“This is not the life I want for you.”
Abuela to Diaz, p 176
In this section, we continue to see Diaz experience hardship on unthinkable levels, but we also begin to see Diaz make positive choices with her future in mind. She describes (almost) healthy relationships, reliable, honest friendships, and hints at a true support system outside of her family. Her family dynamics continue to be a mess, with her brother taunting her over going to jail, her father’s general absence, and her mother’s progressing mental illness. Her friends, however, like Boogie, China, and some parts of her relationships with Kilo and Cheito, would get her through these difficult years.
Diaz weaves suicidal ideation throughout this section. On page 143, she says “We wanted to be throttled, mangled, thrown. We wanted the violence. We wanted something we could never come back from.” A woman threw herself off of the building where her father lived and worked, and Diaz tells what she knows about the story throughout this section. Diaz goes on to describe another suicide attempt, when she tried to overdose on her mother’s pills. She survived, but after coming to, decided to leave her mother for good and got a ride to her father’s apartment.
Meeting Cheito, though she was (in my opinion) way too young to get married, was a good thing for Diaz. Cheito’s family is loving and caring towards each other, and this is foreign to Diaz. It is nice to hear her describing the love she feels between her and Cheito, and the hope for a better life that she feels when they are together. They get their own place (albeit for a short amount of time) and though their relationship doesn’t work out, he inspires her to join the military, which she credits to saving her life. Her time in the military also didn’t work out, but she overcame serious mental blocks by jumping off the tower, something she had thought about as a means for suicide so many times before.
At the end of this section, Diaz writes about a sexual assault she experienced after she returned from the Navy. She was raped in an alley in South Beach, and details the trauma of going through the process of dealing with police and medical personnel after an assault. She recalls a man attempting to assault her when she was a child in a park, taking her to the men’s bathroom, but she and her friends fought him off. She remembers her friend Yvonne telling her about an assault when they were just kids. This chapter is called Secrets, and this represents the shame and urge to keep quiet in instances of sexual assault. You can see the agony of recounting the event over and over when Diaz is at the hospital and talking to the police officer, and it is clear why so many sexual assaults go unreported. The pattern of secrecy seemingly protects them, but it also protects their assaulters from consequence.
Ocean Drive Art Deco District on Miami Beach. Al Diaz Herald staff
Image Link: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/miami-beach/article15798998.html#storylink=cpy
Hi Rachel, I liked your detailed and accurate telling of Diaz’s shift in writing style in this section. It’s eerie and unnerving to see the suicidal ideation and idealization of death, and a life of drugs and instability. Diaz certainly struggled with many hardships in this section of her life, her early teens, but those friendships and her short lived marriage certainly got her on the path to recovery.
I think this chapter really speaks to choosing your own to call your “family”. We may come from unsupportive backgrounds, but it doesn’t mean that we are alone nor that we necessarily have to push through on our own. This is a mistake I made growing up myself. Around the time Diaz married Cheito I came to a similar conclusion and began pushing myself very hard to make friendships and build myself a support system. A lonely existence is extremely painful, especially when there’s layers of abuse contributing to it. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and now I feel much happier and much more able to deal with life’s hardships. I think the chapter could really spark a discussion on what makes someone a good person to include as those special confidants, and what we contribute to these relationships as well. Social interaction and relationships are, in my opinion, what makes life truly worth it.