83 pages • 2 hours read
Erika L. SanchezI Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Cockroaches
When describing her family’s apartment, Julia frequently mentions the cockroaches that scurry about the floor. When Julia mentions to Apa that she wants to be a writer, his only concern is that she “make enough money so [she] didn’t have to live in an apartment full of roaches” (121). The roaches are an ever-present reminder of the Reyes’ poverty, and no matter how much Amá cleans the house or how much the family does their “cockroach dance” to stomp them out, they never disappear for long. In kindergarten, a cockroach crawled out of Julia’s shoe once, and since then, she has had a constant fear that it will happen again, reminding her and those around her just how poor her living conditions are.
Food and Hunger
Julia has an insatiable appetite, both literally and symbolically. Because her family is poor, there is rarely much at home for Julia to eat. Even with the few staple ingredients Amá does keep at home, Julia never learned to cook, which only serves as another reminder of her inadequacy compared to Olga. Julia’s hunger is also a metaphor for her ambition; she is desperate to escape her present circumstances and eager to devour what the rest of the world has to offer outside of her insular Mexican bubble of Chicago. These desires are met with a slew of unfavorable circumstances: her family’s poverty, her own fragile mental health, and the impossible expectations for her to be as perfect as Olga. Even when Julia does not feel physically hungry, “sometimes it’s like [she’s] eating to drown something yowling inside [her]” (78). This yowling is never quieted, though, no matter how much she eats; she will only feel satiated when she escapes all the circumstantial barriers keeping her from creating her ideal life.
Books and Writing
No matter how much Julia eats to quiet the rumbling restlessness she feels, the only way she can truly escape her difficult, overwhelming life is through reading and writing. Her anxiety worsens after Olga’s death, and Julia finds herself turning to her books to avoid social interactions (which, in turn, further alienates her from her large family). She sees herself mirrored in some of her favorite characters, which is the only time she feels understood. She spends what little money she can save on books, often forgoing food despite her ravenous hunger, because books offer her a true reprieve, however temporary.
As an aspiring writer, her fantasies of her ideal future—the covers of her books, her extensive library—motivate her even more to leave Chicago. When Amá destroys many of Julia’s poems, Julia feels exceptionally violated and defeated: “Life without writing doesn’t feel worth living to me” (207). Her writing is “the one thing [she loves] most in life,” and having it taken away contributes to her worsening depression and attempted suicide (207). As Julia heals, she uses journaling as a coping mechanism, and the future she has so long hoped for starts to feel attainable again.
