Junot Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her contains several short stories, most of which revolve around his reoccurring protagonist Yunior. Yunior is not an especially likable person, and I struggle to figure out if Yunior’s unsympathetic character is intentional or not. The stories’ attempts to show why he is the irresponsible, machismo-loving delinquent he is definitely try to explain what made him this way, but I am uncertain if they also intend to excuse his boorish personality. Further complicating things is how much of an author avatar that Yunior may or may not be for Junot Díaz. Considering the sexual harassment allegations against Díaz in real life and the less than flattering views Yunior expresses about the women in his life, it paints a rather unfortunate picture. The matter of whether or not his work should still be mandated by the curriculum is a debate I am not nearly qualified enough to partake in, though if I had to express an opinion, I think it would be worth it to keep his writing in for the sake of Dominican-American literature, though if we were to find a better candidate with a much less problematic reputation, I would recommend them to replace Díaz in a heartbeat. Then again, I’m also the person who suggested that it wouldn’t technically be supporting him if we were to steal his books rather than pay for them legally, which is why I definitely do not belong in that conversation. My political opinions aside, the book’s anachronistic order of telling the stories serves to confuse and confound me, and as always leaves me wondering what artistic value was so important to maintain through telling the story out of order that confusing the reader was considered necessary. I was also especially confused by the chapter that was not told from his perspective.
A Long Line of Vendidas (Week 7)
Cherríe Moraga’s A Long Line of Vendidas caught my attention not only with its casual mention of fantasizing about gunning down oppressors, but with how it begins with referring to race as sex. “MY BROTHER’S SEX WAS WHITE. MINE, BROWN,” (page 425). I found it interesting that she does this, rather than describe his race as white. The point she makes about him being able to present as white because of his lighter skin tone compared to hers could still have been made regardless. Perhaps the reason Moraga chose to write it this way was to call attention to the sex component of their identities, equating it to race and making it clear that she is the most disadvantaged on both ends, being a woman and more clearly dark in her complexion. The story makes a strong point about the brother is unable to sympathize with the plights she suffers not only because he benefits from her subjugation, but because he has unconsciously identified with the oppressors, and to acknowledge that alignment could bring about a guilt he might not want to deal with. I know I used to be the kind of person who would try to ignore any problem that I could not feel the direct effects of, though I have thankfully grown out of that egocentric mindset and have refined my ability to feel for others. I’m also reminded of how chores were handled around my house growing up, and have always held a slight suspicion that it might be gendered in nature. I haven’t actually confirmed whether or not there is a gender component to how chores were distributed, and I do have good reason to believe that the situation with my sister and I was more of an individual matter than a systemic one. Still, I’m not too sure about either.
The Mechanics of Men (Week 8)
I do not remember why I initially felt that David Tomas Martinez’s The Mechanics of Men poem was potentially about how male gender roles are forced on boys against their will. The narrator came off to me as a rather sensitive person whose interests are traditionally considered feminine. However, he does express interest in traditionally masculine activities. Upon rereading it, I found that my first interpretation felt almost entirely off base. If anything, the narrator seems to embrace masculinity wholeheartedly, even if he’s not the most apt at masculine activity. “I have never been the most mechanically inclined of men. Wrenches, screwdrivers, or shovels have never made nice with me.” I think I might have come to my initial interpretation because I noticed a reference to the Biblical Esau and Jacob. Esau and Jacob were twin brothers, and while Esau was a manly hunter who was favored by their father Isaac, Jacob was the softer brother and more of an intellectual bookworm who their mother Rebekah favored. Perhaps the allusion to the brothers is what prompted me to think about the narrator as a boy being forced to conform to the role of a man. It escaped my attention that the narrator does not directly compare himself to Jacob, but rather, considers himself an inverse of Esau. “And I am not mad for being the second favorite son, Esau turned inside out. Can’t regret saying that summer, I was, in fact, already, a bigger and better man than my father because I understood more.” Still, his lines at the end about how he looks up to his brother and “favored my brother’s way of living, of skating in the park and smoking weed while I studied and wondered for us all,” might lend some credence to my first interpretation. How does the narrator feel about himself and his placement in gender roles, I wonder?
Puerto Rican Obituary (Week 11)
Pedro Pietri’s Puerto Rican Obituary has plenty of striking imagery and poetic language. He describes the pains of laboring and working for low pay in poor conditions under uncaring bosses who only see the Puerto Ricans they’ve hired as exploitable workers to be used. He captures the sense of hopelessness they feel and gives the reader a painful reminder of the circumstances that force them to continue working dead end jobs until they die, like the myth of the American dream, the need to support a large family, and the false promise of any hope of being promoted to a better job. Additionally, the frequent repetition of the workers’ names and of several phrases, such as “They worked,” “All died,” “died dreaming,” “Rise Table Rise Table” and “If only they,” in a way, mirrors the sense of monotony and mechanical labor that oppressed workers feel. Something that stood out to me is when Pietri describes how Juan, Miguel, Milagros, Olga, and Manuel died hating each other because they resented and envied the small advantage each of them had that the others lacked, like how “Miguel’s used car was in better running condition than his used car,” how “Milagros had a color television set,” how “Olga made five dollars more on the same job,” etc. (p. 335). Ordinarily, I would have expected Pietri to describe how they understood each others’ suffering and coming together to support one another. Instead, he describes that these poor, marginalized, overworked people hated each other because they each wanted something the other had, and that fact reminds me of a workplace culture dedicated to keeping the employees competing with each other in order to both keep them productive and discourage them from seeking protection by unionizing with each other. Besides this, they also face the loss of their racial identity and the pride they deserve to have in it.
AmeRícan (Week 10)
The “AmeRícan” poem makes several artistic decisions that I, as an ignorant buffoon, am largely unable to decipher the intended purpose of most of them. I do not know what purpose it serves to refrain from capitalizing certain words that should be capitalized. I don’t know why the first words of most sentences aren’t capitalized, or the races and ethnicities besides the titular AmeRícan race remain uncapitalized. “AmeRícan salutes all folklores, european, indian, black, spanish, and anything else compatible.” Actually, now that I think about it, AmeRícan and God are the only words I can find in this poem that are capitalized at all. Why “God” is one of the exceptions I cannot tell, but I suppose that AmeRícan being capitalized (and having two capitalized letters in it) makes a lot of sense for emphasizing it, among other things. The combination of American and Puerto Rican, the focus on the accent over the í in AmeRícan, and the choice to capitalize the R in it all contribute to helping define the identity of AmeRícan (and remind me of the mestiza consciousness). “defining myself my own way any way many ways Am e Rícan, with the big R and the accent on the í!” Speaking of this particular stanza, the wordplay makes for a tongue-twister that throws me off, and honestly that fact somewhat distracts me from the content. Thankfully, the other line I circled, “and i dream to take the accent from the altercation,” helps me to remember the point it makes. The only poetic device I can really comprehend and know the purpose of is the repetition of the word AmeRícan at the beginning of most of the stanzas. The repetition of that helps the reader to memorize the word and keep their focus on it as the subject of the poem.
When I Was Puerto Rican (Week 9)
When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmerelda Santiago is an autobiographical piece, and as such my usual approach of dissecting and analyzing the creative decisions made in it cannot be applied to it as smoothly as they can be applied to a fictional story, since her story actually happened and is not a fabrication of her imagination. However, I can still discuss the impact this reading had on me personally. Reading this, I realized that shared personal experiences can go a long way to helping a reader relate to a character’s or person’s experiences that the reader themselves have not faced. For me, racism and the cultural friction like what Santiago went through in her childhood never had a noticeable impact on me, and I have trouble relating to stories about the racism people suffer when I myself have little experience with it, even if my sense of sympathy lets me feel for them. With Santiago, a specific aspect of her life that I can relate to enabled me to relate better to her other experiences that I have not faced. Specifically, when she learned that her father had an affair and a child with another woman. I had learned of something similar myself a few years ago. Santiago’s innocent desire to meet her newfound half-sister also mirrors my own wish to meet the half-siblings I never knew about before. Similarly, it helps me relate a little better with her experiences of being affected by strictly traditional gender roles and sexist double standards, the disadvantages of which I have had the privilege of largely avoiding since I am male. Race has held very little salience to my personal identity, so having a shared experience with Santiago lets me connect to her racial struggles in a way I otherwise could not.
(Unfortunately, I do not have access to the rest of the book beyond the first half, as the copy I was reading in the library has been checked out by someone else.)
Never Marry a… (Week 6)
The “Never Marry a Mexican” story of Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros follows a character whose likability and sympathetic qualities were debated in class. We also debated on whether or not we believed she was intended to come off as (un)likable and (un)sympathetic as she did. I’m not quite sure how much I like her, myself. Like it’s been said, one of the factors for how likable a reader can find her is how they personally feel about the subject of infidelity in a relationship. The fact that she practically fetishizes the act of cuckolding other women and engaging in affairs with their husbands without their knowledge really sours her as a person. Honestly, a big factor in her not being quite as sympathetic as she might want to come off as is the fact that the brunt of the pain in her backstory is experienced by her mother and not her. Her mother is the one who faces the familiar experience of being looked down upon by her in-laws for being Mexican-American rather than fully born and raised in Mexico like them. While there is a parallel drawn between her mother’s pain from having married into such a condescending family and her own pain when the words “Never marry a Mexican” are turned on her, it kind of pales in comparison given that she’s being told this by her illicit lover. The fact that she later goes on to sleep with his son who was being born while she was having sex with his father is also really creepy and really does not help her case for being likable, though I suppose it further reinforces how screwed up she’s supposed to be. Much of the mitigating elements in her backstory that explain her behavior and attitude somewhat fall flat when the person who suffered most is her mother and not her.
Pastos Verdes y Cielos!! Azules (Week 5)
Of the pieces we saw in the Saint Mary’s Art Museum, there were a few that stood out to me in particular. “Amor de Primavera Regresa a Mi” (Spring Love Come Back to Me) by Ruth Buentello depicted a man holding an infant girl while standing outside in front of a fence. At the top left of the piece is a green, broken heart with the face of a woman in it. The imagery left me curious about what was being said and represented. Sam Coronado’s “Guerrilla” showed a striking image of a military woman posing behind a barbed wire fence in front of a green background. “Ida B Wells: Telling it Like it is!” by Vicki Meek had a person saying the words, “one had better die fighting injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap,” which holds so much applicability to many situations today. “Pastos Verdes y Cielos!! Azules” (Green Pastures and Blue Skies) stood out the most to me. Created by Miguel Aragón for the Series Project, the piece shows a man being patted down by a policeman. It was inspired by his life on the border of Texas and Mexico, and by the border lives of hundreds of victims of a drug war resulting from a power vacuum left by a prominent drug lord’s death in 1997. The rampant death and crime led to apathy and negligence from the area’s people.
…which prompted Aragon to create pleasant images through combinations of subtle colors and shapes.
Aragón creates a juxtaposition between the soothing imagery of the “green pastures” with the harsh reality of “blue skies” via placing the blue-uniformed police officer oppressing a man in front of the green colors and spirals in the background. The knowledge that this piece was created with the context of a drug war and the apathy it caused leads me to a new, emergent thought process about the motives behind the border police’s actions, and questioning what else drives their actions besides racism.
Wait, Robots！？ (Week 4)
When I read the Los Vendidos play by Luis Valdez, my poor reading comprehension led to me completely missing a small but important detail near the end. Namely, the fact that Honest Sancho is a robot. “SANCHO starts where he is, frozen to his spot,” (p. 290). Without knowing that fact, I was under the impression that Secretary Jimenez was stupid enough to think that robots were real. While I still find her to be an idiot who was fooled by the humans pretending to be robots, the knowledge that actual robots exist in the setting and can convincingly pass off as humans lets me exercise more willing suspension of disbelief as to her being fooled. This fact doesn’t have much to do with the racial themes and political message of the play, but I suppose I can connect it to our class discussion. When we talked about how every character is a sellout in some capacity, Honest Sancho cannot really be a sellout if he has no actual personality or motives beyond what he is programmed to do. He is a tool for the real sellouts to make a profit. Speaking of which, the sellouts who pretend to be robots do a convincing job of playing up Mexican stereotypes to portray their respective models. Admittedly, some of the caricatures they depicted were lost on me due to my own ignorance of racial stereotypes, but I was aware of enough of them to get the gist of what they were doing. Discussion question: How culpable can they be for the perpetuation of these Mexican stereotypes, considering that they are preying on the racism of a society that will continue to believe in such stereotypes regardless of what they do or don’t do? If nothing else, the Secretary seems adamant to stubbornly hold onto her Anglocentric lifestyle. “My name is Miss JIM-enez. Don’t you speak English? What’s wrong with you?” (p. 282).
A Silvery Night (Week 3)
The protagonist of A Silvery Night is taught by his religious family and their traditional heritage to fear the Devil, but instead of developing a fear as they intended, he develops a fascination with the Devil. I might just be reading into this way too much, but the concept of him being tempted to do what he has been prohibited from brings to mind the Book of Genesis, in which Adam and Eve are tempted by the snake to disobey God’s orders and eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Like Adam and Eve, the protagonist of A Silvery Night faces temptation and gives into it, and is forever changed by the experience. “He got to the center of the knoll and summoned him. At first no words came out, from pure fright, but then his name slipped out in a loud voice and nothing happened. He kept calling him by different names. And nothing. No one came out.” (98) While Adam and Eve became aware of what was good and evil, the protagonist realizes that he cannot summon the Devil as he had been warned against. “Now he understood everything. Those who summoned the devil went crazy, not because the devil appeared, but just the opposite, because he didn’t appear.” (99) Coming to the conclusion that the Devil doesn’t exist, the seeds are planted for a crisis of faith as he starts to question a strong, defining facet of his heritage. While I could keep talking (or more likely, grasping for straws) about the literary parallels between the Book of Genesis and A Silvery Night, I would rather bring up what Raoul said in class about how he takes relief in the idea that the Devil doesn’t exist and therefore neither does suffering and punishment after death. Yes, the protagonist might find relief in this, but he may also find distress, since it is heavily implied that he begins to doubt the existence of God as a result and may be confused and lost when presented with this idea, given how prominent religion is in family heritage. We may never know how these thoughts ultimately affect him in the long run, but we can speculate on the possibilities.
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