Author Archives: Megan Norat

Reflections and Legacies

“How do we keep living in the world when everything we built is gone? How do we even go on?” (Diaz, 310)

The last section of the book Ordinary Girls speaks a lot on legacies. The things that change based on what you lived through, who you were and how that formed who you are. This section was a lot of reflection while also narrating new aspects of Diaz’s life. For example, during the Halloween party, she reflects on her friendships with China and Flaca while also touching on them aging and gaining new friends. When she was in Puerto Rico she reflected on her life when she lived there, and on the rich history that has been erased by centuries of colonialism. She mentioned that La Princesa, a prison in San Juan that held many Nationalists, including Pedro Albizu Campos, is now a tourist attraction. After Hurricane Maria, she goes back to where she grew up, and sees everything her family built gone. The house her grandmother lived in, the store her father built and kept running, swept away and damaged by the storm.

In the last two pages of the book, she says who she writes for. She writes for those who didn’t make it—her friends that had passed away and couldn’t tell their own stories. She writes for the girls who grew up in circumstances like hers, for those who grew up feeling like they weren’t represented in the media. She writes this book as a legacy, her mark on the world saying that she is here, she matters, and she sees you.

La Princesa as a prison (Prior to 1993 when it was renamed)
Present Day– Puerto Rico Tourism Company (AKA El Paseo de la Princesa)

The Feeling of Home is like a Boomerang

Diaz did a lot of going back and forth in her life, and it’s reflected in her memoir. The way she goes between anecdotes parallels the way she went between homes and lives growing up. She went from living with her mom to living with her dad, and even between them they moved houses a lot. The people she hung out with differed depending on her age and where she was in her life; in school she had Flaca, Boogie and China, her marriage with Cheito, in the Navy she had Jones and G-mo (Diaz, 213, 222). After Mercy died, her feelings about her grandmother flip-flopped. When she first heard the news, she was reminded of the last conversation they had, in which they spoke to each other like they never had before. For her it was almost as if she was speaking with Abuela, someone she did have a good relationship with. When speaking with her little cousin before the funeral, Diaz learned that Mercy had a good relationship with her other granddaughter, one that was also Afro-Latina, described as having dark skin, eyes and hair. This made Diaz question why she never had a relationship like that with Mercy, and made her realize the similarities between her, her mom, and her grandmother. Her multiple suicide attempts were with her mother’s pills, whereas Mercy was found with five empty bottles of sleeping pills (254). In this particular section, Diaz does a lot of self-reflection on who she is, and what home is to her.

Boomerang

La Llorona, the Mother

La Llorona is a bedtime story that many Hispanic children grow up with. If you don’t listen to your parents, La Llorona will come to get you; if you don’t go to bed, she’ll come get you; if you misbehave, La Llorona will take you. In many ways, she is the boogeyman, or a version of him: a myth/legend that will scare children into doing what you ask, someone who used to be good that became bad and preys on children. Diaz compares her mother to La Llorona multiple times in the section appropriately titled “Monstruo”. In the legend, the mother drowns her kids, then drowns herself. In her own way, Jeanette does the same thing: going on a downward spiral and dragging her kids with her. The drugs and alcohol are a way to keep her pain at bay, but they only cause pain to the girls. Being evicted and moving from place to place—when she wasn’t on the run—left Diaz feeling like she didn’t belong anywhere. The multiple scenes with Jeanette and the men go to show the relationship she had with Jaquira. In some way, she always chose the man over her daughter. Without opposition, Jaquira felt that the one person left to protect her (her mother) was the one causing her pain and the reason she was always on the run where she should feel safe.

La Llorona figurine

The Importance of a Grandmother

Something I found really interesting was the different dynamics Diaz had with her grandmothers. She related completely with her Black grandmother and felt she was her safe place, whereas she never felt good enough for her White grandmother. I can relate to this in a way, because growing up I did have different dynamics with each of my grandmothers, and funnily enough one is Taino and the other isn’t. I found that going back and forth between stories was good at showing the differences in dynamic. With Abuela, Diaz loved cooking with her, spending time with her, using her house as refuge. With Mercy, there was judgment, verbal abuse, and passive unacceptance.

I love how Abuela accepts and embraces her roots, which is something that not all Puerto Ricans do, as Mercy continuously demonstrates. The obvious racism that Mercy has towards Papi’s side of the family creates confusion and unnecessary emotions in young Jaquira. This is something that is very important in a child’s upbringing and can have a bug impact on their mental health in the future, which Diaz alludes to multiple times. Not being accepted, especially by a member of the family, can lead to future problems. Abuela calling her “mi negrita” endearingly versus Mercy cutting off her “pelo malo” shows the stark contrast between the two grandmothers’ perspectives on their heritage.

Díaz, J. (2019). Ordinary girls: a memoir. First edition. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

Inside “Ordinary Girls”

The article I read gives a quick glance deep dive of the book “Ordinary Girls” by Jaquira Diaz. Essentially, it gives a summary of the book, but only skimming the surface. Giving an overview of her life in Puerto Rico and then explaining why she moved to Miami Beach, the article also names Diaz’s accomplishments and awards she won. I know this source is reliable because it is from a publishing house (Kirkus Media LLC). The article is a review of the book, and it seems neutral, not leaning towards one bias or another, which also adds to its reliability. It passes the CRAAP test because it is current (written in 2019), speaks only about the book and the author, and comes from a respectable source (Kirkus Reviews found on Gale Academic OneFile).