36 pages • 1 hour read
Junot DíazThis Is How You Lose Her
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Story 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 4 Summary: “Otravida, Otravez”
“Otravida, Otravez” is narrated by Yasmin, a young Dominican woman. She works hard in her role as a hospital laundry room supervisor, explaining, “I work two blocks away at St. Peter’s Hospital. Never late. Never leave the laundry room. Never leave the heat. I’m in charge of four other workers, I make an American wage, but it’s a donkey job” (54).
Yasmin’s boyfriend is Ramon, a chubby Dominican man who left his wife and son in the Dominican Republic. He is trying to buy a house with Yasmin. She has anxiety about his two romantic worlds and secretly reads the letters from his wife, revealing, “He claims that he stopped writing letters to her the year before, but that’s not true” (59). Eventually, Ramon purchases a house and they move in together. Before long, Yasmin is pregnant with Ramon’s child. Yasmin plans to discuss how to put her foot down about the letters with her former landlady Ana Iris. Before she can tell her, however, Ana Iris confesses she must send for her children soon because her heart is too weary from being apart from them. When Yasmin hears this, she comforts Ana Iris and does not bring up Ramon. The next time she gives Ramon his wife’s new letter, she pretends to smile.
Story 4 Analysis
The story of Ramon mirrors that of Díaz’s father, who moved to the United States to make a life for his wife and children, only to fall in love with another woman. Here, Díaz processes this abandonment by putting himself in the shoes of his father’s lover, considering her emotions as she watches the man she loves refuse to sever ties with his family.
The imagery in the story’s first sentences serves as a microcosm for the unbecoming situation Yasmin resigns herself to:
He sits on the mattress, the fat spread of his ass popping my fitted sheets from their corners. His clothes are stiff from the cold, and the splatter of dried paint on his pants has frozen into rivets. He smells of bread. He’s been talking about the house he wants to buy, how hard it is to find one when you’re Latino (51).
A binary of inclusion and exclusion manifests over the course of the story, both in relation to Yasmin’s role in Ramon’s life and in the pair’s attempts to buy a house in America, which Ramon deems “[beginning] to live” (69). Further, Yasmin considers Ramon’s search for a house to be akin to him “interviewing for a visa” (57).
Much is made, then, of the migrant’s attempt at making a new life in America, a proposition that is rarely easy. Further, both Ramon and Ana Iris cannot let their Dominican pasts wholly go, as seen through Ramon maintaining his marriage, at least officially, with his wife, and Ana Iris’s need to send for her children. Yasmin’s reading of Ramon’s wife’s letters also ties her to her Dominican past. Yasmin’s decision to let go of her need to see Ramon sever ties with his wife is in part an attempt to disavow the binary of assimilation and exclusion that she, as an immigrant, faces. Much of Díaz’s work focuses on the idea that late 20th and early 21st century immigrants, unlike their counterparts decades earlier, find it nearly impossible to cut ties with their homeland completely. This is due in some part to better communication and the ease of air travel. Yasmin therefore resigns herself to a life in America that, while perhaps better than her prospects in the Dominican Republic, is also far from her idealized version of a life in the United States.
Related Titles
By Junot Díaz
