When I Was Puerto Rican

“I lay on my pillow, whimpering, wondering how the termites knew I’d disobeyed my mother” 

Esmeralda’s mother tells her to stay out of her father’s way while he is working. Instead, he asks her to help. This leads to her carrying a piece of wood that is covered in termites that swarm and bite her. Esmeralda interprets misfortunes as punishments. In the beginning of the book, she, like most children, has little awareness of the fact that sometimes things happen without reason. It is also clear that she sees disobeying her mother as particularly worthy of punishment.

“Men, I was learning, were sinvergüenzas, which meant they had no shame and indulged in behavior that never failed to surprise women but caused them much suffering” 

Children, lacking analytical tools and experience, believe what they are taught. The women in Esmeralda’s life are teaching her that men are unreliable (yet predictable) and are primarily sources of pain to women. Esmeralda will not be able to change her mind without her mind being open, but most of her formative years and spent watching men let women down.

“What a jibara, children jeered” 

Previously, Esmeralda wanted to be a jibara more than anything. Now that she is in a city, the word jibara is used as an insult. Children use it to mock the way she her dialect and her ignorance about pencil sharpeners and Santa Claus. It’s challenging for her to realize that labels change depending on who is speaking, and whom they are speaking about.

“I’d never lost a loved one, so I took on her grief as if it were mine, tried it on to see if I could feel anything for the old man who had made me so happy”

Despite stating later that she does not like people much, Esmeralda often shows a high degree of empathy, or at least, an interest in it. When Juanita’s grandfather dies, it is a loss to Esmeralda, but also a chance to try and understand something new about people and how they process trauma.

“Politics isn’t a disease like polio. It’s something men talk about at the bus stop”

This is another example of the division between men and women in the book. Esmeralda is only repeating what she has heard, but what she has heard is that politics is only for men. What she thinks of this is unclear, but the implications are that politics is important enough those only men discuss it, or politics is unimportant enough that only men discuss it, or that women have no political interest or ability. 

“That’s part of being an imperialist. They expect us to do things their way, even in our country”

The Americans moving to Puerto Rico are viewed with mixed reactions. This will serve as a counterpoint later when Esmeralda moves to New York and wishes it could be more like Puerto Rico. The notion of immigrants making demands on a land that is not theirs lingers in the background.

“I looked around for something with which to hurt myself so that when Abuela asked, I could show her a reason for the tears. I put my hand in the doorjamb and slammed the door shut”

Esmeralda is upset because she is worried that her father does not love them enough. Rather than speak this simple truth to her grandmother, Esmeralda slams her fingers in a door, injuring herself, just to have what she considers a better excuse for her tears. She is hard on herself and views her own emotional pain as weakness.

“Please, Jesus, don’t let her find out I moved during the service”

Esmeralda moves under a pew during mass in order to retrieve her shoe. She is irrationally consumed with guilt that she’ll be found out. It is unclear why she thinks her grandmother would be upset if she found out that she had briefly moved between pews, but reinforces the idea of Esmeralda seeing herself as always being on the verge of punishment.

“I would just as soon remain jamona than shed that many tears over a man” 

After Esmeralda sees her mother crying, yet again, over Papi’s inconsiderate behavior, she cannot make sense of women who put up with men forever. She thinks that nothing could be worth the amount of suffering that Mami goes through just to keep Papi around. Better to be alone forever like the jamona than to let someone else have that much control over your emotions.

“Her powdered and painted features were not readable; the lines she’d drawn on her eyebrows and around her eyes and the colors that enhanced what always seemed perfect were a violation of the face that sometimes laughed and sometimes cried and often contorted with rage”

Esmeralda is upset after seeing Mami make herself up on her way to a job interview. Mami looks completely unnatural. Esmeralda resents that her mother has to alter herself in any way just to go work—which Esmeralda equates with leaving them. Even a face “contorted with rage” is preferable to this unnatural version of her mother.

“I let my body go limp to take her abuse, and part of me left my body and stood beside my sisters and brothers, their eyes round, tear filled, frightened, their fingers interlaced into each other’s, their skinny bodies jerking with every hit I took”

After Tato grabs Esmeralda between the legs, she kicks him. Mami reacts badly, beating her and screaming that she can’t ever do that again. What she means by “that” isn’t clear to Esmeralda. Her out of body experience is a sad example of how often the Santiago children must support each other in the face of their parents’ behavior. 

“The idea that you were not supposed to think in school was funny”

Education—both what it is and what it is not—is an important theme throughout the book. Esmeralda goes to school to learn. In theory, everyone does. And yet, it is what a teacher or school system emphasizes as worth knowing that becomes what constitutes a true education. The book could be used as a lively frame for discussing the difference between knowledge and experience, or book learning versus life learning. 

“Even if you don’t accept the Lord…you can send your children to Sunday school. At least it gives you a free morning”

It is not always easy to pinpoint how Esmeralda feels about her spirituality, or her views on organized religion. However, when the adults discuss it, as in the quote above, there is often a weary cynicism. Religion seems to be as much of a tradition—or in this example, as a way to get a break from your children—as it does a soul-nurturing necessity.

“She had become public property—no longer the mother of seven children, but a woman desired by many”

When Mami comes back from New York she has a new confidence. It is striking to Esmeralda. This version of Mami is much closer to who she wants to be herself. But she is not the only one who notices. Men on the street catcall Mami and pay her more attention than Esmeralda has ever seen. As a child whose parents have not always been reliable, Esmeralda fears that this attention paid to her mother will siphon off the emotions her mother has to give to her children. For Esmeralda, when women step out in public and accept attention from those who look at them, they become public property to comment on and, in some cases, use.

“In their passion Mami and Papi had forgotten about us. They were only real to one another. We huddled in a corner, afraid that if we left them, they might eat each other”

Esmeralda’s glimpses of her parents’ passion often come during arguments, not during loving exchanges. This is a sharp, sad contrast to her ideas about true romance, where two people in love cannot see anyone else and exist solely to consume each other. Mami and Papi have created their own world, but it is one of isolation and frustration and is not a situation that Esmeralda wants to emulate.

“She taught English composition as if everyone cared about it, which I found appealing”

Miss Brown is Esmeralda’s eighth grade teacher in New York. She is enthusiastic about teaching, even if the subject is dull. The above quote is more evidence that Esmeralda can be motivated by people who are passionate—she simply hasn’t had many people in her life who were passionate in a positive way.

“It had been all my fault. Somehow my just being at the window had made it happen”

Esmeralda goes to her window and a trucker sees her looking out. He waves to her and then begins masturbating. Even though she is growing more confident, Esmeralda still has an irrational, almost superstitious, view of herself as being at the center of events she could not have responsibility for. She thinks about all the times she has been told about men, and is sad to find that so much of it has come true.

“Grudgingly, we sent him cards on special days, copied out our best compositions, stayed in touch, knowing it was all show. Because in Brooklyn, after Francisco’s death, Mami became, even more than ever, both mother and father to us. We could count on her in a way we had never been able to count on Papi, Tata, or Francisco, who had made everyone happy for such a short time before dying and becoming a ghost that haunted us all for the rest of our lives”

Esmeralda is finally able to acknowledge that having parents is more than simply having a father and a mother. Parents have a set of duties that they must fulfill. Because Papi does not carry out his duties, he relinquishes his rights to Esmeralda’s emotions. She is now old enough to see that Mami is more of a father than he ever was, and this gives her something new to think about: that the best male qualities can exist in women, and that women can live happily without men.

“No one, I thought, could get beat down so many times and still come up smiling”

Esmeralda has seen her mother go through such hardships that she can’t completely trust Mami’s seeming contentment and optimism. This is a heartbreaking observation from a child, who, in an ideal situation, would not yet have such a cynical view of human nature. Mami has enduredtoo much, but Esmeralda has also seen too much.

“There were two kinds of Puerto Ricans in school: the newly arrived like  

myself, and the ones born in Brooklyn of Puerto Rican parents. The two types didn’t mix…To them, Puerto Rico was the place where their grandparents lived, a place where they visited on school and summer vacations, a place which they complained was a recent memory were also split in two groups: the ones who longed for the island and the ones who wanted to forget it as soon as possible”

Esmeralda’s ideas of Puerto Rican as an identity are challenged in New York. Up until then, Puerto Rico had been her whole world. A place where people spent their whole lives, for better or worse. Now she is confronted with people for whom Puerto Rico is just another place without any particular importance, a vacation spot. Some Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican disdain the homeland-born Puerto Ricans’ strong sense of culture. Any notions of hereditary solidarity that Esmeralda may have had are now debatable.

“I didn’t know what to do. To tell the interviewer that I knew the woman was lying seemed worse than translating what the woman said as accurately as I could and letting the interviewer figure it out. But I worried that if people from other countries passed as Puerto Ricans in order to cheat the government, it would reflect badly on us”

This is the clearest instance of Esmeralda feeling protective of her country of origin and its people. Esmeralda often chooses to lie in order to help Puerto Ricans get on welfare, even though she worries that it sends the wrong message about Puerto Ricans as a whole. She makes a choice and is conflicted by it on a case-by-case basis, showing a new level of emotional maturity. 

[Esmeralda felt] Ashamed that, after all the hours of practice with Mrs. Johnson, Mr. Barone, and Mr. Gatti, after the expense of new clothes and shoes, after Mami had to take a day off from work to take me into Manhattan, after all that, I had failed the audition and would never, ever get out of Brooklyn”

Even though she is getting older, Esmeralda still takes on too much responsibility. She assumes that she has let people down when they give her no indication that this is the case. She sees herself as a disappointment waiting to happen, which causes her shame when she contemplates how many people believe (foolishly, she thinks) in her. Also, for all of her newfound maturity, she still speaks in childish absolutes. She is sure that she will “never” get out of Brooklyn.

“A mi no me gusta mucho la gente,” or “I don’t like people much”

After her guidance counselor tells her that her aptitude test shows that she would be good at helping people, Esmeralda is unconvinced. She tells her friend Yolanda that she doesn’t like people much. The question arises: is this because she has some innate misanthropy in her, or has she come by her feelings honestly, based only on the people she has known?