Dream
Machado is starting to see the physical toll that her girlfriend is having on her. She is aware of the problem but doesn't seem in the right state to do anything about it. Abuse makes people feel trapped and powerless, which is why her body is reacting in this state.
To show that you have not been fucking tho~e people, you become adept at doing searches on your phone, providing evi-dence that you haven't been in contact with anyone.
Similarly seen in the last chapter of This Is How You Lose Her, we see how relationships cause the narrators to emotionally and spiritually disintigrate.
f her love for you has sharpened and pinned you to a wall.
It reminds me of people who collect insects and compile them into a shadow box with pins. Similarly to Autobahn who was the curator for collecting and compiling a database of birds in the world. The curator controls who and how the subjects are displayed to the world. This short passage displays how arrested Machado is under her partner.
But you.
Similar to Diaz, Machado struggled with conflating herself into two people through her accomplishments and weaknesses. They lived two different lives. What people see and what we keep in private can exist as two different people, people that we'd only show with exclusivity.
You should have had a baby with that ex of yours. Th en she wouldn’t have left you.
Children make women subservient to men
Only a bitch of color comes to Harvard to get pregnant. White women don’t do that. Asian woman don’t do that. Only fucking black and Latina women.
Such interracial aggression for Black and Latino women
You scan the incoming junior faculty for a possible, but there’s nothing.
Same sorta predatory behavior as Ms. Lora
your legs look like they belong to someone else. Every time you think about the ex, every time the loneliness rears up in you like a seething, burning continent, you tie on your shoes and hit the paths and that helps; it really does
Literally running away from his problems
fl ew a plane into your soul. Like someone fl ew two planes into your soul
9/11 reference? to illustrate the tragic loss? Am i thinking too much about this? Probably.
drops a fuck-ing bomb on this city,
References Ms. Lora with the back drop of possible nuclear war
super open- minded blanquita
Perceived racial differences
, in a bit it so won’t matter.
At this point it seems that Yunior has become resigned to his motivations for cheating that it numbs him to the damage he causes to others.
still pushing the college thing, off ers to pay all the admission fees but your heart ain’t in it and you tell her,
Similar to Tammy, even though men treated them poorly, they're still available to the men that do them wrong, and they are willing to help them and financially support them.
At the school the Spanish girls are the ones who give her trou-ble. They make fun of her accent, her clothes, her physique. (They call her Miss Pat.) She never complains about it— It’s a really great job, she says— but you see the nonsense fi rsthand. It’s just the Spanish girls, though. The whitegirls love her to death. She takes over the gymnastics team. She brings them to dance programs for inspiration. And in no time at all they start winning.
To the Spanish girls, Ms. Lora is seen as a type of competition to them? Or they resent her because she is Latin but doesn't fit into the mold of conventional Latin beauty. She is of no use to them like she is to the white gymnasts. Not only because she is athletic but she is also a token because she is hispanic and a gymnast.
ou really need to get out of here
She wants to help him. Similar to Paloma's concerns.
This time you don’t even ask about the condom. You just come inside her. You are surprised at how pissed you are. But she kisses your face over and over and it moves you. No one has ever done that. The girls you boned, they were always ashamed afterward. And there was always panic. Someone heard. Fix the bed up. Open the windows. Here there is none of that
An anxiety and shame that follows the act of sex. Young women are filled with anxiety surrounding their body image and performance. Where as Ms. Lora, being a mature woman, knows she doesn't fit into the conventional definition of beauty because of her strength and muscle tone. Yet isn't hindered by what comes natural in sex.
Both your father and your brother were sucios. Shit, your father used to take you on his pussy runs, leave you in the car while he ran up into cribs to bone his girlfriends. Your brother was no better, boning girls in the bed next to yours. Sucios of the worst kind and now it’s offi cial: you are one, too.
Sucio legacy! A tradition of sleazy machismo behavior
keeping you from pulling out. Stay.
There is no tension or anxiety because Ms. Lora is a mature woman. Pregnancy isn't a threat as much as it would be for Paloma.
she was terrifi ed that if she got pregnant she wouldn’t abort it out of love for you and then her life would be over
Also takes place during the AID's epidemic, traumatized kids about sex and their bodies. Paloma knows a possible pregnancy from Yunior would be her downfall from breaking the curse of her family.
You add an extra run to your workout, hoping it will cool your granos, but it doesn’t work. You have a couple dreams where you are about to touch her but then the bomb blows NYC to kingdom come and you watch the shock wave roll up and then you wake, your tongue clamped fi rmly between your teeth
Sexual tension mixed with the anxiety of living during a time of possible nuclear war.
Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn’t mean you don’t have them
Part of Paloma's fear, the necessity of being a mother once you're involved with someone.
People always touched you. You were used to it. You were an amateur weightlifter, something else you did to keep your mind off the shit of your life.
Touch, sex as an outlet for escapism
Why is sex with me a mistake, you demanded, but she just shook her head, pulled your hand out of her pants. Paloma was convinced that if she made any mistakes in the next two years, any mistakes at all, she would be stuck in that family of hers forever.
Sex is a gateway for Latin women to be sucked into a life of servitude for men
any mistakes
Would sleeping with Yunior be the mistake? She knows he potentially can become toxic towards her?
she didn’t need any more depressing than she had already. She lived in a one- bedroom apartment with four younger siblings and a disabled mom and she was taking care of all of them. That and honors classes. She didn’t have time for anything and mostly stayed with you, you suspected, because she felt bad for what had happened with your brother.
Illustrates the resilience of women while portraying men having a harder time coping with their environment
Someone really should have medicated you.
lack of importance when it comes to mental health
miss lora151blow itself to pieces
Nuclear war, anxiety
t was 1985. You were sixteen years old and you were messed up and alone like a motherfucker. You also were convinced— like totally utterly convinced— that the world was going to
His relationship with Ms. Lora was built on loneliness and vulnerability
Was it some atavistic impulse to die alone, out of sight? Or was he just trying to fulfi ll something that had always been inside of him?
To disappear in obscurity like his father?
You’d fuck anything,
Teen hormones, anxiety, validation fueling him
if it hadn’t been for your brothe
He is more like his brother than he believes himself to be.
We even saw the ocean, up there at the top of Westminster,
Their mom makes the journey to the water without their father, symbolizing a separation. Her departure with her kids to the outside world foreshadows their arrangement as a family in the future.
losing it,
Lose connection with her husband, losing ties, disconnecting from her old life in DR
None of you are ready for guests, Papi said. Look at this house. Look at your children.
Their father keeps his family purposely isolated as a form of abuse and control. He controls who enters and leaves the house. The social deprivation is a punishment enforced upon the rest of the family so they will adjust to being the ideal Americanized family. He doesn't take ownership of his actions as a father by referring to his child as "your children" as if they solely belong to the mother.
people would be. All that would be left would be us colored folks.
The shifting of class and race over time. Gentrification leaves behind "minority groups".
The brother watched me with a half grin, not understanding a word I’d said, his arms scrunched nervously at his sides. His hair was a frightening no-color. His sister had green eyes and her freckled face was cowled in a hood of pink fur. We had on the same brand of mittens, bought cheap from Two Guys.
Class and race difference
pelo malo. He put two or three creams on my head and had me sit with the foam awhile; after his wife rinsed me off he studied my head in the mirror, tugged at my hair, rubbed an oil into it, and fi nally sighed
One thing their father cannot tame is Yunior's hair. His father projects his own fears based on assimilation toward Yunior's unruly hair, representing evidence of their DR heritage. Yunior's hair becomes a liability for their father's wishes to become Americans in ultimately achieving the American Dream. His order to shave Yunior's hair is the only option for him to achieve his dream while also maintaining control over the bodies of his family.
api was breathing down my neck, his hand on a belt, I couldn’t perform; I looked at my father like my laces were live wires he wanted me to touch together
Yunior couldn't deliver what his father wanted from him which was tying his shoes. The environment his father created with his kids was solely "disciplinary" preventing any emotional vulnerability to be accepted. Not being able to "perform" also has a sexual innuendo of not being able to perform sexually, or not being "man enough". Notice how Diaz's use of language transcends the context of his short stories to other discourses such as sex, intimacy, ego, identity, etc.
I didn’t know what to make of him. A father is a hard thing to compass
Theres a desparity in expectation in how Rafa and Yunior perceived their father while in DR compared to now in America. Theres no middle ground to their idealization of their father, meaning that their upbringing would lead them to align themselves with unrealistic expectations of masculinity hence machismo. This also illustrates the difference in wealth between Latin and American cultures.
She would stand behind us and when I turned around she would be mouthing the words we were learning, trying to make sense of them
Illustrates how the household is prioritized. Men, children, and then women. Women are literally voiceless in this short story and are grappling with their own agency to keep up with the Americanization of the rest of their family. Yunior's mother learning English is her way of keeping up and surviving with the rest of her family.
We didn’t stop shivering until Papi set the apartment temperature to about eighty. Beads of water gathered on the windows like bees and we had to wipe the glass to see outside.
Create juxtaposition of cold and heat to symbolize the mixing of two worlds through the imagery of weather and climate.
frozen solid
Similar to an Ice Age, before the new dawn of civilization.
He also helped himself to his bed, to the TV, and to Mami’s bed.
The mother's toleration of having her things stolen from Rafa might have been for many reasons. Was it because she was afraid to completely lose Rafa? Was it to teach him a lesson, as if she knew he'd come back? Was she just weak to the needs of her first born? Either way, it shows a very bad image to Yunior that women are supposed to be the mules of men, a subject to their abuse and vulnerability. It normalizes the exploitation of their mother and the deceit of women in general.
Mami had miscarried her fi rst two pregnancies and by the time she’d gotten knocked up with Rafa she’d been told for years she’d never have children again; my brother himself almost died in childbirth, and for the fi rst two years of his life Mami had this morbid fear (so my tías tell me) that someone was going to kidnap him
Yunior's mom's reason for treating Rafa differently is because he is the first born. He was born under precarious conditions that made his birth a miracle, enabling privilege to be endowed upon him with no morals of his own. Her fear lies in completely losing him, not to cancer, but to a woman she despises. Family ties are thicker than any other.
ceberg Slim
Iceberg Slim was a very notorious pimp who literally wrote the book on pimping. His methods involved intense manipulation, abuse towards women, and gaslighting to maintain power over the people he abused. Not only was his work provoking but telling of how men treated women within a specific social group.
He prided himself on being the neigh-borhood lunatic, wasn’t going to let a little thing like cancer get in the way of his offi cial duties
To avoid being vulnerable, Rafa compensates with more absurd behavior to prove to himself and the public realm that he is still able to perform masculinity while he is ill. Each character in this story is hyper performing their role of normalcy.
he fronted like noth-ing had happened.
Rafa doesn't want his cover of Machismo to be relieved to the public realm. He pretends he isn't sick and attempts to function like a healthy person. Similar to his mother, he takes up a performance of acting busy to avoid the reality of his situation. Is this a learned behavior from his mother to dismiss and ignore the traumatic parts of reality?
(I didn’t lift a fucking fi nger in our apartment, male privilege, baby.)
Exactly, male privilege. Even though Yunior isn't treated with the same honor as Rafa, he still has his male privilege to justify his behavior.
checked out in her own way
The mother has resigned herself to her role of working and proving for her kids as a way to redeem some sense of normalcy in her life after Rafa's diagnosis. Does this also have to do with the class struggle of Hispanic women having to work to make ends meet for their children compared to the white majority?
, smoking so much bud that if I remembered an hour from any one of those days it would have been a lot
Disassociating, a form of escape
event- horizon personalities— shit just fell into her and you never really knew how she felt about it. She just seemed to take it, never gave anything off
The mother takes on a role of muledom. Because Rafa is the first born after so many stillborns, Yunior's mother treats him like a prince who can get away with anything. Though as the youngest, Yunior isn't given the same treatment.