Junot Diaz’s story “How to Date a Brown girl, Black girl, White girl, or Halfie” is a written instructional guide offering advice on proper dating etiquette. The story is centered around an Afro-Dominican teenage boy who breaks down instructions on how to get laid with women based on their ethnicity and social class. He explains step by step how you should handle each woman, from changing your speech and behavioral approach depending on whether she was an insider or an outsider. However the narrator’s unreliability leaves the readers with questions on how true the story is or how it should be interpreted. The unreliability of the narrator in this story reveals a lack of pride in the narrator’s individuality, thus the facade he keeps up in order to hide his ethnicity and social class. …show more content…
We are aware of the narrator’s African roots when he tells his readers that “Hide the pictures of yourself with an Afro” (Junot Diaz).
Although it seems trivial, the narrator only carried feelings of embarrassment towards that picture, which could potentially ruin his date. Although Yunior realizes he is Dominican, only African blood runs in his veins, thus marginalizing him in society as an Other. Knowing that, the narrator hides his background and changes his character depending on the social class and ethnicity of his date. Again, we witness that the narrator has mixed feelings about his ethnicity when he mentioned what to do when one of the girl’s mother wants to meet you; he says “Don’t panic. Say, Hey, no problem. Run a hand through your hair like the white boys do even though the only thing that runs through your hair is Africa” (Junot Diaz). By doing so Yunior is trying to imitate a race he wishes to be. When the narrator mentions that “the white ones are the ones you want the most,” (Junot Diaz) it is clear that having sex with a white girl would be as close as Yunior could get to being white
himself. Social class is a big factor the narrator tries to hide in the story. He tells the reader to “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” (Junot Diaz). Discovery of government cheese in the fridge by your date would mean you are receiving government help which could ruin his date. Also this was no simple matter because the girl’s social class determined where the cheese would be hidden which says a lot about the narrator anxiety in being exposed. To the narrator all this determined whether you were going to get laid at the end of the date or not. Yunior is ashamed of his background and social standing, which is why he tells his readers to mask themselves by not revealing information irrelevant to the date in fear of being judged by those standards. We can also tell that the narrator was not happy with himself since he was always changing for the people he dated. The narrator is so set on social class, ethnicity and his background that he has created a fake self of himself. Instead of being himself and not hiding behind a false front the narrator has become someone ruled by the very social standards he tries to avoid.
Okita and Cisneros’ stories are written from very different standpoints, and from first glance do not even appear related, yet through all of this emerges the idea that you can create your own identity. This common theme would not be achievable if it were not for the eloquent use of literary devices such as tone, mood, and shifts by Okita and Cisneros. Not only do Okita and Cisneros’ works bring together a common theme they manage to bring to light the very real problem of racism in America, that has existed since it’s very foundation, in an attempt to bring about change. Although Both authors used a wide variety of literary techniques to write their works they show that commonalities can be found in the most different of
In the essay of Mr.Gary Soto, we learn about his experiences about falling in love with someone of a different race. Ever since he was young, he would be lectured that marrying a Mexican women would be the best option for his life. Gary’s grandmother would always proclaim: “... the virtues of marrying a Mexican girl: first, she could cook,second, she acted like a woman, not a man, in her husband’s home” (pp.219). Being conditioned into the notion that all Mexican woman have been trained to be proper women, Mr. Soto set out on finding his brown eyed girl; however, what love had quite a different plan. This paper will cover three different themes Gary’s essay: The tone, the mindset of the character’s mindsets, and the overall message of the
Junot Diaz's Drown, a compilation of short stories, exemplifies how the high standard of masculinity within the Latino community can have a detrimental effect on males. These stories are told in the first person by a narrator called Yunior. The different stories are told against the background of The Dominican Republic and the United States. The narrator highlights the different challenges that he faces throughout his childhood and into his young adult life. During this period, he struggles to find his identity which is expected by every Latino. In the Dominican Republic, a man’s manhood is closely tied to his identity, and Yunior is no exception. While in the process of finding his identity, Yunior is challenged with abuse, poverty and the lure of drugs, which leads to his addiction and his becoming violent .…
In “Once Upon a Quinceanera” Julia Alvarez follows the Hispanic coming of age tradition for females to explore how evolution of culture has shifted throughout generations. By doing this Alvarez discovers perceptions are influenced by cross cultural boundaries. In “Leave Your Name at the Border” Manuel Munoz, discusses the barriers between Mexicans and Americans when it comes to language and how it affects future generations. He does this by acknowledging socially expected norms for Mexican Americans in public and the tensions created when assimilating to such norms between a non-dominant and dominant group. In “What’s Black, Then White, and Said All Over,” Leslie Savan discusses how black talk and pop talk is connected because white people
Junot Diaz is a Dominican-American writer whose collection of short stories Drown tells the story of immigrant families in the urban community of New Jersey. His short story “Fiesta, 1980” focuses on Yunior, an adolescent boy from Dominican Republic and his relationship with his father. On the other hand, Piri Thomas was a great Latino writer from Puerto-Rico whose memoir Down These Mean Streets tells his life story as an adolescent residing in Harlem and the challenges he faces outside in the neighborhood and at home with his father. Both Diaz and Thomas in different ways explore the dynamics of father-son relationships in their work. Furthermore, both expose masculinity as a social construct.
WEESR, KHATHERINE. “Tu no Eres Nada de Dominicano”: Unnatural Narration and De-Naturalizing Gender Consruction in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. “Journal Of Men’s Studies 22, no.2 (Spring2014 2014): 89-104. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed November 30,
Among the most prominent are strains of racism/classism, belonging and dislocation, death and meaning and self-identity, and sexual awakening. In a slim 187 pages the author competently weaves social commentary (via the seemingly innocent adolescent perspective) into a moving narrative that only occasionally veers toward the pedantic.
...and stereotypes against him have played role in Yunior’s racial identity and how he views it. Yunior’s experiences have taught him that white and Latino are different and in essence being white is better. Yunior’s journey of maturation has taught him to accept his racial identity as being Latino and his position in life. Yunior has not reached the end of his maturation period, but given the environment and his situation it appears that he is in a stagnant stage of his life. Had he had a more positive upbringing he would be more optimistic about the future, he would be setting goals for himself instead of just being stuck. In his search for a permanent escape of his reality, he learns that being white is the only way to achieve real success and sadly, Yunior believes, that is not in his future.
“Papi pulled me to my feet by my ear. If you throw up— I won 't, I cried, tears in my eyes, more out of reflex than pain” (307). As this scenario presents violence, it displays innocent Yunior’s response towards his abusive father as he pulls Yunior’s ears. In the short story Fiesta 1980, Junot Diaz depicts the life of young Yunior as he struggles with his Dominican family issues. Yunior was picked on the most in the family, especially from his dad. As Poor Yunior was the victim of his dad’s affair with a Puerto Rican woman, it affected him psychologically. Yunior suffers from the fact his beloved mother is being cheated on; therefore, he vomits as he rides his dad’s van, as his first ride in the van is linked to his first meeting with
The short story “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, and Halfie” by Junot Diaz is the main character, Yunior’s, guide to dating girls of different races and the ways to act in order to get what you want from them. The only thing Yunior seems to want for these girls is sexual acts. This short story argues that a person’s heritage, economic class, and race affect how a person identifies themselves, and how their identity affects how they act towards other people. The pressures a person may feel from society also has an effect on how a person treats themselves and others. The pressure and expectations from society are also what makes Yunior think he needs to have sex with these girls. There are many different occasions of the main character talking and acting differently to other people within the story, such as: to himself, his friends, and the different girls he tries to date.
Whereas Oscar’s mutation can be seen by those around him, Yunior’s sort of marinades over time. Like Oscar, Yunior is also a nerd, on many occasions he admits to watching Akira, a Japanese anime with Oscar, and can even read his Elvish writing on their dorm room door “(Please don’t ask me how I know this. Please.) When I saw that I said: De León, you gotta be kidding. Elvish?”(172). This is not the only time in which Yunior inserts his knowledge of Pop culture. Throughout the course of the novel, Yunior references many different genres: from science fiction to fantasy, and Star Trek to The Lord of the Rings. Yunior’s love of things that would typically be classified as ‘nerdy’ is not the only thing that sets him apart (secretly) from Dominican culture. As the novel progresses, the reader can see that Yunior truly loves Lola, one of his ex girlfriends and Oscar’s sister. In fact, he moves in with Oscar during college at the request of Lola. Towards the conclusion of the novel, Yunior also says “I wish I could say it worked out, that Oscar’s death brought us together…[I] alternated between F… Lola and these incredibly narcissistic hopes of reconciliation that I did nothing to achieve”(324). Yunior’s mutant ability, which can only be defined by his actions throughout the novel, is actually disguising his feelings and who he is so that he may blend in with the Dominican concept of what it means to be masculine. After Oscar’s death and being too late to win Lola over, we begin to see a reemergence of Yunior, one who gets married and “don’t run around after girls anymore. Not much, anyway” (326), and that one day hopes to show Lola’s daughter the writings of Oscar’s that he has kept throughout the years. Yunior, at the conclusion of the story, has matured in many ways, much like the way Wolverine matures throughout the X-Men movies, and goes from being a “lone-ranger’ of sorts but eventually joins the X-Men in
Although it is ultimately revealed that Oscar and Yunior are close with each other, Yunior’s pure embodiment of the Dominican masculine is the complete antithesis of Oscar’s character, who is the opposite of anything that could describe Yunior. One good analogy to the hyper masculine identity of Yunior is to that of the personality of Trujillo, the repressive dictator of the Dominican Republic who oversaw the Haitian parsley massacre. Trujillo had a strong lust for women and a rather apparent tendency for violence, and as some sources (i.e. Masculinity after Trujillo, by Maja Horn) argue, the modern conception of masculinity in the country came to full bloom after his rein. Interestingly this was the period of time that Beli grew up in, and a substantial part of her childhood experience was suffering at the behest of Trujillo’s suppressive regime, and consequentially this contributed to her hefty and dominant
Without details, the words on a page would just simply be words, instead of gateways to a different time or place. Details help promote these obstacles, but the use of tone helps pull in personal feelings to the text, further helping develop the point of view. Point of view is developed through the story through descriptive details and tone, giving the reader insight to the lives of each author and personal experiences they work through and overcome. Issa Rae’s “The Struggle” fully emplefies the theme of misplaced expectations placed on African Americans, but includes a far more contemporary analysis than Staples. Rae grapples as a young African-American woman that also struggles to prove her “blackness” and herself to society’s standards, “I feel obligated to write about race...I slip in and out of my black consciousness...sometimes I’m so deep in my anger….I can’t see anything outside of my lens of race” (Rae, 174). The delicate balance between conformity and non-conformity in society is a battle fought daily, yet Rae maintains an upbeat, empowering solution, to find the strength to accept yourself before looking for society’s approval and to be happy in your own skin. With a conversational, authoritative, humorous, confident and self-deprecating tone, Rae explains “For the majority of my life, I cared too much about my blackness was perceived, but now?... I couldn’t care less. Call it maturation or denial or self-hatred- I give no f%^&s.” (Rae 176), and taking the point of view that you need to stand up to racism, and be who you want to be not who others want you to be by accepting yourself for who you are. Rae discusses strength and empowerment in her point of view so the tone is centered around that. Her details all contribute to the perspectives as well as describing specific examples of racism she has encountered and how she has learned from those
Although society advocates believing in a ‘sameness’ between people who are black or white, individuals are still organized by race, class, gender and sexuality into social hierarchies. These hierarchies essentially formulate stigmas that suppress certain races and discriminate against them. Caucasia written by Danzy Senna is focused around a young mixed girl, Birdie, who encounters obstacles in her life that help her form her own perceptions about issues regarding class, race, and sexuality. These obstacles fundamentally shape her to have a unique outlook on society where she begins to question white privilege and also sympathize towards the mistreatment of black individuals. Senna explores the fundamental problems that are associated with race, and the struggles that a diasporic individual faces due to the restrictions set by society. Although Birdie is a mix of both black and white, she is overlooked as a “white” girl, which has its fair share of benefits as well as hardships.
What goes around comes around. Sometimes life isn’t perfect. Nothing on earth is perfect, we all make mistakes and we learn from them. That’s part of being human. Relationships come and go but every time we brake up with someone, they teach us a lesson. They could teach us to become a better person or they could bring out the worst of us. In the novel called This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz, Yunior didn’t have good relationships because he always cheated. For example, he cheated on Magda with Cassandra and he cheated on Alma with Laxmi. Yunior sometimes loved them but his way of loving them was unique. He was scared to be committed to just one person. Maybe he was scared to fall in love. We live in a generation where we see all kind of crazy stuff happening in relationships. Maybe that’s how society wants us to feel,