Analysis Of Junot Diaz's Poem How To Date A Browngirl

In the poem “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie” Junot Diaz uses allusion and visual imagery in a very vivid way to explain the difficulties of being both male and a minority in America. He shows how often we accept as young men that bending the truth about ourselves has become almost necessary to get a date with a girl, then he engages it what appears to be a preparation of a young guy on how to organize and clean his house in accordance to with the economical status of the girl that he will be bringing home and to make himself appealing to the type of girl he is with.
This journey begins with the narrator who is believed to be an older man, probably a friend, giving instructions to a young kid on how to do things depending upon where the girl he is dating is from. - “Clear the government cheese from the refrigerator. If the girl's from the Terrace stack the boxes behind the milk. If she's from the Park or Society Hill

hide the cheese in the cabinet above the oven, way up where she'll never see”- He is describing the different responses and the different scenarios he would face depending on the ethnicity of the girl he is dealing with. This says a lot of what the author thinks about each ethnicity’s personalities.

Also, Diaz makes reference to awkward childhood pictures “At the campo” which show the young guy’s ethnicity “With an Afro”, and to hiding the bucket with “Crapped-on” toilet paper in the bathroom.

Putting them all together, these literary images go to describe a young man, most likely of Latino descent, who also lives with his mother in what seems to be a poverty troubled area. These instructions are given to the young man from a position of knowledge and experience and using references to things that only people from Latino descent would have experienced in his household. This leads to believe that the narrator’s background is also Latino. To this point the Young man has only received instructions and this is where we start getting some information about this character too. We find out the specific type of girl he wants the most. “The White ones are the ones you want the most, aren’t they…” and we also discover that the young man is Dominican when the narrator says, “You’ll wonder how she feels about Dominicans. Don’t

ask”.
Lastly, the young man is trained on the details of being intimate with women of various ethnicities. These details are not even close to being sensitive. The narrator even instruct the young man on conversation that would specifically play the young women’s mind into agreeing to have sex with him, or at least get close enough to his goal. After explaining all this, Diaz paints a painful image of a woman who has done something she knows she will later regret. This may suggest that the narrator has experience with white women not choosing to socialize with guys of his type.
Diaz introduces the world to the secret life of men in his story and grounds the thoughts of young men and often what is built as the driving force in their lives. At first look this seems to be the story of a mentor passing the torch down to his apprentice but as we get to the core of it we can see that it is about the struggles of various races to socialize, even with a country as diverse and open-minded as The United States. Diaz in this case specifies this story to Dominicans, which are within the Latino community a much smaller community. This is a situation that many people can relate to since the struggle to overcome racial favoritism is not only for Dominicans but also for mostly every other ethnicity or nationality but white Americans. So basically he faces the difficulty of what he wants and what he can actually achieve and we can see how for him even though he changes his “Game” depending on the girls ethnicity he does not want to be judged by his own. This is why he is instructed to hide who he really is.