55 pages • 1 hour read
Esmeralda SantiagoAlmost a Woman
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-15
Chapter 13 Summary: “The music inside her...”
Esmeralda’s work relocates to New Jersey, so Esmeralda asks if she can move closer and be roommates with Regina, but Mami rejects the idea. Esmeralda begins going to community college part time, where she makes friends with a beautiful Jewish girl named Shoshana. Esmeralda continues to write Otto in Switzerland, but Shoshana encourages Esmeralda to keep dating boys in the country. Esmeralda and Shoshana get jobs together as telemarketers, working in the evenings. Esmeralda is meant to stick to a script, but she likes talking to people and learning about their lives: “If I listened carefully, I might hear myself speak twenty years from now, or thirty, or even fifty” (195).
During the day, Shoshana and Esmeralda attend tapings of television shows and become friendly with some of the pages who work at the studios. Esmeralda begins spending time with Andy, a page who works at the Johnny Carson show, though Shoshana is appalled when she learns Esmeralda and Andy spend their time together platonically: “You’ll die an old maid!” (199). Shoshana sets Esmeralda up on a double date where they go horseback riding. Esmeralda is nervous riding on the horse, especially after Shoshana falls and must be rushed to the hospital. Shoshana hits it off with the doctor who attends to her.
Esmeralda learns that Neftalí died—not fighting in war, but because he was a heroin addict and jumped out of the window at a police station. Esmeralda mourns his death, wondering how she never noticed Neftalí’s problem. Margie, Esmeralda’s half-sister, gets married and begins visiting more often, inviting Esmeralda to visit her in Yonkers. Esmeralda feels embarrassed to not understand how Margie does certain things, like set the table and use tampons, but Margie does her best to make Esmeralda feel at home. Esmeralda is sad to learn that Margie will be moving to Miami with her husband, knowing they will drift apart. Esmeralda attends the premiere of Up the Down Staircase at Radio City Music Hall. Seeing herself on the screen, Esmeralda renews her desire to perform, but finds that she is far behind with some of the dancing technique and that there aren’t many roles for girls who look like her. One of Esmeralda’s cousins, Lólin, elopes with a musician, and Esmeralda’s relatives put more pressure on her not to make such a mistake. Esmeralda begins to feel overwhelmed living at home, frustrated by her “family’s voices, their contradictory messages, their expectations” (210).
Chapter 14 Summary: “What size bra do you wear?”
Esmeralda and Shoshana both sign up for a math course taught by a handsome teacher, Mr. Grunwald, determined he will fall in love with one of them. Esmeralda learns she is terrible at math and wants to drop the course, but Shoshana persuades her to stay in it, so Esmeralda gets tutoring from Mr. Grunwald. Mr. Grunwald grows frustrated at Esmeralda’s poor math skills, so she tells him about her training in Indian dancing instead. Esmeralda realizes it’s strange that she’s friends with a Jewish girl instead of some of the other Puerto Ricans at her school. After her telemarketing job goes out of business, Esmeralda gets a part-time job working for an advertising agency, where she reads newspapers from the Midwest and gets lost in a world very different from Brooklyn. Tata moves temporarily out of the house to have her own place, but begrudgingly returns when she runs out of money: “Now that we were older, she didn’t find us as charming as when we were little” (217-18).
Shoshana and Esmeralda answer an advertisement to model for a photography school, which inspires them to attempt to build up their modeling portfolio. Esmeralda asks her advertising professor to look over her pictures, but she is offended when he suggests she model braziers in catalogues. One of the photography students, Shanti, takes a liking to Esmeralda and asks to photograph her around Manhattan. During one of their sessions, Esmeralda runs into Mr. Grunwald and realizes that she likes him better than Shanti, even if Mr. Grunwald doesn’t return her feelings. Shoshana thinks Mr. Grunwald might be a homosexual because he lives with a roommate. The two girls determine to follow him home, where they spot him walking a fluffy dog. Esmeralda believes this proves he’s a homosexual, until she sees him kissing a beautiful woman.
Mr. Grunwald tells Esmeralda about a part in a Broadway play for children for an Indian dancer. Esmeralda auditions and is elated when she gets the role. Esmeralda gets along well with her costars and crew, particularly a fellow actor named Allan. Esmeralda bonds with Allan platonically, but Shoshana thinks it’s impossible for men and women to be friends. Esmeralda’s play opens, and her entire family attends, as well as Mr. Grunwald, because he told her about the part. Esmeralda loves performing but wonders how she got so lucky: “I was not the most beautiful girl Shanti had ever photographed, nor the most talented actress graduated from Performing Arts” (236).
Chapter 15 Summary: “It wouldn’t look right.”
Esmeralda’s play goes on tour, starting in Westchester County, where Esmeralda notices the mostly white audiences of children are much more polite than the outspoken New York City school children. In the smaller towns, Esmeralda realizes she stands out: “I was the darkest person in the room, and the stares I drew felt like darts” (240). Esmeralda feels embarrassed by the attention, but eventually she takes it upon herself to try to educate people about Puerto Ricans so they won’t be so ignorant. When she gets back from the tour, Esmeralda hurries to catch up on schoolwork and takes summer courses in the hopes that she’ll travel more with the play in the fall. One of her courses, an art history class, requires her to go to local museums, where she meets Patsy and Avery Lee, a brother and sister from Texas. Patsy approaches Esmeralda to ask for directions, then invites Esmeralda out to coffee, though Patsy quickly disappears.
Avery admits he wanted to approach Esmeralda but didn’t want to scare her off, so sent his sister. Avery and Esmeralda tour New York together, with Esmeralda pretending to have been hired as a guide so Mami won’t be suspicious. Avery buys Esmeralda clothes and tries to get her to come up to his hotel room, and though Esmeralda is tempted, she resists. Avery asks Esmeralda to move to Texas and be his mistress. When Esmeralda asks why he doesn’t just marry her, Avery says it “wouldn’t look right” to have a Puerto Rican wife (247). Esmeralda is hurt, but Avery tries to explain that he has political ambitions and needs to marry a “‘good ole Texas gal’ from a prominent family” (248). Esmeralda is heartbroken and worries she is “good enough to sleep with but not good enough to marry” (249).
A few days later, a stranger approaches her on the street: a German man named Jurgen who becomes immediately besotted with her. Jurgen takes Esmeralda back to his apartment so he can change. Fearing Jurgen means to take advantage of her, Esmeralda puts up her guard, but is taken by surprise when Jurgen asks her to marry him after knowing her for only a few hours. Esmeralda agrees, thinking it’s a joke, but Jurgen calls her mother to make it official. Esmeralda and Jurgen make up a story about having known each other for a long time so Mami won’t get too suspicious. Jurgen takes Esmeralda on a test drive in a Porsche. The next day, he shows up at her apartment to take her to the beach, driving a different Porsche. Jurgen meets Esmeralda’s family, who are won over by his charm.
At the beach, Esmeralda meets one of Jurgen’s friends who has just arrived from Los Angeles, driving a Jaguar. When Jurgen drops off Esmeralda, his friends make a disparaging comment about the way Mami looks, which irritates Esmeralda. Back at the apartment, Esmeralda wonders at Jurgen’s strange background and his friends driving so many luxury cars. On a boat in Central Park, Jurgen confesses that he steals small planes and luxury cars for a living. Esmeralda thinks he’s joking at first, then realizes he’s serious and worries she’ll be arrested for being an accessory to the crime. Jurgen leaves for Los Angeles but promises to return shortly and see if Esmeralda still wants to marry him when he gets back.
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
In Chapter 13, after her cousin Lólin elopes with a man her family doesn’t approve of, Esmeralda finds herself overwhelmed with contradictory messages from her relatives. Before this, Lólin had always been used as an example of a “good” girl and someone Esmeralda should model herself after, but now Esmeralda’s relatives “looked at us hard, to let us know that if we were too well behaved, they suspected we were up to no good” (208). Especially frustrating to Esmeralda is that her Mami and Tata don’t practice what they preach. Mami and Tata hold Esmeralda up to a high standard that neither woman has managed to achieve; Mami wants Esmeralda to get an education so she doesn’t have to work in a factory, even though Mami has always worked in factories, and Tata warns Esmeralda away from drinking and smoking, even though she constantly drinks and smokes. With so many contradictory messages and so many watchful eyes following her every move, Esmeralda longs to hear her own voice, “even if it was filled with fear and uncertainty. Even if it were to lead me where I ought not to go” (210). Esmeralda knows she might make mistakes, but at least they will be her own.
Esmeralda’s life in New York City is full of possibility, as shown in Chapter 14 while she pursues various jobs and modeling and acting careers. Landing the lead role in a major Broadway play, Esmeralda’s life is far different from the lives led by some of the other women in her family. At 36, Mami is now pregnant with her eleventh child, and this combined with her hard work in a factory has made her prematurely old: “Her step was slow, her skin had lost its luster, her hair, cut short to frame her face, was brittle and broken at the ends” (217). Esmeralda’s once young, vibrant mother has sacrificed her youth and her health to provide a better life for her children.
Similarly, Mami’s mother, Tata, begins to feel dissatisfaction living in such a full house with no privacy and temporarily moves out on her own. Esmeralda describes the dismal boarding house “in one room crammed with a bed, an easy chair with torn upholstery, a hot plate, some chipped dishes and glasses” as well as a “chamber pot under her bed” (217). Tata eventually moves back in with Esmeralda and her family but continues to struggle with feeling resentful of her family and the lack of privacy and comfort. Though Esmeralda often resents the influence Mami and Tata have over her life and feels that they are too restrictive, Esmeralda also knows she is inextricably bound to these women who sacrifice so much so that she and her siblings can have a chance to succeed.
Esmeralda has encountered racism while living in New York City, but in Chapter 15 she has some experiences that open her eyes to how the rest of the country views Puerto Ricans. Esmeralda goes on tour with her play and realizes that in many of the diners, restaurants, and hotels that her troop visits, she is “the darkest person in the room, the diner, the school, the store, the entire town” (241). Though the others in her troop are sympathetic, none can understand what Esmeralda is going through because they are all white: “[T]hey didn’t draw stares as I did” (241). Esmeralda’s memoir takes place during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and she references Martin Luther King, Jr., a hero to the Santiagos, who keep his portrait hanging in their house. The Civil Rights Movement centered mainly around the struggle for African Americans to be treated equally, but Esmeralda notes that other people of color are also treated with suspicion and distrust:
I wasn’t black, I wasn’t white. The racial middle in which I existed meant that people evaluated me on the spot. Their eyes flickered, their brains calibrated the level of pigmentation they’d find acceptable. Is she light enough to be white? Is she so dark as to be black? In New York I was Puerto Rican, an identity that carried with it a whole set of negative stereotypes I continually struggled to overcome. But in other places, where Puerto Ricans were lower in numbers, where I was from didn’t matter. I was simply too dark to be white, too white to be black (242).
On a more personal level, Esmeralda encounters racism from a Texan man, Avery Lee, she begins dating in Chapter 15. Avery seems besotted with Esmeralda and offers to move her out to Texas to be with him, but Esmeralda is horrified when she realizes he means to keep her as his mistress because he could never marry a woman of color. While Esmeralda believed that Avery was falling in love with her, she now realizes that he viewed her as the “stereotype of the hot-tomato Latina” (247). Avery wants Esmeralda to be with him, but only as a sexualized object, not as an equal who could marry him and have his children. While Esmeralda knows that her culture and background is complex and nuanced, she begins to realize that many in the world see her and people who look like her as caricatures, not real people.
