” (2001: 72) She willingly places José Luis as the “center” of her life (p.5) in the hope that “love would free her from her sleeping condition” (Fellner 2001: ...... middle of the article ......olence, foreign wars and translation in Demetria Martínez", American Literature, 78 (2): 357-87.Martínez, Elizabeth Sutherland 1998. De Colores means all of us: Latin views for a multi- . Colored Century. United States: South End Press. Martinez, Demetria. “Solidarity.” Writing by La Frontera. Rodríguez., Ana Patricia. 2009. Dividing the Isthmus: Transnational Histories, Literatures, and Cultures of Central America United States: University of Texas Press, 130-167Torres, Hector Avalos 2007. Conversations with Contemporary Chicana Writers. 315-324.Vigil, Ariana 2009. “Transnational Community in Demetria Martinez’s Mother Tongue: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. »., 10 (1): 54-76