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.
Symbols & Motifs
Archie Comics
At her cousin Alma’s house, Esmeralda reads Archie comics, describing the characters as “the only American teenagers I’d come to know” (26). Archie and his friends, like the American teens Esmeralda glimpses at a distance in her school, are aggressively white, with blank ethnic backgrounds, and “short, easy-to-remember names like Sue, Matt, Fred, Lynn” (26). Although Esmeralda is disenchanted by the dark, boxy streets of Brooklyn, she fantasizes about the white suburbia depicted in the Archie comics, “their concerns as foreign to me as mine might be to them” (27). Esmeralda goes into a lengthy comparison of the difference between Archie, Veronica, Betty, and Jughead, and her own life, including adult supervision, the type of food eaten, dating and social life, and the lack of responsibility white teens get to carry.
Unlike Esmeralda, “[t]hey existed solely for themselves” (27). Esmeralda envies the lives of the Archie characters, so free from hardships and emotional pain. Because Esmeralda has so little exposure to white American teens, she imagines that all their lives must be this easy and carefree. Though, arguably, Archie and his friends are comic book characters and don’t reflect real life, Esmeralda uses these familiar staples of white American pop culture to show the inherent cultural differences between life for white American teens and herself. Esmeralda has been warned against becoming Americanized by her mother, but this glimpse into American life implies that things would be much easier for Esmeralda if she could only “live in those uncrowded, horizontal landscapes painted in primary colors” (27).
American Food
Esmeralda and her family have a complicated relationship with American products, particularly food. The ease and availability of such a wide range of products is a novelty to Esmeralda and her siblings, and though the transition to a new culture is difficult for them, one thing they readily embrace is the flashy American diet. Though Mami takes pride in providing her children with food, even in hard times, and attempts to make them things that will keep them strong and healthy, Esmeralda and her siblings dream of American products: “[W]e didn’t want rice and beans, milk and bread. We wanted Ring Dings and Yodels, pizza, Coca-Cola, Frosted Flakes, Jell-O, foods we never had in Puerto Rico” (61).
These Americanized foods represent a cultural disconnect in the different generations of the family. Tata fears the food and thinks it will be damaging to the children; Mami reluctantly gives in to her children’s desires but tries to keep it in moderation; and Esmeralda and her siblings crave the food wholeheartedly. While Tata and Mami see the food as an emblem of America and want to hold on to the old ways, Esmeralda and her siblings equate the name-brand, highly advertised food with the American dream. Though they have lived a life of poverty, overcrowded into small, unheated apartments infested with roaches, Esmeralda and her siblings dream of a different kind of American life, where they have enough money to buy whatever they want. To them, the food symbolizes security, because people who can afford to buy things like Pepsi and candy bars without a second thought must not be struggling for money and bouncing from job to job.
West Side Story
Esmeralda loves singing, dancing, and performing, but she begins to resent the constant references people make to her about West Side Story, the Broadway musical and film. West Side Story updates the story of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to 1960s New York City and follows two rival gangs, the Jets (made up of white teens) and the Sharks (made up of Puerto Ricans). A white boy, Tony, and a Puerto Rican girl, Maria, fall in love despite their family and friends being enemies. Some people, like Esmeralda’s employer, Mr. Murphy, seem to expect that Esmeralda should love the musical, because it has Puerto Rican characters: “[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’” (120-21). However, Esmeralda resents the musical because, to her, it highlights the racism and prejudice she experiences on a daily basis.
Esmeralda notes that the sweet, virginal Maria is often portrayed by a white actress, where as the “sexy spitfire” Anita was played by a darker-skinned Puerto Rican. The Jets have a “nice, clean, warm place to hang out, reminiscent of the malt shop where Archie hung out with Betty, Veronica, and Jughead” (121), and they remain sympathetic throughout the musical despite getting into all kinds of shenanigans, such as nearly raping Anita. The Sharks, by contrast, have only a rooftop and spend all their time arguing about America and Puerto Rico. To Esmeralda, this type of representation doesn’t give a voice to Puerto Ricans—it simply exists as another way to exoticize them. Much like in acting school, where Esmeralda longs to play a variety of roles but is always cast as Cleopatra, Esmeralda sees West Side Story as putting her in a stereotyped box, carefully containing her cultural differences in a way that stunts her creativity and expression.
