1.
Discuss the impact of genre and perspective on
the narrative
Like
Jane Austin’s novel, Persuasion, where in the narrative we
have a bildungsroman of a young woman who grows up, Negi similarly grows up as
evidenced by her physical changes that are subtly interwoven into the
plot. A sense of time is created by the
narrator’s mother, Mami, having babies one after the
other. Her perspective becomes more
sophisticated as she is permitted by her parents to learn newer things, and
some things she learns on her own. From
her perspective, Negi is very negatively affected emotionally by her parents'
fighting up until the very end of the section assigned for Tuesday. She at times before, though, has learned to
tune the conflicts out in order to feel emotionally stable. In the book, there's a motif of a subgenre of
music (Latin American) called boleros.
This offers a different perspective in terms of musical taste.
2. What are the essential things that readers
need to know to understand the difficult relationship that Negi has with her
mother? Is part of this due to the times
that she is born into (1940s-60s)?
There
are several scenes in the narrative that are essential to understanding the
conflicts that occur between her mother and herself. Many of the conflicts occur because of her
mother's constant concern for Negi's father, Papi, who leaves mysteriously and
then returns, sometimes, days later.
Negi's father has a strong love for his daughter that her mother envies,
and she doesn't think her daughter comprehends or understands the things that
are occurring due to the complexity of gender inequality in Puerto Rico at the
time. In Puerto Rico, as poor Jibaras,
the accepted more for what a man does is to find a prostitute somewhere, which
would have been in Jurutungo (Santiago, page 49). Perhaps men are expected to come home to
their wives more so now than in the past, but I think that this is still
prevalent in hispanic and Latin American culture.
3. How
does food relate to identity (local/national), to gender, to socio-economic
status, to life in general?
Many Latin American cultures, but
specifically Puerto Rico's, have a unique heritage and culture, just like
European, Asian, African cultures do.
Part of this culture are the foods that that culture has learned to cook
and eat--the people are generally well adapted to it, and changing to another
set of customs is difficult. In Santiago's
story, food, when related to gender, is not a big issue, because that's not the
center of the conflict between the narrator's parents. Food is, however, a central part to Negi's
life who begins to assimilate and understand that her culture's food is not the
only food in the world. When the
American arrives and teaches the audience the food pyramid and shows them what
amazing foods Americans have, as if Americans are healthier, Negi begins to
ponder the cultural wealth of American culture in a positive light, though her
parents think this is not necessarily true; her parents are more
critical-minded, due to their years of experience and wisdom. The fact that they were poor to begin with,
food is not an issue for them because of the cheapness of rice and beans, and
so they do not starve. Whereas, in the
USA, a country that has an obesity epidemic, some people have too much food
that they literally do not know what else to do with it except eat it.
4. Select two of my favorite metaphors and
provide an interpretation.
Santiago
imagines a bus being a steamboat, which is enigmatic of the fact that she's
young and she's trying to express the world in terms of what she already knows,
since clearly a bus cannot chug but a steamboat can (Santiago, page 37). Furthermore, a bathroom where people go to
use the toilet or take showers and take baths typically, is used to describe a
wholly different kind of structure, the playground, on the same page. A playground would be a wooden structure, or
metal, where kids hang on and go down slides or pretend to be monkeys. This however, is highly unlike a bathroom,
and so I thought of it more as a conceit than a regular metaphor, which is why
I liked it.
