Fiesta 1980 Analysis

Junot Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic and immigrated with his family to New Jersey, where a collection of his short stories are based from. Out of that collection is a short story “Fiesta, 1980”, which was featured in The Best American Short Stories, 1997. This story is told from the perspective of an adolescent boy, who lives in the Bronx of northern New Jersey with his family. He is having trouble understanding why things are the way they are in his family. Diaz shows Yunior’s character through his cultures, his interaction with his family, and his bitterness toward his father.

     As a young child, Rodriguez finds comfort and safety in his noisy home full of Spanish sounds. Spanish, is his family's' intimate language that comforts Rodriguez by surrounding him in a web built by the family love and security which is conveyed using

It is not just the language of the Dominican culture that we find characters struggling to hold onto in Díaz’s Drown. We also find that the characters walk a fine line of defining themselves as newly Dominican American, and it seems they feel pressured to leave behind their old ways and traditions to join their new society. In the short story “Fiesta, 1980,” we find many examples of the family being torn between their Dominican customs and assimilating to their new American life. This story begins with the explanation of Papi’s most prized possession: a brand-new, lime-green, Volkswagen van. Much to Yunior’s chagrin (due to the fact that he gets sick every time he rides in the vehicle), this van means a lot to Papi, because to him, it represents an American family. According to John Riofrio (2008), “it[the van] is the embracing of the American way which has reenabled Papi’s masculinity,” (p. 33). After arriving at their Tia and Tio’s home for the party, Yunior sneers at his relatives’ apartment stating, “the place had been furnished in Contemporary Dominican Tacky” (p. 32). It seems as though Yunior, after only a short period in America, is already feeling embarrassed by his culture’s traditions. This chapter of the book also discusses the betrayal of Yunior’s father to his family, by having an affair with a Puerto Rican woman, whom

You can see how Maria’s El Salvador is empty of people, full only of romantic ideas. Jose Luis’s image of El Salvador, in contrast, totally invokes manufactured weapons; violence. Maria’s “self-projection elides Jose Luis’s difference” and illustrates “how easy it is for the North American characters, including the big-hearted María, to consume a sensationalized, romanticized, or demonized version of the Salvadoran or Chicana in their midst” (Lomas 2006, 361). Marta Caminero-Santangelo writes: “The main thrust of the narrative of Mother Tongue ... continually ... destabilize[s] the grounds for ... a fantasy of connectedness by emphasizing the ways in which [Maria’s] experience as a Mexican American and José Luis’s experiences as a Salvadoran have created fundamentally different subjects” (Caminero-Santangelo 2001, 198). Similarly, Dalia Kandiyoti points out how Maria’s interactions with José Luis present her false assumptions concerning the supposed “seamlessness of the Latino-Latin American connection” (Kandiyoti 2004, 422). So the continual misinterpretations of José Luis and who he really is and has been through on Maria’s part really show how very far away her experiences as a middle-class, U.S.-born Chicana are from those of her Salvadoran lover. This tension and resistance continues throughout their relationship.

Demetria Martínez’s Mother Tongue is divided into five sections and an epilogue. The first three parts of the text present Mary/ María’s, the narrator, recollection of the time when she was nineteen and met José Luis, a refuge from El Salvador, for the first time. The forth and fifth parts, chronologically, go back to her tragic experience when she was seven years old and then her trip to El Salvador with her son, the fruit of her romance with José Luis, twenty years after she met José Luis. And finally the epilogue consists a letter from José Luis to Mary/ María after her trip to El Salvador. The essay traces the development of Mother Tongue’s principal protagonists, María/ Mary. With a close reading of the text, I argue how the forth

In my analysis of this novel, The Adventure of Don Chipote or, When Parrots Breast-Feed by Daniel Venegas, I kept in mind that Nicolás Kanellos put great effort into getting this novel circulated in Spanish and in English. Kanellos argues that Spanish-language immigrant novels more accurately present the “evils” of American society such as oppression of the immigrant workers and deconstructs the myth of the American Dream, which permeates in English-language ethnic autobiographies. I believe Kanellos felt so passionately about circulating this particular novel was due to the fact that in Venegas’ novel we see clear representations of the three U.S. Hispanic cultures that Kanellos presents which are the native, the immigrant, and the exile cultures.

As children grow up in a dysfunctional family, they experience trauma and pain from their parent’s actions, words, and attitudes. With this trauma experienced, they grew up changed; different from other children. The parent’s behavior affects them and whether they like it or not, sometimes it can influence them, and they can react against it or can repeat it. In Junot Díaz’s “Fiesta, 1980”, is presented this theme of the dysfunctional family. The author presents a story of an adolescent Latin boy called Junior, who narrates the chronicles of his dysfunctional family, a family of immigrants from the Dominican Republic driving to a party in the Bronx, New York City. “Papi had been with

　　Natalie Diaz's debut collection, When My Brother Was An Aztec, is a book of poems that accounts Diaz's skills in imaginative and lyrical language. The collection explores her past in unexpected form and images, tackling the subjects of her family, most notably her meth addicted brother, life on the reservation, and being a Native American woman. In this collection Diaz has filled the pages with rich and interesting images that rely on Native American culture, experiences of her own as a Native American woman, and mythology. As I read this collection I was struck by how heavy her images rested on the page and yet how weightless they seemed to fly off.

One thing all human beings, have in common is the struggle for self identity. Children are raised by parents or guardians who have struggled and fought for their own identities. In many cases, parents are still trying to figure it out, while raising their own children. Such is the case with the characters in Junot Diaz’s, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The theme of identity is conveyed through the characters’ Dominican culture, social standing, and in finding love. Oscar, Lola, and Yunior are three central characters in Oscar Wao, who’s Dominican cultural and family expectations were major obstacles as they struggled to establish their identity.

True masculine force goes back, in family stories from the Dominican Republic, with Trujillo's dictatorship shaping manhood perception in the Dominican culture. Oscar is incapable of rising to male-standard imposed by

Rodriguez is ashamed. He is ashamed with the fact his espanol is no longer his main language. The author presents, “I grew up a victim to a

Sabina Berman is a notable and critically acclaimed Mexican playwright. Berman’s notable work includes her first published play, Yankee (1979). In Adam Versényi’s translation of Yankee, Berman explores the relationship between the individual and identity. Through the three main characters—Bill, Alberto, and Rosa—we see the continual conflict they face as they aspire to achieve their respective objectives: to feel nurtured and loved, to have peace and quiet, and to feel loved and acknowledged. But it is Berman’s interjection of juxtapositions that forces us to analyze the relationship between the main characters. More specifically, Berman focuses on the impact Bill has as an intruder, and how he highlights the national identity incompatibilities between North American and Mexican cultures, to expose the serious social and political problems between the nations.

Growing up poor in the Dominican Republic strongly influenced the choices Yunior makes later in his life. In “Aguantando” Yunior recalls about how poverty was a part of his life. Díaz writes, “We were poor. The only way we could have been

Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban tells the story about three generations of a Cuban family and their different views provoked by the Cuban revolution. Though part of the same family, an outsider might classify them as adversaries judging by relationships between one another, the exiled family members, and the differentiations between political views. Although all of these central themes reoccur over and over throughout the narrative, family relationships lie at the heart of the tale. The relationships between these Cuban family members are for the most part ruptured by any or a combination of the above themes.

Julia Alvarez also uses language to show how the four Garcia girls adjust to living in a new, and to them alien, culture. The protagonist in this novel is the family Garcia de la Torre, a wealthy, aristocratic family from the Santo Domingo, who can trace their genealogy back to the Spanish