A Cup Of Water Underneath My Bed Summary

I’m nominating Daisy Hernández’ memoir, “A Cup of Water Underneath my Bed,” for the 2016 Humanities Award for Intersectional Analysis. Daisy’s life story is an exemplary example of intersectionality because she is an authentic compassionate individual who writes about living, the aspects of her identity and redefining the meaning of success. The 2016 Humanities Award for Intersectional Analysis criteria requires that the candidate exemplify a complex intersectional analysis, which Daisy has exemplified over and over again in her writing. Daisy’s intersection of social, ethnic and racial differences, along with the complexity of language, sexuality, and class can be distinguished throughout the three structured sections of her life. In addition,

Daisy grew up in a working-class immigrant Cuban and Colombian Family living in Union City, NJ. Her father was a Cuban factory worker and her mother was a Colombian Santeria-practicing seamstress in a factory. Daisy was born into a culture full of women, women who told stories about their own experiences and of others who had grown up in the same community. However, her parents both valued education and sent Daisy to an English Catholic elementary school, even though she grew up speaking only Spanish in the comfort of her home. One day at school, Daisy is faced to analyze a deck of cards with pictures and words, however at home, Daisy remembers the cartas her Tía Rosa’s husband uses to talk with the spirit world. As Daisy watches the White woman with the

The first man I love and the first woman I adore, my father and my mother with tier Spanish words, are not in these cards. The road before me is English and the next part too awful to ask aloud or even silently: What is so wrong with my parents that I am not to mimic their hands, their needs, not even their words (Hernández 5).

As a child, Daisy was the one her parents relied upon to translate and explain information, since her parents only knew Spanish. Although after a while, many parts of the white world attracted her and she began to experience contradictory emotions about her national language of Spanish.

In the second section, Daisy talks about her experiences with sexuality with power and jeopardy. In our adolescent years, we are faced with many impediments that enforce strict limitations on our gender, race, migration and sexuality. At the age of 16, Daisy already knew to stay away from Columbian men, “Columbian men get drunk, beat their women, cheat on their wives, and never earn enough money. They keep mistresses, have bastard children, and never come home on time. They steal, lie, sneak around, and come home to die, cradled in the arms of bitter wives” (Hernández