In the courtyard, two of the cells are in their original condition– stone walls, rusted bars, the stench of dried piss, pigeon shit. Even in the summer heat, the tourists are lining up for photos. A woman approaches, asks if I will take a photo of her and her two kids. I take her phone, stand in front of one of the cells. I take their picture. “Gracias, mamita,” she says. And then, without thinking, I hand her my phone so she can take one of me. How strong our collective desire to erase our history, our pain. How easily we let ourselves forget.

Diaz reflecting on her family’s roots at La Princesa, an old prison in Puerto Rico from the colonial days, page 343.

As Diaz grows older as an adult, she begins to become more pensive about her family and regrets with them that she had as a child and younger adult. She regrets that she left her mom to rot, turning into a splitting image of Grandma Mercy, which Diaz had discovered was nicer than she had been in the past. Her mom was unrecognizable and truly messed up when they finally reconciled and it partially broke Diaz in her mind, as it only been a decade but she looked like she had aged far more than that. She thought her own mother was a crackhead on the street when she approached, to the point that Cheito took out some coins when she approached. The deaths of various family members, their histories, and the seeming endless cycle of abuse and violence in her family, even amongst cousins, made Diaz really start to think about the bigger picture of her own history.

Diaz, being a black Puerto Rican woman, comes from a unknown history. They can only trace themselves as far back as a few generations prior in Haiti, and after that their heritage is lost to slavery and colonialism. The poverty that Diaz endured as a child is a direct result of the acts of generations of slavery and colonialism. It is a specter that haunts Puerto Rican people to this day, and exists in smaller forms with US control. The needs of Puerto Ricans are tossed aside, as Diaz recounts during the wake of Hurricane Maria, where the true effects were downplayed and many parts of the island were totally destroyed and thousands died. It means a lot more than the simple numerical value would imply, as Trump and the media seem to equate to value.

This section really brings up interesting conversations about colonialism and it’s effects. Meth use, mental illness, violence, sexism, homophobia, poverty, womanizing within Diaz’s own family all have roots in her immediate society, influenced by the colonizers and the society that was forced upon them by acts performed generations ago. The racism prevalent in society holds Diaz and her family back, and causes rifts in and out as people judge her based on her skin color, her hair, and her appearance, and hold her back even somewhere like the military simply because of her roots. I think an important question that jumps out to me from this section is the effect of race on roots, and the cycles that it creates. What can be done differently to try and change the course of these families from having continual problems time and time again, causing unimaginable suffering to poor children over and over creating abusive and/or mentally unstable adults. What parts of history do we need to acknowledge and actively respond to in order to move forward and prevent this sort of thing from continuing to happen.

“Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria” by Western Area Power Admin is licensed under CC BY 2.0

I got up a few hours later and took my mother’s pills, all of them – antipsychotics, sleeping pills, anxiety pills. I washed them down with half a bottle of Dawn dishwashing liquid. I’d heard the stories about toddlers who’d gotten poisoned with Drano, or detergent, or bleach, but all we had was Dawn. If we’d had any Drano or bleach, I would’ve downed that, too. I was determined to die.

Jaquira Diaz, reflecting on her suicide attempt at just 11 years old, page 178.

Ordinary Girls has been escalating rapidly since Diaz began to grow up – almost a reflection of her childlike innocence being torn into pieces. We are taken on a ride, the ride of her life, the ride of all of her traumas, and it is becoming harder and harder to read. For Diaz to be beaten and abused on a regular basis, for her to fall into drugs and associate with dangerous people, for her to do literally anything to escape the depression and anger she feels about her family makes me so upset to read. The fact that she began to idolize the woman who commit suicide in her father’s apartment complex and see her as at least having had a plan and wondering if she tried to kill herself too at eleven years old is so incredibly painful and eye opening to read.

The sheer vulnerability to which Diaz shares with us is incredibly commendable and heart breaking at the same time. We have watched her been crushed and beaten by the world around her, increasingly so with each page. It’s so upsetting to know that she reached suicidal ideation at just 11 years old. Children at eleven years old should be just on the brink of puberty and dealing with the pains of middle school as reputation begins to become a big factor in their social lives – but Diaz has to deal with abuse, drugs, lies, and a broken life with absolutely no escape. It’s almost as though she’s being held underwater. When I first started reading this, I related to Diaz’s broken heart from her broken family, but it reached a new level where i’m genuinely terrified to see what happens to her next.

I am so glad Diaz was able to recover from this state of mind. I can only imagine the pace at which her mind is running and the pain she’s enduring. For her to have lived long enough to find stable, healthy love, and to reach a point in her life where not only is life worth living but that she’s recovered from her traumas enough to share them with us is truly inspiring. To me, it’s inspirational that she was able to recover from the depths of depression, suicidiality, and anxiety.

Kahn, Margot. “Jaquira Díaz on ‘Ordinary Girls,” Home, and Telling Her Story: Bust Interview.” BUST, https://bust.com/books/196745-jaquira-diaz-interview-ordinary-girls.html.

“I picked up the bag and without taking my eyes off my father, said, “I will never forgive you.” Then I packed some of our clothes and schoolbooks and walked out.” (Diaz, pg. 103)

The second section of our reading deals a lot with the sheer instability that came with the family beginning to break apart. With Papi having finally left Mami, and living separately, Mami fell into the beginnings of schizophrenia and began to lose her mind. She became addicted to hard drugs herself and was homeless a lot of the time. She would even taken Jaquira and Anthony with her to live in dangerous neighborhoods in extremely unstable housing, and would lash out and attack anyone who dared challenge her, but particularly her own kids.

Her father and grandmother simply watched. Her father simply passively encouraged the kids to take the pain and try to avoid “awaking the monster” so to speak, instead of taking responsibility for his kids and making sure their mother stayed the hell away. Their grandmother was simply too old to be able to fight back against Mami, and could only watch the abuse happen right before her eyes.

The instability in this environment can lead to the children themselves eventually developing mental illness. Diaz herself remarks this on page 96 – that mental illness runs in her family and this sort of behavior could potentially be her one day. She simply tried her best to just survive the torrent of rage from her mother. I think this particular comment brings up a very useful discussion. The cycle of abuse, the cycle of mental illness – how much of a child’s future is determined by nature vs nurture? What do you think?

My own family struggles with a cyclical line of mental illness / neurodiversity. On my mother’s side, bipolar I runs heavily and I am extremely lucky to have avoided it, as it is so strong that my own family has dealt with psychotic episodes and hospitalizations. I grew up surrounded by this instability, and just like Diaz I knew it could one day be me but I tried my best to avoid it as much as possible, to minimize my exposure, and to hide away as best I could. I didn’t come out perfect, but I think I managed alright – I will definitely need to think over and examine my childhood for the rest of my life. I’ll have to examine little bits of behavior here and there that I might have thought normal but in actuality were just elements of my family’s own illnesses. What can I do to prevent this from ever happening again, should I adopt kids? Diaz herself states that she has no idea whether her mother’s mental illness was caused by her mother’s collective trauma throughout her life, or whether it was simply lying dormant in her genetics. We can clearly see that up to this point she was quite unstable before. The answer will never be clear and it is just something Diaz will have to watch for the rest of her life.

I think Jaquira is very strong and lucky to have survived this environment and come out on top as a successful writer in a loving, healthy relationship. She is an example of a success story of having broken the cycle. I hope to maybe do my own research and see if she has written anything about her recovery process later in her life beyond the documentation of her childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, and see what I can learn from that.

Díaz Jaquira. (2019). Ordinary girls: A memoir. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

After much background research and a multitude of previewing activities, I have chosen to read Jaquira Diaz’s acclaimed debut memoir “Ordinary Girls.” The memoir stuck out amongst the three books because it allows for a comparative experience as I am queer myself and dealt with a similarly chaotic home environment with a mentally ill mother. Recently, I also have developed an interest in Latin American cultures and societies, and I will be able to read Diaz’ extremely personal struggle and get a glimpse at what a queer experience looks like outside of Western society. I feel as though reading this book, I will be able to get a much better understanding of the struggles of a black and Puerto Rican queer woman and hope to gain insight about how these factors all came to play in Diaz’ experience growing up in a highly discriminatory and chaotic environment.

From the first assignment, where we examined the cover of the books, “Ordinary Girls” stuck out to me because of the clear connotation of developing sexuality with the red and purple. The cover drew my eye, and the blurb on the back of the book drew me in with it’s description of a “raw” tale of “mapping a way out of despair toward love and hope” throughout her home with a alcoholic father and schizophrenic mother. I personally grew up in an environment with a bipolar mother and while it is not the same, my home life was extremely chaotic and I dealt with many of the things that Diaz dealt with and developed similar tendencies to avoid being able to speak. In my other previewing activities, I saw that Diaz went into more detail about her experiences with her mother.

In “Ghosts” which is another, much shorter memoir by Jaquira Diaz, she recounts her experience escaping her mother by invoking the Baker Act and joining the military. Up to this point, I had learned that Diaz had not been able to express her feelings at all, another fact of my life growing up that I unfortunately also had to deal with. Diaz met another young woman who finally let her speak and she fell in love with her. Although Diaz’ mother was comfortable with physical sexuality (she taught Diaz to masturbate and was frequently nude), being queer and black in 1980s Puerto Rico in a El Caserio was a true struggle and not something that was openly acceptable. After joining the military to escape her mother, she ran into more discrimination being a woman soldier, and had to navigate almost being raped and being sexually harassed on a regular. She found an escape in a very loose type of relationship with her married staff sergeant. Here, she explored bisexuality but also navigating something very wrong. I am really hoping that Diaz touches more on this story in Ordinary Girls, as this happened when she was still very young.

One more factor of the book that I am interested in is Diaz’ experience with racial discrimination. While trying to figure out which book to read, I read “America Is in Crisis. But Some of Us Have Never Known Anything Different”, which is a article Jaquira Diaz wrote for TIME magazine in the wake of the George Floyd protests. In it, she details her experience being black and dealing with police brutality and racial profiling in both Puerto Rico and in Miami. She goes into great detail relating her past and present experiences to how she joined, like many other non-white and non-standard people in the US, an alternate reality separate from the white experience in the United States. I am white myself and although I have heard many stories from acquaintances and friends alike, I will never experience the racism first hand. I am very interested to read about her experience growing up black in both Puerto Rico and Miami, because I haven’t read a writer’s personal perspective with modern racism in many years. It will give me more of an opportunity to get more acquainted with it and expand my understanding of racism in multiple perspectives.

Through my previewing activities and background research, I have gained a desire to read “Ordinary Girls”. Through the various articles Diaz has wrote and interviews with Diaz that I have read, I have gotten more insight on her incredibly interesting journey finding her identity as a black, queer Puerto Rican woman, and how her experiences have left her afraid and living in a reality that I do not experience due to the factors out of her control. I really hope that by reading this book, I will be able to further develop my understanding of the black, queer, and female discriminatory struggles on a perspective that is in and out of Western society. I believe her unique journey will be highly engaging and will have a very lasting impact on me – it’s only natural that such a raw and horrifying recount of a child’s life would do so. I am very interested to see others who have chosen to read Ordinary Girls and their reasons for doing so, and look forward to discussing it soon.

Bibliography:

Díaz, J. (2014). Ghosts. The Kenyon Review, 36(1), 196–209. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24242155

Martin, R. (2019, October 29). In New Memoir ‘Ordinary Girls,’ Jaquira Díaz Searches For Home . Morning Edition. Washington D.C., District of Columbia; National Public Radio.

Díaz, J. (2020, June 25). America is in Crisis. That’s Not New for Many of Us. Time. Retrieved September 13, 2021, from https://time.com/5859204/america-in-crisis/.

For the assignment, I chose the 2019 National Public Radio interview In New Memoir ‘Ordinary Girls,’ Jaquira Díaz Searches For Home that features Jaquira Diaz touching on her book Ordinary Girls with Steve Inskeep, hosted by Rachel Martin. In the 7 minute interview, Diaz touches on the difficult portions of her childhood and a specific chapter detailing her life at 14, where she learned ways to protect herself and keep herself alive in a traumatic and violent environment. Ordinary Girls is a memoir detailing the discovery of a atypical identity in an environment where that might have some extremely severe consequences. Listening to this source and reading the transcript has helped me to understand Diaz’ perspective and her position on her childhood. She mentions a moment where she returned to her home in El Caserío and a boy told her that she doesn’t belong there anymore and needs to leave right now. She says that she agrees, and this shows that she has processed her trauma and developed the ability to move on from such a difficult environment and move forward with her life. This has made me want to read the book combined with my previous research into other works by Diaz with last week’s assignment.

This source passes the CRAAP test. It is an interview with the author herself, Jaquira Diaz, Morning Review, a section of the popular well-regarded nonprofit media organization National Public Radio. Diaz herself is speaking about her own book with questions prompted by the presenter, and being that she is the primary source, this makes the information credible and reliable. The information is current as it comes from a very recent broadcast (2019) and does not require further information as a result.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/774306278

Martin, R. (2019, October 29). In New Memoir ‘Ordinary Girls,’ Jaquira Díaz Searches For Home . Morning Edition. Washington D.C., District of Columbia; National Public Radio.

When I first enrolled in the course, I was pressed for time to pick a major and ended up with sociology, banking more on my work experience with technology and IT than anything to propel me forwards, and getting certificates. However, this does not mean that I came into here for no reason. I feel that it is very important for me to learn about sociological research methods and sociological concepts so that I may become a better informed citizen and give me a skillset that could potentially lead me to working in a nonprofit or government institution as well.

Now that we are a few classes deep, I have formed some expectations based on the format of the class. I want to improve my writing, particularly my research-based writing of course (my last time doing a research paper was the fall 2018 semester!). However, there is a very important discussion and analysis part of this course as well. I want to learn to better work with others to improve our writing and how to provide helpful feedback and commentary that may better help to develop my own writing as well as those who share their own with me. It will be interesting to see how that dynamic plays out in an online class, versus a in person class like I experienced 3 years ago.

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