Almost a Woman

“There was no sign we’d ever been there, except for the hillock of blue cement tile on which I stood. It gleamed in the afternoon sun, its color so intense that I wondered if I had stepped onto the wrong floor because I didn’t remember our floor being that blue.” 

Esmeralda returns to her childhood home in Puerto Rico, only to be surprised at the color of the tile, which is much brighter than she remembers. Throughout all her travels to different places, Esmeralda has kept a special fondness for her childhood home and for the happiness she felt in Puerto Rico. However, when she turns as an adult, Esmeralda realizes that she may not have been remembering things correctly, as exemplified by the surprising brightness of the tile. Though she has longed to return home for years, Esmeralda realizes that home can never be entirely what she remembers it to be.

“‘Something could happen to you’ was a variety of dangers outside the locked doors of our apartment. I could be mugged. I could be dragged into any of the dark, abandoned buildings on the way to or from school and be raped and murdered. I could be accosted by gang members into whose turf I strayed. I could be seduced by men who preyed on unchaperoned girls too willing to talk to strangers. [...] Two days in New York, and I’d already become someone else. It wasn’t hard to imagine that greater dangers lay ahead.”

Mami repeatedly warns Esmeralda of the dangers in New York City after they first move there from Puerto Rico. Though Mami just wants to keep Esmeralda safe, her warnings cause Esmeralda to be fearful of the world around her, and to question her experience of being in America. Esmeralda can tell she has become a different person in this new place and worries that the greatest danger won’t come from the outside, but rather from her own internal struggles and changes as she adapts to her new life.

“There was a midpoint between being a puta and a pendeja that I was trying to figure out, a safe space in which decent women lived and thrived and raised their families. [...] One false move, and I ran the risk of becoming one or being perceived as the other.”

One of the dangers Mami warns Esmeralda of is men. Esmeralda learns from Mami that there are two types of women to avoid being: the loose woman, or puta, and the woman who lets her man walk all over her, or pendeja. Esmeralda knows that she is meant to find some middle ground between the two, but she also worries that she won’t strike the right balance and will be judged by her family and community.

“Slowly, as our vocabularies grew, it became a bond between us, one that separated us from Tata and from Mami, who watched us perplexed, her expression changing from pride to envy to worry.” 

Esmeralda and her siblings learn English by reading illustrated children’s books from the library and watching television. At first, Mami is pleased and impressed by how quickly her children learn, but she soon realizes that this difference in language will create a divide between them. In learning English, the children will better assimilate into the culture, which is what Mami wants, but also fears. Mami brought her children to America to have a better life, but she also worries these opportunities will eventually lead her children away from her.

“It was good to be healthy, big, and strong like Dick, Jane, and Sally. It was good to learn English and to know how to act among Americans, but it was not good to behave like them. Mami made it clear that although we lived in the United States, we were to remain 100 percent Puerto Rican. The problem was that it was hard to tell where Puerto Rican ended and Americanized began. Was I Americanized if I preferred pizza to pastelillos? Was I Puerto Rican if my skirts covered my knees? If I cut out a picture of Paul Anka from a magazine and tacked it to the wall, was I less Puerto Rican than when I cut out pictures of Gilberto Monroig? Who could tell me?” 

Esmeralda struggles with her identity after moving to America, realizing that she is no longer wholly Puerto Rican but also not fully American. Mami inadvertently adds to this confusion by praising Esmeralda for embracing some American aspects but punishing her for adopting others. Overwhelmed with a feeling of displacement after moving from place to place, Esmeralda seeks to find comfort and security in defining her identity, but she realizes it is extremely difficult to do so.

“I felt sorry for her, and for myself. The thing I wanted most, a return to Puerto Rico, came true for her. But her dream was the opposite of mine. She wanted to stay in New York, to be a success American-style, surrounded by the things we thought would make us happy: the apartment on Park Avenue, the luxury car, the clothes and dinners out and nights at the theater. I curled into myself much the way Mami did, afraid to dream—no, afraid to speak my dreams aloud, because look at what had happened to Natalia’s.”

Shortly after getting into the Performing Arts High School, Esmeralda is shocked when she learns her friend Natalia has returned to Puerto Rico unexpectedly. Esmeralda and Natalia often shared their dreams: Natalia’s was to be a financially successful doctor in Manhattan, and Esmeralda’s was to return to Puerto Rico and live on a farm. Esmeralda realizes their dreams have essentially been reversed, with her acceptance into a rigorous school in Manhattan, and Natalia being forced to go back to Puerto Rico. As a result, Esmeralda develops a fear of vocalizing her dreams out loud, because she believes this will jinx them and cause them not to come true.

“Standing next to each other, Mami and I looked like darkest night next to brightest morning, each determined to get her way, knowing one would have to cede to the other, waiting until the last possible moment of uncertainty before she surrendered.”

Mami and Esmeralda have a loving but complicated relationship, and tensions increase as Esmeralda grows older and begins to become more vocal about getting her own way. While shopping for a dress for graduation, Mami wants to keep Esmeralda in childish cuts and colors, while Esmeralda wants to show that she is becoming a woman. Esmeralda used to back down to her mother and let Mami make all the decisions, but now it is Mami who concedes, proving that Esmeralda is coming into womanhood and is a force of her own.

“The sadness didn’t leave her when she went to work. Her grief was like a transparent box that allowed her to sew bras in the factory, to talk to us, to cook and shop, but held her in, untouchable. Mornings, her muffled movements about the apartment woke me as she got ready for work. She woke up early, showered and put on a simple black shift or a black blouse and skirt. She brushed her black hair into a tight bun, scrubbed her face, powdered her nose and forehead. She never ate breakfast, not so much as a cup of coffee. She tiptoed down the wooden stairs, which creaked in spite of her efforts.”

After Francisco’s death, Mami becomes overwhelmed by grief. However, because she has so many people depending on her, Mami must continue to go through the motions, taking care of her eight children and going to work to provide for them. Esmeralda notices how Mami struggles to keep going, in a way that Esmeralda might not have when she was still a child. Now with her own worries, cares, and responsibilities, Esmeralda realizes what a sacrifice Mami makes every day to put her family first.

“At fifteen, Cleopatra was soon to be queen of Egypt, while I had to argue with my mother over every little thing. I wondered what it was like not to have a mother, and a chill raced up from my toes to my head. I had to walk to the door and peek out to make sure Mami was still there before I could be warm again.”

Esmeralda vacillates between adoring her mother and resenting her. Mami is the most important presence in Esmeralda’s life, but like many children as they transition into adulthood, Esmeralda challenges her parental figure’s authority. One such case occurs when Esmeralda wants to make a dress for her role as Cleopatra in a scene at school. Mami protests Esmeralda’s tight dress, causing Esmeralda to wish she didn’t have a mother to tell her what to do. Yet Esmeralda also realizes just how much she needs her mother, and she immediately takes back the thought. No matter how much Mami might irritate her, Esmeralda’s worst fear is for Mami to disappear or leave, which would throw her world into chaos.

“I settled back in my chair, seething, alternating shame with guilt, envious of Margie’s fashionable clothes; her rolled, teased, sprayed hair; her meticulous makeup; the charm bracelet that tinkled on her right wrist; the Timex on her left. At the same time, I longed to talk to her, to find out if she was in touch with Papi, if it hurt her when he remarried, if she remembered our grandmother, whom, Provi said, I resembled.”

Esmeralda is surprised by a visit from her half-sister Margie, the daughter of her father from a previous relationship with a woman named Provi. As Provi and Mami visit, Esmeralda realizes that while the two women are being pleasant on the surface, they are subtly cutting each other down. Esmeralda feels torn between loyalty to her mother and interest in her half-sister, a girl she barely knows who lives such a different life from herself. Margie and Esmeralda could share a special bond, but the continued competition between their mothers prevents this from happening.

“I didn’t tell Mami that although she had high expectations for us, outside our door the expectations were lower, that the rest of New York viewed us as dirty spicks, potential muggers, drug dealers, prostitutes.”

Mami has sacrificed many things to provide for her children’s dreams, and Esmeralda feels the burden of this greatly. Mami expects her children to be much more successful than she ever was, to have a better education, and to make smarter decisions about love. However, Esmeralda knows just how much is stacked against them as Puerto Rican immigrants. Esmeralda wants to honor her mother’s dreams, and so she protects Mami against the way the world views them, knowing it would break her heart.

“Weekends, Mami took us to the beach at Coney Island. Carrying blankets; coolers packed with ice, drinks, and food; a stack of towels; a couple of plastic buckets and spades, we trooped into a subway already filled with people similarly burdened. Once, the picnic started there when a child complained she was hungry, and in no time, everyone was dipping into the fried chicken and the potato salad and passing it around to total strangers who were eager to share their coleslaw and sliced ham and cheese sandwiches.” 

Esmeralda recounts many times in her childhood filled with sadness, poverty, and confusion, but she also remembers happier times, such as trips to Coney Island. Despite their difficulties in life, Esmeralda’s family comes together to enjoy these weekends on the beach, where they are surrounded by other families also struggling but still finding these moments of joy. The families on the train build a sense of community and even share their food with each other, showing that despite their different backgrounds, they can all come together to appreciate their common desire to have fun and be with their loved ones.

“From where I sat reading, I watched Mami sorting socks and underwear from the laundry-basket. Every so often, her eyelids flicked up to gauge Tata’s mood. It was funny to see her behave the way I did when I wanted something: the not-so-subtle hints, the ‘all my friends are doing it’ justification, the mention of a celebrity. Tata was as unimpressed with Mami’s techniques as Mami was with mine.”

As Mami comes out of her mourning for Francisco, she wants to start dancing on the weekends and tries to persuade Tata to watch her children. Esmeralda observes on, amused by the similarities in Mami’s behavior to her own. This moment shows a connection between the generations; Mami might be an adult in Esmeralda’s eyes, but she’s still a daughter. Mami had children very young and missed out on much of her childhood, so in some ways she is still stuck in the same place that Esmeralda finds herself in now: A girl dependent on her mother, seeking her permission and approval to venture out into the world. 

“At Performing Arts, I’d learned that Brooklyn was not New York City. It was referred to as an ‘outer borough’ by the mayor himself. Manhattan was the financial, theatrical, and artistic center of the United States. I wanted to be in it, to move from the margins into the center. I wanted to climb to the top of the Empire State Building, to gaze over the city and beyond it to the vast horizon that I knew existed but couldn’t see from the ground in Brooklyn.”

As Esmeralda advances in her studies and begins working and earning her own money, she realizes that the world is bigger than just her neighborhood. Growing up leads Esmeralda to assert her independence. Going to Manhattan on her own—to work, shop, go to the theatre, etc.—makes her feel like she has her own individual purpose. Though still relatively close by, the idea of Manhattan lets Esmeralda spread her wings while still having the safety and structure of home at hand.

“The noncommittal social worker was the first American to see the way we lied, her visit an invasion of what little privacy we had. It stressed just how dependent we were on the opinion of a total stranger, who didn’t speak our language, whose life was clearly better than ours. Otherwise, how could she pass judgment on it?”

Esmeralda becomes embarrassed when a welfare worker inspects her family’s apartment, and she realizes just how destitute her family must look from the outside. Between the laundry hanging in the bathroom, the unwashed dishes, and the dead cockroaches on the floor, the apartment does not live up to the fantasies Esmeralda has for her life. Part of Esmeralda’s shame stems from her growing awareness as she becomes an adult, and her realization that people will watch her family and pass judgment; but part of her outrage comes from the unfairness of being judged by a white welfare worker from a different background. Esmeralda’s family has struggled for everything since coming to America. However, Esmeralda realizes that there are others who have not had to work so hard, though they feel entitled to judge those who have not been so fortunate.

“I walked out of the building in a daze; went straight to the library; found a picture of Rita Moreno, another of Chita Rivera, a third of Jose Ferrer. They were not ugly people. They were beautiful Puerto Ricans. But did they, I asked myself, “look” Puerto Rican? Had I not known that they were, would I have said, there goes a compatriota? Knowing who they were, I could not know what I would have done if I hadn’t known. I only knew that according to Mr. Jeffers, my one connection with the entire motion picture industry, Puerto Ricans were not pretty people.”

Esmeralda auditions for a film role and believes she has done well, only to learn from the producer, Mr. Jeffers, that she was deemed too pretty to play a Puerto Rican. This confuses Esmeralda and sends her into a tailspin, as she wonders why a pretty person can’t play a Puerto Rican. As one of a few people of color in a mostly white performing arts school, Esmeralda has struggled with being typecast as exotic characters. Now Esmeralda confronts the uncomfortable realization that some white people, like Mr. Jeffers, conflate being Puerto Rican with being ugly or wrong in some way, even though to her, the Puerto Rican actors she encounters in films look like the people she knows and loves.

“I wiped off my makeup, then stripped. Esmeralda Santiago remained in the folds of each garment I took off and put away. Naked, nameless, I lay on my bed and slept. Half an hour later, Negi emerged, dressed in the comfortable clothes I wore at home. Another performance was about to begin, this one in Spanish.”

Esmeralda struggles between multiple identities throughout the novel: the self she is at home versus the self she is at school, versus the self she is at work, and so forth. In this passage, Esmeralda has just returned home from a day of working in the mail room, where she adopts a certain set of mannerisms to fit in with her colleagues. At home, Esmeralda becomes “Negi,” her family’s nickname for her, and speaks and acts like a different person. Because of her background in acting, Esmeralda equates these different roles with performances, a part she plays to suit whatever situation she finds herself in. Though Esmeralda can adapt to these different performances, it creates confusion for her, as she wonders which of these parts she truly is.

“I told myself that it was better for me to seem conservative and old-ladyish than like a hot tamale right out of West Side Story.”

Esmeralda becomes irritated when her family mocks her for buying a conservative dress for her first date with Sidney, a man from her office. Though she second-guesses the dress, Esmeralda reassures herself that she’d rather err too far on the side of being too modest than appearing too wild. Aware of the reputation of Puerto Rican women thanks to their depictions in films like West Side Story, Esmeralda knows people might expect her to be loose and wants to prove to people that not all Puerto Rican girls are the same.

“Dashing as Sammy was, I preferred my quiet afternoons with Andy. Shoshana rolled her eyes. ‘You’ll die an old maid!’ We laughed. We were both nineteen, and although we were desperate for love, we knew there was still time. After all, this was America, not the old country.”

Esmeralda and her friend Shoshana both come from families who have recently immigrated to the United States from other countries: Esmeralda’s family from Puerto Rico, and Shoshana’s family from Israel. The two girls connect over their strict upbringings and the struggle of being American but still feeling the pulls to the old culture. One benefit of being American girls is that Esmeralda and Shoshana don’t have to marry as young as their parents would have been expected to in their old countries. They can get jobs, go to school, and take more time choosing the right person to marry, opening up their lives to many more possibilities.

“The more time I spent away from home, the more it felt as if I were a visitor in my family. Our house, with its noise and bustle, was like a pause between parts of my real life in Manhattan, in dance studios, in adventures with Shoshana, in college, in the social calendar of Mishawaka, Indiana.”

Esmeralda takes advantage of being young and educated in New York City, going to community college, taking on various jobs, attending dance classes, auditioning for plays and modeling jobs, and spending time with Shoshana and other friends. Yet in doing so, Esmeralda realizes that she begins to feel more and more distant from her family. Esmeralda’s entire life used to revolve around Mami, her siblings, and Tata, and her world was limited to the small apartments and houses they lived in Brooklyn. Now Esmeralda realizes just how many opportunities there are in the world, and she feels herself becoming distant from her family as a result.

“Naked, I wrapped myself around him, his left arm under my head, mine across his chest. I pressed close until our brown skins were one. I could not think of what I’d just done, refused to answer the voice that asked, ‘Why him?’ Why not Otto or Avery Lee or Jurgen? Why had I not resisted, had in fact joyfully thrown off my clothes on the black leather chair?”

Esmeralda loses her virginity to Ulvi, a Turkish filmmaker, after resisting making love with several of her suitors before. Afterward, Esmeralda wonders why she chose Ulvi instead of some of the men with whom she had more serious relationships. Otto, Avery Lee, and Jurgen were all white; though Ulvi comes from a different culture, he and Esmeralda share a feeling of displacement in the United States that she hasn’t fully shared with any of her other boyfriends. Esmeralda sees some of herself in Ulvi, which is why she trusts him to be her sexual partner.

“‘What do you think happens to us here?’ I contended. ‘Do you think we’re as Puerto Rican in the U.S. as on the island?’ ‘More,’ he argued. ‘We have to work at it here.’”

Esmeralda encounters some different ideology about cultural heritage in her costar, Jaime, who believes it is their duty to promote Puerto Rican art. Esmeralda feels it is unfair to put pressure on herself to have to be a certain way to be deemed Puerto Rican enough, but Jaime argues they must do everything they can to keep their culture and tradition alive in the United States. Although Esmeralda concedes that Jaime has some points, she is most concerned with keeping her family afloat, and she feels she doesn’t have time or energy to bear the responsibility of her entire culture.

“‘I can tell you’ll be over him soon,’ Shoshana predicted. ‘It’s not like you to suffer for long.’ My head was so heavy I couldn’t think fast enough to agree or disagree. On the subway to Brooklyn, I jotted down her words on a scrap of paper and folded them inside my wallet. No, it wasn’t like me to hold on to pain for long. Why bother? A new setback was bound to come soon enough.”

After breaking up with Ulvi, Esmeralda confides her pain to her best friend, Shoshana, who reassures her that she’ll rebound quickly. Though Esmeralda is still in the midst of heartbreak, she recognizes the truth in Shoshana’s words. Esmeralda has had so many difficult things occur in her life that she can’t allow herself to wallow. With so many new challenges arising for her all the time, Esmeralda has never allowed herself to hold onto past pain for too long, and instead chooses to continually move forward.