(Andrea and Beck wrote this post collaboratively after hours of heated discussion and reading the book together. We found the book to be challenging in its opacity--an impenetrable wall of minutae and hours of tedium, navigating through a life without many choices trapped in the mind of a narrator who seemed to be withholding vital parts of her emotional landscape.)
As a critical reader interested in creative craft, while reading the book we searched for authorial craft choices to thicken the story. We felt as though these intentions were either lacking or lost; there were no dramatic perspective changes, aside from a flew flashes, the narrative is mostly linear. Desires as a reader: the boring, repetitive, regimented nature of the narrative and of Esmeralda's life embodies her feelings as trapped in a household and society full of conflicting expectations. From a young age she was thrust into American society with an immigrant identity. This double consciousness plays out in expectations of American standards of whiteness, cleanliness, and class in conjunction with controlling family and longing for Puerto Rico as a place and as a culture. At school she faces not living up to American childhood standards especially when her classmates physically fight her when they see her being successful by her acceptance into performing arts high school. Her symbol to them, as an other, as an outsider, as a lower class immigrant, gives them evidence that she should never be successful.
Race shows up overtly in these pages as Esmeralda navigates through school and the working world as a white-passing child of immigrants. It also shows up more implicitly, as in the leitmotif of how her skin color looks with different clothing colors (both in her junior high graduation and much later, socializing with Bill), a subtle reminder of how her race is perceived as Puerto Rican to some, not Puerto Rican to others, "other" on welfare applications. Another subtle moment where there is coded commentary on Puerto Rico-as-colony is when Esmeralda acknowledges the Vietnam war (in passing). From the images she sees on TV, the landscape of Vietnam resembles the landscape of Puerto Rico. Esmeralda identifies strongly with the resistance in Vietnam and represents a commentary on colonialism.
Esmeralda faces criticism and arbitrary rules at every turn, in school, at home and even after she turns 18. There is some extremely loaded dialogue between Esmeralda and Otto the first time they see each other after her parents had show up at Otto's sister's party. "'They treat me like a child.' 'It is good,' he consoled. "You are not American girl. They are free.' "'I want to be free,' I hinted, but he didn't get it" (189). There is just so much coded between this short exchange. Otto views her parents' overprotective and controlling behavior as a 'good' thing and that she shouldn't worry about anything because her family is 'free' from Puerto Rico. She is "not American girl." Esmeralda does not view it this way, she often longs for Puerto Rico and says that if she ever gets enough money she'll go back there, a constant desire for a place that at this point in the story exists primarily in memory as most of her family now lives in New York.
There is a lot of logistical stuff in here about their living situations that doesn't do much. it seems like an inventory of the many number of places they lived, but it's an empty inventory since Esmeralda never gets attached to them. The emptiness of these descriptions contributes to her sense of placelessness.
He's also dismissive of her expression of a lack of agency in her claustrophobic family. The controlling treatment of her family towards Esmeralda beyond the age of 18 is probably contributing to the sort of mature child tone that never develops into a critical adult looking back perspective, although we kept hoping that it would. She did not have a lot of models of what other lives were like, and didn't spend time imagining them as we've seen other characters do. Her call center job is a moment where she is able to escape the drudge of her own life into others' stories even though they're not positive stories. "'I hope you never have to go through what I went through,' a woman began her tale, and I paid close attention. Each life was a message I had to decode, clues for what lay ahead. Not a blueprint, but a road map from which to choose a path." (197)
When Esmeralda is younger, her matter-of-fact tone fits her age. She knows as little as a girl her age ought to - when father leaves, she reports that he "wrote to say he'd married a woman none of us had ever heard of and had moved to a town none of us had ever visited" (30). In this case, the lack of information communicated more than the actual details would have: it expresses that her father has moved on into the world that is unknown and inaccessible to her. But the voice doesn't change as she grows up, but she doesn't seem to be a child trapped in the body of an adult in the way that a trauma survivor might be. Her voice just sounds sheltered, which is surprising considering how much raw real world shit she is exposed to. Despite all of it, though, Esmeralda is a disciplined adult who balances the demands of school, work, and family.
Our theory is that this is possibly a book that was written too soon, as we have discussed in class, that can have an impact on the story. In this case, it seems the impact was that Esmeralda didn't have enough distance from her life in order to tease out a story arc that would compel a reader. Characters and experiences show up and pass by without ever reappearing, giving us no incentive to become emotionally invested in anyone. The only character that evokes feeling is her poor mother, who is perpetually pregnant, sad, and in poor health. While Negi plods through life, her mother remains stuck.
Similarly to Winterson and Zeus' Daughter, this memoir loses cohesion toward the end. It speeds up, disintegrates, looses some of the little drive it had as Esmeralda slogged through her adolescence. Even the title seems to reinforce our theory - Almost A Woman is so generic it could apply to every coming-of-age story of a FAAB or female-identified person.
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Beck: "What the fuck...she was 18 in the '60s living in NYC and she didn't do any hard drugs. I guess you can grow up in the face of adversity and still turn out to be a total square."
Andrea: "Ugh. She probably passed Patti Smith on the way to work every day."
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