Tag Archives: ordinary girls

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

What kind of girl

“What kind of girl, they loved to say. What kind of girl, even as they took what we gave, took what we tried to hold on to. Our voices. Our bodies. We were trying to live, but the world was doing its best to kill us.” (Diaz, pg 124) 

In this week’s assigned section we get a look inside Jaquira Diaz’s adolescent life. She begins to really talk about her mother’s illness to her addiction to cocaine and how it affected their family. She focuses on a very gruesome murder at the beginning of the part, something that stayed with her for life. The murder and dumping of a three year old toddler named Lazaro Figueroa, by his own mother and her girlfriend. There were many reasons elaborated in the section to why Diaz focused on it so much. For one, it happened in South Florida where she lived at the time, and she remembers it being such a huge shock that was on the minds of everyone in the community. Diaz was 11 years old when this horrific crime occurred and she remembers everyone following along to this crime of a young toddler being abused one and a half years until his death when his mother hit him in the head with a baseball bat. Diaz states “An entire city mourning the loss of a boy no one knew. We carried him with us. And even though he belonged to no one, he belonged to us all.” (Diaz, pg 84) The pure violence that surrounded this act is something that truly attached to Diaz because her life had violence involved too. She talks about several different dark and gruesome events in her life like when her brother trapped a mouse and handed her a skillet to smash it, to which she did. Or when her aunt Tanisha started self harming, or when Anthony slammed a door on the said aunt’s pinky and severed it. To when she stabbed her own brother with a steak knife. All these violent things kept happening to Diaz and her family but the one thing that truly scared her was turning out like her mother. She says “My greatest fear, the thing that scared me the most in the world, was my mother. It wasn’t the drugs, or her threats… I was afraid that, eventually, I would turn out just like her.” (Diaz, pg 90)

Baby Lollipops’ Shirt

Citations

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

Diaz, J. (2018, June 25). Inside brutal baby lollipops murder case that shook south florida. Rolling Stone. From https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/inside-brutal-baby-lollipops-murder-case-that-shook-south-florida-113594/.

Familial Racism

“Over the next few years, Mercy would cut my hair off many times, as if trying to teach me something about who I was, who I was supposed to be: my grandmother was the first person to ever call me nigger.” (Diaz, pg 51) 

From the start of her story, Jaquira Diaz has brought us all along her beginning childhood life in Puerto Rico. She touches on her childhood adventures and her family troubles. From the violence that would creep into her life and her own family issues. Diaz’s father has been a very present person in her story, the first story she shared was of her and her father at catholic church for a funeral of her father’s hero. She constantly references how similar she is and looks to her father. Saying “I was just like Papi, with his wide nose, with dark eyes, tight curls, skin that browned easily after a little bit of sun.”(Diaz, pg 18) She always felt very similar to her father and how he behaved. This explains how hurt and troubled she was with her father’s infidelity, stealing his favorite book and never letting him know that she had it, “I would lay my head on my pillow and feel nothing but the sharp sting of my father’s betrayal.”(Diaz, pg 37) 

Her grandmother Mercy was something that Diaz did not connect with, probably being that she was racist and colorist. Her grandmother constantly made racist remarks about Diaz’s family because her father was black with black features and Mercy outwardly disliked that. Diaz remembers “Our white grandmother, Mercy, hated that my hair was a tangle of dry and frizzy curls like my father’s. Bad hair, she called it.”(Diaz, pg 49) Her white grandmother ended up constantly cutting her hair short into ugly hairstyles then blaming the look on the fact that it was curly, kinky hair. To have a grandmother that blatantly did not like a part of you since you were young must have been horrible and traumatizing that she kept cutting her hair. To the point where Diaz was being bullied in school, people constantly asked her “Why do you look like a boy?” (Diaz, pg 51) I hope that as we continue the book someone stands up to or stops Mercy because that is just cruel. 


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

Having Someone There

While reading the first few pages of Ordinary Girls, I was already captivated by Jaquira Diaz’s story. But what caught me was the quote, “At first it felt like being interrogated, but after a while, I was so happy to have a grownup listening to me talk about myself, I let it all out. (Diaz 2019, pg 27.)” I felt like I was able to relate to that in a way because while growing up, there was no one to talk to, not even my family and when someone was there to listen to me, it felt relaxing and just telling them everything. Jaquira as a child was able to tell someone she never knew about her problems and to have someone listen to her was very comforting.   

Jaquira as a child had experienced many things that a child shouldn’t have experienced. From her stories of her parents fighting to her being able to feel comfortable with someone that she never knew was a little improper. She had to go to someone else to tell her problems to, and even though she loved her father very much, he wasn’t around much for her. I am similar to her in some ways, even though my dad wasn’t around much, he was still my favorite parent because on days he would have off, he would hang out with me and teach me random things that were very interesting.

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.

The Dangers of a Child’s Love

And while my parents yelled at each other and my mother threw the rotating table fan across the room and threatened to leave, I would lay my head on my pillow and feel nothing but the sharp sting of my father’s betrayal.

(Diaz, 2019, P. 51)

In the first section of our reading for Ordinary Girls, Diaz touches on a number of very heavy topics in her early life. Like many children, one parent is favorited over the other – in the case of Diaz, this is her father. Her father was like an idol to her, and she did everything to try and be like him and saw him almost like a hero. While her mother was unstable and ready to lash out, and her brother bullied her and belittled her because of her looks and gender, Diaz’s father stuck out as a source of comfort for Diaz. Diaz spent many nights with him while he read to her and she would always try and read his books so that he could understand his secrets and be more like him. However, as she grew older, the idolization began to fail. She found her father selling drugs in the plaza at a vey young age, he was a womanizer and constantly betrayed her mother with women in and out of their apartment complex, and ultimately, he left one day and didn’t come back for a very long time. Over time as well he began to belittle her for her gender as well, and not stick up for his daughter and refused to take ownership of his transgressions – leading to the quote I selected above from the reading.

In many ways, I can relate to Diaz’s experience with her family. As a very young child, there is the tendency in our minds to idolize or demonize things, to work in extremes. I hate her because she stole my toy. My dad is the best and I love him very much. After having pizza for the first time, pizza is my favorite food in the whole world and I want to eat it for the rest of my life. This extreme way of thinking is natural when we are small children, but as we grow older we begin to grow out of it. However, sometimes in toxic, abusive, and chaotic homes, this process can be delayed or end up not happening at all. With all the extremes and prejudice Diaz otherwise experienced (about her looks, her gender, the extremes of sexuality from her mother before even hitting puberty, the fights and drama of the home and neighborhood), I don’t find it all too surprising that she wasn’t in the headspace to stop the idolization until much later – until she had her heart directly pierced by her father and he turned her mother on her for something he did. While I did not face nearly as many instabilities outside of home, my the home instabilities led to a similar experience for me. We think so many things are normal that really aren’t, as Diaz states when she reflects on her violent games that she played as a child. Only later do we realize how insanely messed up our experiences were, and how it all makes sense that we ended up behaving the way we did later on. The way we think about ourselves, the way we treat others, and our wellbeing is deeply tied to our childhood experiences – and in an environment like this, it’s only natural that the idolization a child feels can turn into something incredibly dangerous even decades into their life, for themselves and everyone around them. It’s very likely that Diaz’s mother’s experience with abuse in her own family led to her growing mental health issues with age as she ignored the effects and was thrust into an underage marriage in an extremely unstable environment.

America Is in Crisis. That's Not New for Many of Us | Time

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

Belonging in the Face of Oppression

While reading the first part of Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Diaz there was a recurring idea of belonging. Diaz explored her feelings of belonging in childhood through telling stories in relation to gender and race. The lack of belonging that Diaz felt in her family occurred when she was compared to her brother. In comparison with her brother, she often felt isolated because she felt that he was often favorited due to his gender. The connection that she felt with her father during childhood was complicated by the secret trips her father would take her brother on to La Plaza. He would not allow her to go to La Plaza because she was a girl and this reasoning caused a fit of anger and left her, “longing for something to lift this burden of girlhood” (Diaz 9). The strong bond that she felt with her father was hindered due to his beliefs about what girls should and should not do.

The lack of belonging in her family was also felt because of her race. Diaz often felt disconnected from the stories she read and the movies she saw. “I’d lie in my own bed, imagining myself in those movies, writing revisions of them that included characters like me” (Diaz 42). The characters in the stories were people that did not look like her and therefore she struggled to see herself in the stories and connect. This feeling was reinforced by the racist comments that were consistently made by her grandmother. When giving her a haircut, her grandmother cut her hair short like her father’s hair and antagonized her with comments about not being able to look like her white mother. “It wasn’t the haircut, she said, chuckling, it was my bad hair…Your father’s fault. Your father and his black family” (page 50). While her Abuela proudly displayed her darker skin tone and hair, her grandmother put her down and made her feel like she was less than. Diaz’s lack of belonging has a strong connection to the intersection of multiple forms of oppression, and in this section specifically, it was sexism and racism.

Citations

Díaz, J. (2020). Ordinary Girls: A Memoir. Algonquin Books.

Grande, R. (2019, October 29). Abused, Addicted, Biracial and Queer: Jaquira Díaz Is Anything but

               ‘Ordinary.’ The New York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/books/review/ordinary-girls-jaquira-diaz.html

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Pick a Book – Ordinary Girls: A Memior

Fatou Kebe

ENGL 21002

09/20/21

Option 3: Jaquira Diaz and Sandra Cisneros

Ordinary Girls: A Memoir is the book that I have chosen to read for our book club. It’s a narrative autobiography written by Jaquira Diaz about the obstacles she had to face growing up with family struggles, poverty, mental illnesses, and her own sexuality. The book covers Diaz’s violence-riddled childhood in the projects in Puerto Rico to her rocky adolescence in the housing projects of Miami. It is a coming-of-age story that depicts girlhood in its rawest form. Doing research and assignments on this memoir reminded me of another female writer that wrote a book that also shows the reality of growing up as a woman. Sandra Cisneros is the author who wrote one of my favorite books, The House on Mango Street. That book is a modern fiction piece that details the story of young Esperanza and her desire to find her place in the world. It tackles identity, womanhood, family, and friendship. The significance of names and the power in language are themes of this literature and it connects to who Cisneros is. To me the topics that both Diaz and Cisneros highlight in their stories are similar in the fact that it connects back to girlhood and the lives women live. Cisneros even commented on Ordinary Girls: A Memoir saying “Jaquira Díaz writes about ordinary girls living extraordinary lives. And Díaz is no ordinary observer. She is a wondrous survivor, a woman who has claimed her own voice, a writer who writes for those who have no voice, for the black and brown girls ‘who never saw themselves in books.’ Jaquira Díaz writes about them with love. How extraordinary is that!” Here she clearly states her admiration for Diaz and the importance of writing her life story.

Jaquira Diaz is a Puerto Rican writer that was raised in Miami, Florida. She is also an essayist, journalist, critic, and contributor to many notable periodicals. She was born in Puerto Rico to a family that lived in the housing projects. The neighborhood was known as a violent place with a lot of crimes occurring. When she grew older into her adolescence phase, her family moved out to Miami where they struggled with similar problems. They faced obstacles with their financial situation and poverty, with Diaz’s mother and her mental illness, with being queer in a neighborhood that was not open to LGBTQ+ people, and growing up being biracial with a white mother. As Diaz grew older writing became such an outlet for her to express herself and her dealings with identity, drugs, and self-harm. 

Sandra Cisneros is a Mexican-American writer from Chicago, Illinois. She is a novelist, poet, short-story writer, performer, and artist that has also been teaching professionally for years now. She was born in the USA and she also holds dual-citizenship with Mexico due to the frequent times her family would go back to Mexico City during her childhood and adolescence. After her parents got married they settled in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago. Soon after when she would turn 11 her family was able to put a down payment on a house in a Puerto Rican neighborhood on the east side of Chicago. This neighborhood and its people would be the inspiration for Cisneros when she wrote The House on Mango Street. As she grew older due to all of the moving back and forth from Mexico City and Chicago, her six only siblings [all brothers] soon departed the household leaving Cisneros to experience and call herself the isolated one. 

Diaz and Cisneros are both Hispanic authors who wrote phenomenal work that I admire. Both writers produce pieces that are showing the importance of finding one’s own identity and the path and courage it takes to do so. In Diaz’s case, she writes in nonfiction about her own voyage to self-discovery and becoming the woman she is. For Cisneros, she wrote about a girl who wanted to escape more than anything, and during her girlhood, she found who she was inside. Both of these women write so that girls, especially those of color, can resonate and know that there are others who go through the same things, that they are not alone. That being a woman is a challenge of its own, never mind how we are treated in society. They both write to be a voice in addition. To let these stories be known to the public about the struggles and barriers women face while growing up. With this comes my deepest commendation because this is not an easy thing to do. To come out with personal stories of suicide, sexual assault, and mental illnesses, is a very brave and courageous thing to do. When I met Sandra Cisneros back in 2018 when she visited my high school, she quoted Plato and said “Courage is knowing what not to fear,” and I will never forget that. 

Citations:

Cisneros, S. (1984). The House on Mango Street. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.

Wikimedia Foundation. (2021, April 28). Jaquira Díaz. Wikipedia. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaquira_D%C3%ADaz.

Wikimedia Foundation. (2021, September 20). Sandra Cisneros. Wikipedia. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Cisneros. 

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).

Understanding Jaquira Diaz

“I Avoided Facing My Mental Illness for Decades. The Pandemic Changed That” by Jaquira Diaz is the article I found that helped me expand my understanding of who she is. This article is a narrative autobiography about Diaz’s mental health and how she was confronted with it due to being quarantined. In this piece Diaz talks about her first episode of substance-induced psychosis. It was during her mid-20’s when her father and her stepmother found her experiencing paranoid delusions, she believed that someone tried to poison her and that they were after her. After being taken to the doctors, Diaz went through more hallucinations and had to be sedated. She started writing Ordinary Girls soon after this episode, due to her getting the treatment that she needed. Writing about her previous obstacles in the memoir actually contributed to Diaz finding herself again. Throughout reading this article, I got to grasp the significance of the mental experiences Diaz has been through and how it’s what builds her writing. Her ability to write is what truly helps Diaz find herself and meaning to keep living. I believe this is a reliable source because it is written directly by Jaquira Diaz and was published recently in March of this year. 

Díaz, J. (2021, March 3). I Avoided Facing My Mental Illness for Decades. The Pandemic Changed That. Time. from https://time.com/5942112/mental-illness-covid-19-jaquira-diaz/.