Catalina

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content, mental illness, and cursing.

Harvard students have five weeks off for winter break, and Catalina goes home to Queens to spend the time with her “grieving grandparents.” Nathanial travels to Peru with Dr. Murphy to conduct interviews for his thesis and, afterward, plans to spend a few weeks at the beach in San Marta, Colombia. Catalina knows that she couldn’t have joined him, but she is still annoyed that he didn’t think to invite her. Nathaniel shares numerous pictures from the trip, saved in a Facebook album titled La tierra del olvido. Catalina thinks that his Spanish has “the aesthetic appeal of raw chicken” (107).

Both Christmas and New Year’s pass “quietly,” and New York City is covered in snow. This means that Catalina’s grandfather’s construction jobs are closed, and the three of them spend a great deal of time inside, “driving each other crazy” (108). The women tiptoe around Francisco, worried about setting him off, but ugly fights are inevitable. When Francisco and Fernanda go to their Jehovah’s Witness meetings, Catalina has phone sex with strangers she finds on the “Casual Encounters” section of Craigslist. The men’s contributions are never very inventive, but Catalina “pull[s] from all of Western civilization for references to describe [her] body” (112). From reading Sigmund Freud, Haruki Murakami, Saul Bellow, and Vladimir Nabokov, she knows what men are thinking and how to describe herself “so beautifully.” Then, before they climax, she raises her voice and says, “Hasta la vista, baby!” (113). She muses that “the problem” is that her orgasms are “mechanical” and depend only on herself, not on anyone else. After climaxing, she is “fully human again” and feels “stunningly bored” (113).

One night, Nathanial calls her. Her grandfather complains loudly about “self-respecting” women not talking on the phone so late at night, so Catalina takes her phone outside in the snow. Nathanial starts telling Catalina about how Simón Bolivár died in San Marta and how they have some works by a famous Ecuadorian painter. Anxious to change the subject, Catalina tells Nathanial that she had a dream about him. He knows she is lying, and they laugh. Nathanial asks her for a picture, and Catalina feels desired, which is “the most beautiful feeling in the world” (116).

One day, Catalina’s grandmother wakes up with excruciating tooth pain. They lack insurance but manage to secure Fernanda an emergency appointment at a dental school with a sliding pay scale. With Catalina there to translate, Fernanda is diagnosed with an impacted wisdom tooth, and the clinic agrees to squeeze her surgery in by end of the day. The family waits, and Catalina emails back and forth with Kyle, playing the game “Fuck, Marry, Kill.” When Fernanda emerges, Catalina and her grandfather are shocked to see “incredible bruising” covering half her face. The man who leads her out insists that it is normal, but Catalina demands to see the surgeon. The man replies that the surgeon is busy but instructs them to give her Tylenol and cold compresses.

Fransisco is silent as they leave, but Catalina knows it is only because he doesn’t “have the linguistic capability to make a case for anything in a room full of American citizen medical professionals” (118). She reasons that the people at the dental school were “already doing them a goddamn favor” and wouldn’t give explanations to “people who have been in this country for years and seemed unable or unwilling to absorb English” yet were “extraordinarily good at finding every loophole in the law so that their children had access to school, […] had health insurance, [and] free lunch at school” (118-19). Catalina keeps emailing Kyle until her grandfather suddenly knocks the phone out of her hand and stomps on it. He claims that she is “unrecognizable” since starting Harvard and no longer respects him. Catalina starts to cry; she denies his accusations and threatens to return to Boston immediately if he doesn’t apologize. They drop the fight in the face of Fernanda’s suffering, and Catalina texts Nathaniel with her broken phone on the way home. She tells him about the argument but is careful to make sure that Nathaniel won’t think that Fransisco’s anger is “cultural” when he is really “a very complicated man” (120).

The next morning, Catalina receives an email from Jim Young, her former boss at her summer internship. He invites her to coffee, and Catalina suspects that he wants to offer her a job, something she both desperately wants and knows is impossible. She meets Jim at a bakery in Midtown, and, sure enough, he asks about her plans after graduation, saying that there will soon be an open position at the magazine. Catalina says that her plans are “still being figured out” and quickly changes the subject (121). Jim suspects that something is wrong but doesn’t press. He tells Catalina that she can always talk to him, and they part ways.

Catalina wanders the streets of Manhattan until she arrives at the American Museum of Natural History. She describes the museum as “a bit of a mindfuck” with “busloads of white American children [who] make their way through the halls of annihilated peoples” (123-24), but she wanders through the Hall of Americas, the Roman wing, and the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall, which holds a number of animals that Roosevelt killed personally.

Catalina begins sleeping long hours to cope with the stress of her impending graduation and “impossible” job offers. Her grandparents live in denial, believing that “their golden grandchild [will] keep pulling herself up to ever greater heights by her tough, weathered bootstraps” (125). Catalina takes a combination of NyQuil and Benadryl to sleep; one night, she takes too much, and her grandparents find her vomiting in the bathroom. Catalina begs them not to “yell so much,” and they finally see her “sadness” and try to “lure [her] away from [it]” (125). However, Catalina can do nothing but stay in bed.

One day, Catalina’s grandmother asks her to get the mail, which contains a letter from the United States Department of Justice addressed to her grandfather. Immediately suspicious, Catalina sits on the stairs to open the letter. She finds a notice of removal, stating that Fransisco failed to appear in court and will be deported to Ecuador. Catalina feels “weirdly calm,” as if “representatives of the white race were taking notes in the back of the room,” and she doesn’t “want to let ‘them’ win” (129).

The letter mentions a “notice to appear,” so Catalina rushes upstairs and opens her grandfather’s bedside drawer, where she finds two ICE notices summoning her grandfather to a court hearing. Catalina screams. Fernanda comes running, but Catalina hurries back outside, warning her grandmother not to open the door for anyone, and calls her grandfather. Fransisco begins to cry when he answers the phone and tells Catalina that there was an immigration raid on one of his construction sites. Promising to help, she feels “something primal [kick] in,” as if she has “been training [her] whole life for this moment” (131), and believes that anything is possible. She is “overcome by a great love for [her] grandfather” (131), remembering all the times he supported and stood up for her.

She begins researching cases of Dreamers and their parents fighting deportation orders and assembles a list of lawyers, contacting them one by one until she gets a meeting with Josh, who does pro bono work in the basement of a church on the Lower East Side. After listening to Catalina’s story and looking at her grandfather’s paperwork, he tells her that their case isn’t “good.” The best they can hope for is to reopen the case, but this depends on the judge’s discretion. In the meantime, however, filing a motion to reopen would at least give them temporary protection against deportation until the judge decides. This would give them time to build their case and perhaps generate some “good press.” Josh suggests that creating some “noise” might make ICE think that deporting Fransisco is “more trouble than it’s worth and go after easier prey or bigger prey” (135).

Back home, Catalina combs her address book for the most influential person she knows to help make “good press.” She settles on Byron Wheeler and emails him, asking to meet. They have coffee the next morning, and Catalina tells him everything. Byron suggests creating a short documentary film about her last semester at Harvard, something more “art” than “political” that would “[show] the human side of all of this” (139). Catalina worries that this focus won’t help with her grandfather’s case, and she is resistant to becoming a “poster child,” but Byron assures her that it’s their “best angle.” After some further contemplation, Catalina agrees.