Author Archives: Rachel Ferretti

Growing Up and Letting Go

The final section of Diaz’s Ordinary Girls flashes forward to times where Diaz seems settled. She still deals with depression and unresolved trauma that comes up sporadically, but she seems to have a handle on functioning as an adult. She has a home, at one point she and Cheito have a big townhouse together, she moves out and lives on her own, and she is making enough money to support herself and her family.

Diaz cuts off contact from her mother and Miami Beach for an extended period of time. Her mother suffers greatly in this time, as she sinks deeper into her mental illness and addiction. When Diaz returns home after Mercy dies, she barely recognizes her mother. Diaz needed to to cut off her mom to move forward, but it’s clear her mother suffers greatly with no one to keep her accountable. Mercy dies after overdosing on pills, as she said she would several other times. I wonder how much influence Mercy’s suicidal threats had on Diaz as a young girl, and if it played a part in Diaz’s suicide attempts as a child. The reader now has a better idea of how an eleven year old would even know what suicide is, let alone how to attempt it.

The theme of colonialism is underlying throughout the book, but is more prevalent in this section than in previous ones. Diaz writes about Lolita Lebrón, an independentista who, when her comrades backed down, stood up for her beliefs and the people of Puerto Rico fighting against colonialism by shooting up Congress. She obviously does not succeed in achieving independence and is sent to prison, but 50 years later is featured as a headline. I think Diaz can relate to feeling as if the whole world was against her. Diaz’s life and the entire political landscape of Puerto Rico would be radically different, had Lorita Lebrón succeeded.

Overall, this section provides some form of closure to the reader and a sense that Diaz will be okay. She seems to be adjusted and has no willingness to relive or return to the habits and trauma of her youth.

Picturing a Future

“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

“We Must Save Ourselves”

“There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot protect us, as much as we want them to, or need them to. There comes a time when we realize that we must save ourselves” p. 83

Díaz Jaquira. (2020). Ordinary girls: A memoir. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

This section really shows Jaquira Diaz’s mother’s unraveling and progression of her mental illness. It is abundantly clear that the adults in Diaz’s life are not really capable of caring for her properly. In this section, she tells the readers about a relationship she entered before she was even in high school with a 21 year old. Though she describes the relationship through a mostly positive lens, the seven year age difference is illegal for a reason. A thirteen year old can not consent. She was a child, and Chris was an adult taking advantage of Diaz’s unstable home life and lack of positive adult figures.

On Page 75, Diaz describes her admiration for her mother before her addiction and mental illness took over. She worked hard, but cared for her children and was “exhausted but happy.” At one point, she wished to be like her mother when she got older. This wish later becomes her greatest fear as her mother’s condition worsened. Mami kidnaps Diaz and Alaina, forcing them to stay with her while failing to provide basic necessities. Even when they tried to escape, she “always caught us. Always (p 89).” When this happens, Diaz feels utterly abandoned by her father, who stands by and does not interfere with her mother’s antics. He is completely checked out, and disappoints Diaz again when he fails to protect her from Mami.

Throughout this section, Diaz interweaves the story of Baby Lollipops, the gutwrenching murder of a toddler, Lazaro Figueroa, that gained national media attention during key points in Diaz’s own life. She marks important memories by what was going on in the Baby Lollipops case, and tells the story simultaneously with her own. The side by side comparison and fixation on the fact that the baby’s own mother did such horrible things to him are intentional. Sometimes parents can do horrible things. Prolonged abuse is evident between Mami and Diaz and the correlation to the Lazaro Figueroa case is clear. Parents are supposed to love and protect their children, but when they are incapable of doing so, the responsibility to try to save themselves falls on the children. This was particularly threatening to Diaz because it served as a reminder that parents can be loving one day and monsters another.

Díaz at the 2019 Texas Book Festival, Larry D. Moore

Díaz Jaquira. (2020). Ordinary girls: A memoir. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

Wikimedia Foundation. (2021, April 28). Jaquira Díaz. Wikipedia. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaquira_D%C3%ADaz#/media/File:Jaquira_Diaz_2019_Texas_Book_Festival.jpg.

Ordinary Girls Day 1

From the first few pages of Ordinary Girls is clear that Diaz’s father is important to her. She romanticizes his college days and association with the independentistas, his love for literature and poetry, and it influenced Diaz’s love for books as well. On page 3, she says, “I was sure of one thing that I wanted everything my father wanted.” She later details a disgusting, “horrifying” man, looking for her father, who exposed himself to her when she was a child. Despite her father putting her and her family in obvious danger, in the next breath, she says “I adored my father.” She loved her father with all of his complexities, even if it meant hardship for her. 

The issue of gender construct is brought up early in the book, when Diaz laments about how her brother gets to go wherever he wants, but Diaz is forbidden from some places because of her gender. She calls it the “burden of girlhood” on page 9. Even when playing cops and robbers as a child, the boys knew they could make Diaz play the role of robber, internalizing misogyny, as girls couldn’t possibly know how to defend themselves. 

The way our parents interact with us has such a great impact on our psyche. Diaz describes her mother’s worsening schizophrenia throughout the story, and several instances that might have escalated her condition. When Diaz’s father tells her she is crazy, or imagining things after accusing him of cheating with la otra, this gaslighting could not have had a positive impact on Mami. 

Lastly, poverty weaves its way through the entire storyline of this section. Diaz’s father would not need to sell drugs, the family would not need to uproot frequently, and Diaz wouldn’t need to deal with being “empty fridge poor” with better opportunities and more support.  A big reason for the lack of support, not that it’s much better in the states, is a lack of funding for  small businesses.

Pick a Book Peer Editing Draft

Choosing to read a book is a big commitment. Our time is our most precious nonrenewable resource and committing to a book means allotting hours of time, emotional investment, and brain power. To ensure the best use of one’s time, one must choose carefully when contemplating a book. It is important to zero in on topics of interest and research whether the author’s writing style is compatible with one’s preference. Luckily, there are several resources available today to learn about an author, and ample research can be done ahead of time before choosing a book to read. After consulting multiple sources, I have decided that Ordinary Girls by Jaquaria Diaz is the right choice for me to read. I am interested in stories about overcoming childhood trauma, relationships between mothers and daughters, breaking generational cycles, and the prison industrial complex, and all these topics seem to be covered in Ordinary Girls.

I am interested in these topics for a few reasons. Last semester, I took a classed called Youth in the Prison Industrial Complex. We learned about the exhaustive ways that the prison industrial complex is designed to keep people in poverty, particularly people of color. In cases of young people, juvenile detention centers, though incredibly costly, rarely provide any sense of rehabilitative care or skills to succeed upon release. Educational services are inadequate. In Ordinary Girls, Diaz describes sleeping on the floor (Diaz 2020). Recidivism is common because services are denied, keeping the imprisonment process cyclical. This is disturbing, and reading Diaz’s first-hand account will help me learn more about this country’s flawed punishment system.

I come from a family with a matriarchal structure, and I frequently look to my relationship with my mother and her relationship with hers for answers to my own problems. I am frequently told that I am my mother’s daughter, and Diaz mentions a similar phrase in La Otra, however, with a less positive connotation (Diaz 2018). La Otra is a short story written by Jaquaria Diaz, which touches on her childhood experience with a loving, albeit volatile mother, and a father who lets her family down (Diaz 2018). Diaz allows a glimpse into her relationship with her mother, a woman who is direct, unafraid, and though she loved her children, did not provide an example of positive coping mechanisms.

In New Memoir ‘Ordinary Girls,’ Jaquira Díaz Searches For Home, an interview with Steve Inskeep, first heard on Morning Edition is a National Public Radio (NPR) interview created for radio and edited for the web (Inskeep 2019). This interview elaborates on author Jaquaria Díaz’s life, including the hardships and traumatic experiences she endured in her childhood and eventually overcame. When asked about returning to her home of El Caserío, after all the author has gone through, she mentioned that a local boy told her she did not belong. She agreed that she didn’t belong, and this signifies her acceptance of her newfound stability (Inskeep 2019).  It was interesting to hear a selection of Ordinary Girls read aloud in the author’s voice. This source is reliable because it is an interview directly with the author, allowing for insight into the author’s inflection when writing her memoir.

Lastly, the Page 99 test for Ordinary Girls piqued my interest. The Page 99 test is a way to assess a piece of writing based only on reading page 99 (Wikipedia 2021). This method allows for the reader to get a feel for the story in just one page, while avoiding spoilers toward the end of the book. To me, the Page 99 test is comparable to a movie clip on a talk show before an actor gives an interview. For the purposes of my research, Ordinary Girls passes the Page 99 test. The story drops in while Diaz is describing her experience in the juvenile detention center. She explains the dehumanizing conditions within the detention center, the invasive corrections officers, and general lack of tools to succeed, rehabilitate, or heal (Diaz 2020).

 After examining several sources and an extensive preview process, Ordinary Girls is my book preference. This book will help me understand Diaz’s perspective as a queer woman of color with a difficult upbringing, who broke a cycle of instability. Based on my research, Jaquaria Diaz’s writing style is descriptive and conversant, and I look forward to exploring Ordinary Girls in depth.

Works Cited

Diaz, J., & Longreads. (2018, June 25). La Otra. Longreads. Retrieved September 21, 2021, from https://longreads.com/2018/06/25/la-otra/.

Díaz Jaquira. (2020). In Ordinary girls: A memoir (pp. 99–99). essay, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

Inskeep, S. (2019, October 29). In new Memoir ‘ordinary Girls,’ Jaquira Díaz searches for home. NPR. Retrieved September 14, 2021, from https://www.npr.org/2019/10/29/774306278/jaquira-d-az-on-her-memoir-ordinary-girls.

Wikimedia Foundation. (2021, May 30). Page 99 TEST. Wikipedia. Retrieved September 21, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_99_test.

NPR Interview with Jaquaria Diaz

In New Memoir ‘Ordinary Girls,’ Jaquira Díaz Searches For Home, an interview with Steve Inskeep, first heard on Morning Edition is a National Public Radio (NPR) interview created for radio and edited for the web. This interview elaborates on author Jaquaria Díaz’s life, including the hardships and traumatic experiences she endured in her childhood and eventually overcame. When asked about returning home to El Caserío after all the author has gone through, she mentioned that a local boy told her she did not belong. She agreed that she didn’t belong, and this signifies her acceptance of her newfound stability.  It was interesting to hear a selection of Ordinary Girls read aloud in the author’s voice. I have deemed this source reliable, as it passes the CRAAP test. The interview is from October 29, 2019, but my topic does not require recent information. NPR is considered reputable as it is a large nonprofit with fact checkers, and since this interview is with a primary source, the author,  this interview is credible. 

Inskeep, S. (2019, October 29). In new Memoir ‘ordinary Girls,’ Jaquira Díaz searches for home. NPR. Retrieved September 14, 2021, from https://www.npr.org/2019/10/29/774306278/jaquira-d-az-on-her-memoir-ordinary-girls.

https://www.npr.org/2019/10/29/774306278/jaquira-d-az-on-her-memoir-ordinary-girls

Expectations for ENGL 210

Dear Engl 210, 

I enrolled in this class as a requirement, but am eager to take it, nonetheless. I expect to be writing every day for the next few months, as I am taking a few writing intensive classes this semester. I look forward to it, but one thing I will need to get used to is sharing my work. I am a perfectionist and am thankful to live in an era where the backspace key exists, and I don’t have to erase on a typewriter. 

I am excited to learn as a group. It is proven that skills improve with practice, and the more we write and share, the more naturally it will come. I expect my classmates to be open to learning and sharing as well, and together, I expect to grow as writers and critical thinkers.

I haven’t taken an English class in over a decade but recognize the importance of expressing oneself through words in everyday life. I expect us all to be able to exercise patience and try to come from a place of understanding, and lastly, hope to be able to develop as communicators in deciphering the world around us.

Cheers,

Rachel