How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water

Angie Cruz explores the complexities of immigrant identities through the underlying premise of the Senior Workforce Program and its stated goal of producing ideal job candidates. To this end, Cara’s complex personality, unique communication style, lived experiences, and skills contrast sharply with the reductive responses that American employers use to judge employability. This key difference in approach is designed to expose the biases inherent in American occupational institutions. Through Cara’s complexity, Cruz challenges the reductive measures that Americans typically use to determine who is most worthy of work. Based on the narrow social measures that employers use to vet candidates, Cara fails to prove her employability. Because American standards emphasize a command of standard English grammar and the ability to communicate concisely in a formal register, no potential employer acknowledges the value of Cara’s many experiences and strengths. As this injustice becomes evident, Cruz relies on linguistic bias to expose the reductive ways in which Americans judge both immigrants and job applicants. By contrasting the intimacy of Cara’s sessions with her responses on sample job interviews, Cruz reveals the depths that employers miss when they rely on narrow tools and linguistic expectations to vet job candidates. By contrast, Lissette allows Cara to express her worth in her own terms, and in the process, she learns more about Cara’s core values, convictions, skills, and identity than responses to canned interview questions would ever have revealed. By exposing these institutional biases, Cruz implies that the stated goals of job application processes, which aim to hire the best candidate, may not result from conventional screening methods.

In addition to exposing the drawbacks of the application process, Cruz exposes the dehumanizing aspects of American attitudes, which often equate a person’s identity and worth with their employability and job experience. Although racist stereotyping, xenophobia, and overt discrimination dehumanizes immigrants and reduces the complexity of their multifaceted identities, the omnipresent cultural biases and American attitudes that conflate a person with their occupation also reduce and dehumanize everyone in American society. For example, the employment screener meant to identify Cara’s career aptitudes reduces her entire character to “caretaker,” “humanitarian,” and “innovator,” and all of these labels are insufficient for capturing the lived experiences that helped Cara to develop these traits. Thus, employer emphasis on the actions one performs ignores the social connections, inner values, cultural norms, beliefs, and aspirations that lend complexity to immigrants and job seekers alike. Ultimately, Cruz endeavors to assert that a person’s labor is not their identity. Thus, Cara’s story shows that her work in the lamp factory is merely a means to survive. When she is offered menial work in a country that conflates occupation with identity and worth, her effort to survive becomes a reductive stereotype, and the narrative makes it clear that narrow-minded job descriptions reinforce this notion. For example, the housekeeping advertisement and sample interview responses ask Cara to not only prove her experience but to prove that she enjoys it as an extension of herself. Despite her experience, Cara has no official way to document her housekeeping skills even though she regularly performs housekeeping duties for Lulú and la Vieja Caridad.

Finally, Cruz’s use of extensive documentation acts as a counterbalance to Cara’s narrative sessions and overturns the stereotype of immigrants as undocumented and by extension, a faceless unknown. In sharing the many documents of Cara’s life, Cruz reveals the complex factors that shape a person’s identity and proves that even these documents are reductive. For example, Cara is impacted by the lease invoices showing the growing back rent she owes, but her late lease payment does not constitute an adequate summary of her as a person. While creditors use such documents to pass judgement on a person’s character, these details only represent one aspect of a person’s life. Cruz therefore questions the validity placed on documentation and seeks to prove that documents in isolation cannot account for a person’s character and circumstances. Even Cara distrusts her pending citizenship paperwork, understanding that having it may not change how others view her. The novel therefore implies that rather than promoting understanding, documentation flattens character complexity.