Analysis Of Drown By Junot Diaz

Sadness, anger, humor, intrigue, and yearning swept over me as I devoured Junot Diaz’s dark and descriptive short story collection/novel Drown. As a mother of adolescent boys and as a teacher, my heart ached for Yunior both as a child and a young adult. As a child, Yunior was innocent, lonely, and lacked support. These same traits followed him through adolescence and into adulthood. Along with these feeling about Yunior, I guiltily felt little compassion for Yunior’s father, Ramon de las Casas. Keenly, Ramon constructed plans to get to the United States yet fell short in living up to his potential and providing for his family. While still in the Dominican Republic, Yunior reminisced, “We were poor. The only way we could have been poorer

Yunior went on and described how, “When times were real flogo, when the last of the colored bill flew out of Mami’s purse, she packed us off to our relatives” (p.74). In Ramon’s quest for a better life, he failed to take care of his family in Santo Domingo. The poverty in Yunior’s life led his mother to work long hours resulting in a lack of supervision and support. Yunior’s mother worked tirelessly while Ramon could not prioritize. In fact, at one point he was working two jobs, yet sent no money for an entire year back to the family he left (187). Because of his ill-equipped father, I was filled with anger at the difficulties Yunior faced. I wanted Ramon to do more, but could he? Basically, no; unfortunately, he lacked the education and life-skills necessary for assimilation into the United State’s culture and society. However, interestingly enough, Tienda & Haskins’ 2011 article “Immigrant children: Introducing the issue,” claimed that “Alejandro Portes and Alejandro Rivas of Princeton University [have evidence to show] immigrants adapt culturally and progress economically between the first and second generation” (p. 11). Therefore, if Daiz wrote a sequel, I am left holding out hope for Yunior and his

As Tienda and Haskins (2011) noted, “Immigrant children are more likely than native children to face circumstances such as low family income, poor parental education, and language barriers that place them at risk for developmental delay and poor academic performance once they enter school” (p. 7). At the school where I teach, the circumstances holding back the immigrant family are clearly visible. A few years ago, I had a student in class whose family had recently immigrated to the United States from Mexico. Language barriers initially set him back followed by poor attendance because he was working nights to help support his family. As his English teacher, I felt ill-equipped to support his success. Many of the issues impacting his academic success were out of both his control and mine. Overall, schools, especially rural schools in Iowa, need to pay closer attention to the diverse lifestyles of their multicultural students and