Mystery Of The Stupid Morons-Personal Narrative Analysis

1422 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Essay on fatherlessness

An essay on the one time my family apartment was broken into while we were away on vacation and how I solved the Mystery of the Stupid Morons. Appeared in The New Yorker, June 13, 2011

All the Dominicans I knew in those days sent money home. My mother certainly did. She didn’t have a regular job outside of caring for us five kids so she scrimped the loot together from whatever came her way. My father was always losing his forklift job so it wasn’t like she had a steady flow ever. But my mother would rather have died than not send money back home to my grandparents in Santo Domingo. They were alone down there and those remittance, beyond material support, were a way, I suspect, for Mami to negotiate the absence, the distance caused by …show more content…

Two, maybe three hundred dollars. But in Santo Domingo of those years, in the neighborhood in which my abuelos lived, that 300 smackers was the difference between life with meat and life without, between electricity and stone age. All of us kids knew where that money was hidden too—our apartment wasn’t huge—but we all also knew that to touch it would have meant a violence approaching death. I, who could take the change out of my mother’s purse without even thinking, couldn’t have brought myself to even look at that forbidden …show more content…

My one and only case.

The next day at the pool the dolt announced that someone had broken into his apartment and stolen all of his savings. This place is full of thieves, he complained bitterly and I was like: No kidding.

Took me two days to return the money to my mother. Truth was I was seriously considering keeping it. I’d never had that much money hand and who in those days didn’t want a Colecovision? But in the end the guilt got to me and I gave it to her and told her what had happened. I guess I was expecting my mother to run around in joy, to crown me her favorite son, to at least cook me my favorite meal. Nada. She just looked at the money and then at me and went back to her bedroom and put it back in its place. I’d wanted a party or at least to see her happy but there was nothing. Just 200 and some odd dollars and fifteen hundred or so miles — that’s all there

Show More
Related

  • Struggles of a Dominican American Family

    859 Words  | 2 Pages

    Culture is our way of experiencing our daily lives. Dominican Republic’s culture is very complementary to mine, we respect our family dearly. Although it is peculiar for the housewife to be the bread winner of the family, the father is usually the one that will provide for the family. A Large family is infrequent nowadays, most families could have up to six children. A big family also plays a big role in financial problem. Junnot and his family leaves in a very poor neighborhood since it was just his mother that is basically feeding everyone in the house. The amount of income parents makes will determine the type of neighborhood they might live in, or the type of school the children might go to. “It is not as if the robbery came as a huge surprise. In our neighborhood, cars and apartment were always getting jacked.”(385) Majority of the immigrant lives in a poor neighborhood full of delinquency and crime due to poverty. Poverty level is based on the family circumstances. There is a higher chance of poverty with the newly immigrant, and they live in this condition because they are still new to the county. Education also plays a big role in this, because the more educated a person is the more they are likely to make it and become successful quicker. This might be a little different with the children, and there is a high

    Read More

  • How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

    1624 Words  | 4 Pages

    Immigrants come to America, the revered City upon a Hill, with wide eyes and high hopes, eager to have their every dream and wild reverie fulfilled. Rarely, if ever, is this actually the case. A select few do achieve the stereotypical ‘rags to riches’ transformation – thus perpetuating the myth. The Garcia family from Julia Alvarez’s book How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, fall prey to this fairytale. They start off the tale well enough: the girls are treated like royalty, princesses of their Island home, but remained locked in their tower, also known as the walls of their family compound. The family is forced to flee their Dominican Republic paradise – which they affectionately refer to as simply, the Island – trading it instead for the cold, mean streets of American suburbs. After a brief acclimation period, during which the girls realize how much freedom is now available to them, they enthusiastically try to shed their Island roots and become true “American girls.” They throw themselves into the American lifestyle, but there is one slight snag in their plan: they, as a group, are unable to forget their Island heritage and upbringing, despite how hard they try to do so. The story of the Garcia girls is not a fairytale – not of the Disney variety anyway; it is the story of immigrants who do not make the miraculous transition from rags to riches, but from stifling social conventions to unabridged freedom too quickly, leaving them with nothing but confusion and unresolved questions of identity.

    Read More

  • Edwidge Danticat's Night Women: Literary Analysis

    470 Words  | 1 Pages

    Parents make sacrifices in order to provide an opportunity for their children to escape from Haiti to live a better life. In the short story Night Women a mother prostitutes herself to provide

    Read More

  • The Contribution of the Latina Voice: Julia Alvarez

    1112 Words  | 3 Pages

    Around the time of Trujillo’s dictatorship, specifically on March 27, 1950, a little Dominican girl, named Julia Alvarez, was born in New York. At three months, Julia and her family moved to the Dominican Republic, where she spent most of her childhood. While growing up, Julia lived with her mother’s rich, large, and traditional extended family, in which the men worked and the women stayed home. Julia’s childhood, even though living in the Dominican Republic, was surrounded by American culture in which she ate American food, wore American clothes, and went to an American school. With so many ties to the United States, Julia’s father was saved from being another one of Trujillo’s victims because of her father’s association with the underground (a secret force that tried to usurp Trujillo from power); however, Trujillo could not victimize a family with a strong tie to America. In 1960, the Alvarez family moved out of the Dominican Republic and back to New York since Trujillo had set up police surveillance around the Alvarez family compound; soon enough Trujillo was going to get rid of him. However, just before the police were able to capture Julia’s f...

    Read More

  • Mothers Of The Plaza De The Dirty War

    1687 Words  | 4 Pages

    A mother’s love is one of the strongest passions in the world. This love can drive a mother to do drastic deeds to save her children and her family. The mothers and the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo truly exemplify the power of a mother’s love. Their love was shown during the Dirty War in Argentina in 1976.

    Read More

  • Volar By Judith Ortiz Cofer Summary

    759 Words  | 2 Pages

    The narrator seems to remember her parents fondly but there is a sadness in the memory. The parents are discussing taking a trip back to Puerto Rico, to see the mother’s family. The narrator’s mother longs to return to where she came from, even just to visit, she talks to her husband about “renting a car and going to the beach” (295) You can tell that the mother has thought about going back to visit often, she has already planned out the trip in her mind. The narrator’s father explains that the family cannot visit, he begs her to understand that he “can’t take the time off of work” (295) and tries to dissuade her with the expense of flying to Puerto Rico. The father obviously works hard to provide for his family and while he does a good job, it is just too much for him to take off and return to his wife’s home. It seems that they have had this same conversation before, he answers her almost like he is resigned to the fact that she will never stop asking to

    Read More

  • Junot Diaz The Money Summary

    1419 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the story ‘The Money’ Junot Diaz talks about a life changing event that happened when he was 12 years old. He first starts talking about his family’s economic position. He describes how his father was always losing his forklift positions and his mother not having a stable job. Diaz’s family lived in a small apartment, where they never had snacks or any good food that would sustain them to have a healthy balance. But his mother would always find a way to save about $200 to $300 dollars to send back to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where Diaz’s grandparents lived to also support them as well. Junot always knew not to steal because knew the consequences behind that action so him and his other siblings stayed away. One day in the

    Read More

  • An Analysis Of Nuria Amat's 'Tell Them Not To Kill Me'

    855 Words  | 2 Pages

    Rulfo knew what is was like to grow up in poverty, not only did he experience but it was all that surrounded him. Poverty in after the revolution and the Cristero War was extreme. In Nuria Amat’s Juan Rulfo she states that Rulfo’s family were landowners with money, but after the revolution Rulfo’s family lost a practically everything (Amat, 25). One story that connects to the vast occurrence of poverty in Mexican society during the post-revolutionary era is Es que somos muy porbes (We’re Very Poor). Not only does this story draw on the harsh life of the poor, but another theme it includes in the brutality of nature.

    Read More

  • Junot Diaz The Money Summary

    352 Words  | 1 Pages

    Summary of “The Money” by Junot Diaz In this essay, the author recounts a life event from his childhood. The story begins with Junot describing his family's financial status and living arrangement. Diaz and his four siblings lived with their two parents in a catchpenny apartment in a rough urban borough. Not steadily employed, his mother and father were in a constant struggle to keep the family afloat monetarily; to the point where decent, alimental food was not a likely sight in the household. Despite their meager inhabitance his mother was stowing $200 to $300 monthly and sending it to her parents in the Dominican Republic.

    Read More

  • Volar

    889 Words  | 2 Pages

    First off the author puts a lot of little hints into the story clueing us into the fact that this family is from a lower economic and social status. This is to set up our views on what comprises social and economic status. Right off the bat we are told that this little girl has an “allowance of a quarter a day” (Ortiz Cofer 277). This is one of the only times that we are actually given an actual money amount in relation to this family. When added up over 7 days comes into a little under 2 dollars. When compared to modern allowances of wealthier family’s children they usually get much more than that. Another huge thing that clues us into the families economic and social status is the fact that the little girl is aware of her parents fear of the land lord “once I saw our landlord, whom I knew my parents feared,”(par 1). Most people don’t fear their landlords unless they are on the verge of being kicked out due to the inability to pay them. The fact that the parents are showing great enough fear of their landlord that the daughter is picking up on it shows that they are either behind on rent or unable to pay the rent regularly. Judith also write a conversation into the story between the father and the mother of this little girl talking about how the mom wants to go visit home in Puerto Rico the father says”(par 1)...

    Read More

  • Evolving Structure of Mexican Drug Cartels

    1500 Words  | 3 Pages

    A businessman, and a business woman sit across from each other in negotiations. The man proposes four thousand pesos, and the woman says she can't afford that much. She counter-offers twenty-five hundred pesos. The man agrees and leaves. This was a weekly payment for the protection of the woman's local business against the Juarez Cartel."

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Junot Diaz's 'The Money'

    1046 Words  | 3 Pages

    In Junot Diaz’s essay “The Money” he explains where his family stands economically. Stating that his father was regularly being fired from his forklifting jobs and his mother 's only job was to care for him and his four siblings. With the money brought home by his father, his mom would save some. Her reason was to raise enough to send to her parents back in the Dominican Republic. When his family went on a vacation, they came back to an unpleasant surprise; their house had been broke into. Eventually Diaz was able to get back their money and belongings. Diaz returned the money to his mother although she didn’t thank him for it, this disappointed him. Like Diaz I have also encountered a similar situation where I was disappointed. When I was in second grade, my life life took a completely different turn. My dad took an unexpected trip to Guatemala, on his return, the outcome was not what I expected.

    Read More

  • Life on the Border

    1312 Words  | 3 Pages

    We left on June 13 on a plane headed for El Paso, Texas. We would be staying at the Loretto School, our sister school, and then every morning we would cross over the border into Ciudad Juarez and go work at a daycare center, Centro del Spiritu Sanctu. Our first day there we didn’t go to the daycare center, instead we met some friends of Mrs. Hartrich’s, Betty and Peter. They live in Juarez, and what they do is help out the people in their community. They also help people who are coming down from the United States to help out for the first time or people who are coming back from Central or South America and need a place to stay before heading back to the United States. Betty told us about the maquilladoras. They are sweatshops that a lot of big corporations in America, like N...

    Read More

  • Personal Narrative: Fake and Fabricated

    2378 Words  | 5 Pages

    Happiness is fake, like something forced upon me; something not real, fabricated and I don’t like it. I’m supposed to like it though. I’m supposed to like everything the government forces on me. I feel like I’m the only person who doesn’t feel content with my life, everyone else seems to be perfect while I’m falling apart at the seams.

    Read More

  • My Neighborhood: Mis Barrios De El Paso

    925 Words  | 2 Pages

    I also know of an instance in which one neighbor broke into another’s house and stole some

    Read More

More about Mystery Of The Stupid Morons-Personal Narrative Analysis

Open Document