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 7-9
Chapter 7 Summary: “I don’t care if the whole world is going.”
Mami slowly comes out of mourning and things begin to change around the apartment. Esmeralda and her siblings start playing music. Tío Chico, Mami, and Tata take turns cooking elaborate meals, and neighbors from downstairs come to visit and eat. Jimmy, a boy just a little younger than Esmeralda, develops a crush on her and begins following her around. An embarrassed Esmeralda goes to her cousins’ apartment to avoid seeing him. On weekends, the family goes to Coney Island. While the others swim, Esmeralda sits on the beach because she was once swept under by a wave and feared she would drown. One day, the kids persuade Mami to take them to the amusement park. Edna goes missing, and Mami becomes frantic. Finally, Edna reappears on a horse with a police officer, and Esmeralda fantasizes about being rescued by a handsome police officer the same way.
Mami wants to go dancing at night and tries to persuade Tata, who remains skeptical: “‘Hmmph,’ Tata responded, an unspoken, ‘I don’t care if the whole world is going, you’re not’” (93). Mami continues to badger Tata to watch the younger kids so she can take Esmeralda to the clubs, until Tata finally gives in. At first, the club overwhelms Mami and Esmeralda, but they have a fun time on the dance floor, where “every woman who can dance is beautiful, and every man with loose hips and grace is dashing, regardless of facial features or body types” (96). Afterward, Mami decides that Delsa and Norma should come with them next time. Saturday night dances become a regular thing, and Esmeralda enjoys the freedom and sexual power she feels on the dance floor: “I lost all sense of time, embraced and embracing, beautiful, graceful, trembling with sensations possible only this way, in this place” (99).
Around the same time, the news reports dangerous things happening, like JFK’s assassination, the murder of Kitty Genovese, and riots in Brooklyn. One riot starts near Esmeralda’s home, but is shut down quickly, though Mami still determines to move soon. Mami wants Esmeralda to skip a dance to study for her summer school geometry exam, but Esmeralda reassures her she knows the material now and won’t fail again. The dance is interrupted by a riot, and Mami and the girls escape into the subway, fearful the rioters will follow them down there. The next morning, Esmeralda fails her geometry exam. Once school starts, Esmeralda and her family stop going to dances. Money is tight with all the needs for starting up school again, and Mami goes to the welfare office to ask for help. The welfare worker tells Mami she can’t get welfare when she has a job, and he tells Esmeralda she should work. Mami tells him, “She job school” (104), though Esmeralda suggests she could get a job. Mami doesn’t want her to work, even though Esmeralda’s younger brother Hector has a job: “[H]e was male and I was female, and that was the difference” (104).
Chapter 8 Summary: “She’s not exactly Method.”
Esmeralda longs to play different roles in school but is always cast as Cleopatra. She struggles to get into character and find new approaches to playing the part. Esmeralda wants to be a Method actor who stays in the moment, draws on memories, and remains self-aware in her performance; however, she also worries that her lack of experience and exposure to the world will make her acting fall flat. Esmeralda gets offered a job as an usher at a local Yiddish theater. The owner, Mr. Rosenberg, sells the tickets and also performs in the show. Esmeralda can’t understand the Yiddish but becomes enamored of the performances by the actors and how they shift and change every night. After the first performance she becomes overwhelmed with emotion and weeps in the back row. This position continues for a few more weeks until the acting troop stops to rehearse the next play, but Esmeralda gets hired again for the next round of performances.
Mami takes the girls to a dance on Park Avenue near Christmastime. After the dance, they walk down the street to find a place to eat but get stopped by a police officer who questions them for being too loud. Esmeralda summons her Cleopatra performances and speaks back to the officer in a haughty, regal tone, confusing him about whether she’s a resident of the neighborhood, so he lets Esmeralda and her family go. At another dance, Mami meets a new boyfriend, Don Carlos, who begins showing up at all the dances they attend, though Esmeralda and her sisters don’t like it when he sits at their table since he scares off dance partners: “Men thought he was our father and didn’t ask us to dance” (114). Mami invites Don Carlos over for Sunday dinner, and Tata gives Mami a hard time for bringing a new man into the family. Mami argues she’s “still a young woman and deserve[s] a life” (115). Don Carlos moves in.
At school, Esmeralda excels in her junior year, learning new parts, acting as the hall monitor, and loving her dance classes and the freedom they help her feel. Esmeralda continues to usher at the Yiddish theater, where she gets to know the regular patrons. One evening, one of the men has a coughing fit and a doctor in the audience takes care of him as Esmeralda runs off for some water. Esmeralda worries what would happen if there wasn’t a doctor in the house, but Mr. Rosenberg teases her, “there’s always a doctor in this house” (118). Mami moves the family into a new apartment with more space, where Esmeralda cordons off a small hallway off the kitchen to be her own room. Though the space is sparse, Esmeralda loves having her own private space. Esmeralda applies for a job at a photographic developing company, where the boss asks her about West Side Story because she’s Puerto Rican. Esmeralda gets the job, but resents the connection to West Side Story, which she feels portrays Puerto Ricans in a negative light.
Esmeralda’s class discusses Romeo and Juliet, which West Side Story was based on, but though everyone else loves it, Esmeralda thinks it’s stupid to kill oneself over love. At her job, Esmeralda gets to know her coworker Sheila, a black woman supporting herself and two young children, who encourages Esmeralda to stay in school. Esmeralda uses her money to pay her siblings to do chores she doesn’t want to do and to buy books she can keep instead of returning to the library. Don Carlos begins to display some suspicious behavior, like only coming home on weekends, being evasive about his children from another relationship, and not helping to pay with the bills. Tata thinks this bodes ill, and Esmeralda worries that his stinginess is “a sure sign that there were other, more unpleasant traits in him that we had yet to discover” (125).
Chapter 9 Summary: “Stop thinking and dance.”
As a senior, Esmeralda is finally old enough to get cast in the Shakespeare plays, but once again gets cast as Cleopatra. Her partner, Northern Calloway, helps her dig deeper into the character. Esmeralda also makes a new, sheer dress to play the part, but “for the sake of decency” wears tights and leotards underneath (127). In the school hallway, a teacher suggests Esmeralda would make a good Indian classical dancer and encourages her to come find him. Esmeralda tries, but can never track him down. Another teacher, Miss Cahan, asks Esmeralda to try out for a play at a children’s theater company. Esmeralda attends the audition in a fancy apartment in Manhattan on the Upper East Side. Another student from the school, Claire, auditions for the same role, and Esmeralda worries because she knows Claire often gets better parts than her.
At first, Esmeralda struggles with the dance exercises, until Miss Cahan instructs her, “Stop thinking [...] and dance. Don’t worry about remembering the steps” (130). Esmeralda knows she will get the part: “Claire might be an angelic ingenue, but I’d perfected exotic characters” (130). Esmeralda attends her rehearsals at a dance studio, taught by the teacher who originally approached her, Matteo. Matteo teaches Esmeralda Indian classical dance, which she takes to quickly and loves passionately. The performance goes well, and Esmeralda shines in her role: “When I danced, I had no tongue, but I was capable of anything. I was a swan, I was a goddess, I vanquished devils” (133).
A pregnant Mami learns Don Carlos is still married. Esmeralda and her siblings become bitter toward him, even though Don Carlos eventually gets a divorce. Mami works until she’s about to deliver the baby, then goes back to the welfare office. The welfare worker insists on coming back to their apartment, where Esmeralda is shamed by the state in which she and her family live. Esmeralda falls asleep crying, embarrassed by her family’s destitution. That night, the power goes out in New York and the entire Northeast, and for the first time, Esmeralda can see the stars outside.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
As Esmeralda continues to progress toward adulthood, she begins to have a small sexual awakening. So far, her encounters with men have been unwanted and invasive, such as Tío Chico grabbing her breast and men flashing her on the subway. Esmeralda also becomes embarrassed when a neighbor boy, Jimmy, becomes infatuated with her. However, when Esmeralda begins going to dances with Mami, Esmeralda experiences her first taste of attraction and pleasure in her growing sexual awareness.
Though the dance floor still has its share of unwanted attention—such as “rompemedias, stocking rippers” and “pulpos, octopuses” with too loose hands (99)—Esmeralda finds she enjoys some of her encounters with men. Esmeralda tests the waters, avoiding anyone who becomes too aggressive, but enjoying the situations where she feels she can be in control: “I savored the power of being able to excite a man, to feel his hot breath against my ear, slow at first, then sharper, hotter” (99). Because so many of her sexual encounters before this have been conflated with shame and secrecy, Esmeralda doesn’t allow these experiences on the dance floor to go any further and becomes “embarrassed I let it go so far” (99). Nonetheless, the dancing remains an erotic memory for Esmeralda that allows her to explore these budding emotions and sensations in a way that she normally can’t with her strict Mami and Tata watching her every move.
Esmeralda faces some uncomfortable stereotyping, generalizations, and prejudices against her skin color and culture. In Chapter 8, Esmeralda grows frustrated at continuously being cast as Cleopatra because she’s the only “exotic” person in her class, even though Egyptian and Puerto Rican cultures are vastly different. Esmeralda longs to play a variety of roles and expand her range but finds herself pigeon-holed into certain types. After the popularity of West Side Story, Esmeralda resents that the film offers the only representation of Puerto Ricans that most people outside of her culture recognize: “[E]very time I told someone I was a drama student, they expected me to lift my skirts and break into ‘I feel pretty, oh so pretty...’” (120).
Esmeralda recognizes some discrepancies in the way the film depicts white skinned and darker-skinned people, with the sweet innocent Maria often played by an American, and the sexy spitfire Anita played by a darker-skinned Puerto Rican. Also in Chapter 8, Esmeralda, her two sisters, and Mami are confronted by a police officer for simply walking down Park Avenue, trying to find a place to eat. Esmeralda and the others are breaking no laws; the police officer clearly targets them for being not white in an affluent neighborhood. Incidences that Esmeralda may have once missed or ignored become obvious to her the older she grows and the more she learns of the world.
Where Esmeralda once trusted Mami implicitly, she now begins to see flaws in Mami’s judgment. In Chapter 9, Mami and the family learn that Mami’s new boyfriend, Don Carlos, is still married and has been lying about his divorce. All her life, Esmeralda has been warned by Mami about not trusting men and not allowing them to walk all over her, but Esmeralda realizes that this is what Mami has always done:
But what scared me most about Don Carlos’s betrayal was that Mami was not immune to the seductive power of a man with a sweet tongue and a soft touch. ‘Men only want one thing,’ she’d said so many times that I couldn’t look at a man without hearing it. If she could fall under the spell, how could I, younger and less experienced, hope to avoid the same destiny? (134).
Esmeralda loses faith in Mami’s judgment with men as she also becomes ashamed of the poverty in which her family lives. Unable to rely on Don Carlos for support, Mami must go back on welfare when she has his baby, and Esmeralda feels deep shame as the case worker inspects their home. Esmeralda has long noted that her family doesn’t have some of the niceties and luxuries that others do, but she now begins to feel anger as she realizes this lifestyle is a result of her mother’s choices: “It was not funny anymore to laugh at ourselves or at people who held our fate in their hands. It was pathetic” (136). As she grows older, Esmeralda feels herself detaching more and more from Mami, becoming critical of her choices and her lifestyle.
