Esmeralda and her Mami

The memoir, Almost A Woman by Esmeralda Santiago was beautiful in the way that it portrayed artistic youth and growing up Puerto Rican in Brooklyn, New York in the 1960s. There was powerful language embedded throughout the text, and important themes of identity and sexual identity, racism, class differences/class struggles, transition, and family dynamics. There was so much meat in the story, and the author portrays the ups and downs of growing up poor with an abundance of siblings. Esmeralda’s devotion to her mother, called simply by: Mami is adherent in the story of her adolescence. She is perpetually embarrassed by her, and yet admires her completely.

It is interesting to note the theme of transition in the text. Mami goes from one man to another man, as the protagonist does as well in the second half of the book. Mami also is in this perpetual cycle of pregnancy and birth, and as her family grows larger, Esmeralda seems to distance herself from them. The protagonist also goes from love interest to love interest, as the novel progresses. Her mother seems to be overprotective when it comes to her dating life. But, at the same time she also protects her daughter with the utmost care. That one chapter, where she turns up uninvited at Otto’s sister’s party, was amusing because it reminded me of something that my own, “helicopter” overprotective mother would do. She also works various jobs, and the progression of jobs and movement to new apartments and houses is also a form of transition.

A line that demonstrates her life time and time again is seen when Santiago states, “In the cramped, noisy apartment where my mother struggled to keep us safe, where my grandmother tried to obliterate her pain with alcohol, where my sisters and brothers planned and invented their future, I improvised. When it hurt, I cried silent tears. And when good things came my way, I accepted them gratefully but quietly, afraid that enjoying them too much would make them vanish like a drop of water in the desert” (89). Good and bad events happen to Esmeralda, but she seems to find her identity along the way of discovering her talents and who she is as a person, and as a young woman.

Her family is full of hypocrites as well. There’s a scene when the grandmother tells her not to drink or smoke, while she herself is drinking hard liquor and smoking. Mami also tells her daughters that they have to be married (in a white dress in a Church) in order to be allowed to move out from the house, when she herself has had multiple lovers and eleven children out of wedlock. But this discipline that her guardian ensure is good advice overall, and benefits their daughters. Not one of them drops out of High School pregnant or gets into drugs etc. and Mami truly cares for her children’s well-being.

The term “algos” is repeated frequently in the text. It is meant to signify “trouble” or bad situations that young girls can find themselves in. what is puzzling is that even though Esmerelda is extremely close to her mother, she never tells her (or anyone else) about the street harassment she faces almost daily, and the bullying by the girl Lulu (which is mentioned a bit earlier). The word: Algos means “pain” or a “painful condition” in Greek. Whether or not the author knew this meaning or not, Mami uses this word as a precaution for all of her female adolescent children when they go out dancing together, or even go places unchaperoned.

Esmeralda sometimes doubts her artistic talents. “An artist should sacrifice for her art, I knew that. A part of me loved the romance of being a starving artist. But the voice that spoke loudest asked what chance an undertrained Puerto Rican Indian classical dancer had of supporting herself” (207). It was the Brooklyn and Performing Arts High School in New York City that truly inspired her love of acting, but most of all dance. There is so much related to dance in this novel, and it is much appreciated. The inclusion of art and dance in the novel is wonderful. It highlights how much she has learned, as a person, and how much discipline and bravery she has to have in order to keep on auditioning and performing her roles.

One quote that really spoke to me was when the narrator says near the end of the book, “Mami drilled into me that I only one asset. I wasn’t the prettiest of her six daughters, or the strongest of her children, but I was, she often said, intelligent. It was the power of that intelligence that I trusted” (287-288). Her distinct intelligence shoes up in many different places in the text. It shows up at the beginning when she first learned how to read/write/speak English, and translate for her mother in order to receive welfare. She also helps her mother by speaking perfect English to a white police officer in Manhattan one night, which initially saves their skin. Her intelligence also shows up when she goes to High School and later, to community college.

It is puzzling the way that she is entrapped by her (final) lover, Ulvi. He is the only boyfriend of hers that she gives up that intelligence and independence for a time. She loses touch with Nefttalí and Otto, rejects Sydney, Avery Lee, Jurgen and some others. Ulvi is her ultimate (sexual) secret, but he forces her to make the hardest decision in her life: whether to stay or go. But on the final pages, it is assumed that she chooses her Mami instead of going off to live independently with Ulvi. This shows her devotion to her family, and how romantic or sexual love is less important to her than the love she has for her family. This is all summed up when Santiago writes: “Over the years of watching Mami, La Muda, my aunts and cousins as they loved, lost, and loved again, I’d learned that love was something you get over. Of Ulvi left, there would be another man, but there would never, ever be another Mami” (310).