What is the meaning of the title in the novel Buried Onions?

The themes of the widespread sorrow that the characters in the novel experience and the determinism that marks their fates link the title Buried Onions to its narrative. Significantly, Buried Onions opens with an image of death: the statement that "mortuary students would get good jobs" because the narrator of the story, the poor nineteen-year-old Mexican American Eddie, has already lost several friends and relatives, including his father.

The following quotation exemplifies that the characters' suffering and their eventual defeat are linked to the place where they were born: the depressed city of Fresno, California, where, according to the narrator, a giant onion has been planted under the soil, making the people cry and despair.

The black asphalt would shimmer with vapors. I had a theory about those vapors which were not released by the sun but by a huge onion buried under the city. This onion made us cry. ... I thought about the giant onion, that remarkable bulb of sadness.

Because onions make people cry, Soto uses the image of the buried giant onion to convey the sadness that clouds the existences of the inhabitants of the city. The giant onion is a powerful visual explanation of the theory of determinism: if one is born under certain deprived conditions, one is condemned to remain in those conditions for life and to fail to improve one's status. This theory counters the American ideal of social mobility, which postulates that social status can be improved through hard work.

Soto's novel complicates both concepts, showing the hardships that the narrator has to go through. As Eddie struggles against determinism to improve his condition, his plight exemplifies that willpower is not always enough to overcome material and economic obstacles.