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’s ability to make lasting connections between her childhood events and those in her adulthood, provide us with an animate justification of the experience of being a bisexual woman of color with cultural influences.
In the first section of, “A Cup of Water Underneath my Bed,” Daisy talks about her family’s devotion and cultural and spiritual background.

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

cards:
She [listens} to her bold English words – dog, cat, house – and there is all the evidence of what is to come in my life. I am not to go the way of the two people I long for in the thick terror of the night.

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

73). Even though she knew what to watch out for from her mothers and aunts stories, they also advised her on what to look for in live. For instance, “a man with a college degree is best, but choose white over black because no one sees the diploma on the street, in churches, and at the supermercados…” and, “remember to ask if he grew up in the capital or some no-name campo. It is the difference between marrying the Bronx and Fort Lee” (Hernández 75). However, even with all the advice that has been passed down to her from older generations, she meets a guy by the name of Julio, a Colombian man, who she ends up dating for about two years and leaves him for another man with more money and a better car. However, when Daisy is in college, she is taken back to a memory she had when she was 10 years old. Daisy was sitting around the kitchen table, when a friend of her mother’s tells her Tia’s the latest chisme pertaining to Iris Chacón, “a women they all know from the neighborhood has left her husband and children to be with another woman” (Hernández 77). How was this possible, it wasn’t until she was in college that she realized the idea of kissing a girl had never occurred to her, thus striking her curiosity. Her first experience with a woman was with a Dominican friend, which only lasted a couple months. Not long after, she goes out with a Puerto Rican butch for two months, then back to a Dominican femme, to dating a transgender man to back to sticking to what she knows and dates a Colombian woman. However, when the dark-haired woman brakes up with her via e-mail, she can’t talk about it to her Mami and Tía Chuchi and Tía Dora and Tía Rosa because of how the Latin culture would present its own fair share of difficulties to Daisy. Therefore, when Daisy comes out to her mother, she at first tells her it’s the rigors of graduate school that cause her to sob within her mother’s arms. Unable to take it any longer, the next day she calls her mother in and tells her, “estoy saliendo con mujeres.” I’m dating women” (Hernández 84). Daisy’s mother doesn’t know what to say other than, “Ay, Dios Mío,” which after hyperventilating and fanning her-self with her other hand states, “I’ve never heard of this. This doesn’t happen in Colombia. But I never saw anything like this there” (Hernández 84). When the news of Daisy’s bisexuality ends up traveling to the rest of her family, mostly her aunts react and her Tía Chuchi accuses her of trying to kill her mother and her Tía Dora stops talking to her for a number of years. Daisy’s ability to hold onto her sexuality firmly even in the face of lesbian incredulity allows her to explore her family’s racism, thus being defined by contradictions.