Drown

Rafa is a decidedly-flat character whose primary purpose, throughout the collection, is to foil Yunior. Named after Ramón, Rafa is rough, tough, and remorseless. He mercilessly harasses and beats Ysrael in the first story in the collection. He treats Yunior with disdain and coldness. Even as a young adolescent, he sexually objectifies women. He is not the son upon whom Ramón fixates, presumably because he satisfactorily performs hypermasculinity, unlike Yunior. He is, in essence, everything that Yunior is expected to be, and everything Yunior fails to be. 

For the bulk of the collection, Ramón, Yunior and Rafa’s father, functions as a model of dysfunctional hypermasculinity. His abusive, philandering ways destroy his family. He towers over Yunior and produces a bitter, internal conflict within Yunior, as Yunior is caught between hating his father and vying for his love and approval. He is a character that spends the entirety of the story “Aguantado” being articulated through absence. Although the Ramón that appears in each story is slightly torqued, he can be understood as the same character, at his core. The final story of the collection, “Negocios,” adds more subtlety and nuance to his character. In that story, we come to understand Ramón as a man who came to America not speaking a word of English, at the tender age of twenty-four. Lured to the land of milk and honey by the promise of prosperity, he instead encounters bitter poverty, extreme hardship, vicious ignorance and racism, and the intractable loneliness that being alienated from both his adopted country and his homeland produces. Through Ramón, Díaz constructs not only a paradigm of hypermasculinity, but an emblem of an immigrant experience, in all of its harshness, tenderness, complexity, and reality. 

It’s important to note that the Mamí, who appears in “Fiesta, 1980,” appears to be markedly different from the Mamí who appears in “Negocios.” In “Fiesta, 1980,” Mamí is a character who quietly endures and accepts Ramón’s abuse. She functions as a kind of martyr. In “Negocios,” however, she is a much more outspoken, ferocious woman who reacts to Ramón’s abandonment and infidelity with unrestrained vengeance. In both stories, she is a devoted mother who does her best to provide both emotional and material labor to ensure the psychological and physical nourishment of her children. She is, in that sense, a prototypical matriarchal figure. Her flatness, in relation to the more robust characters of Yunior and Ramón, reveals Díaz’s focus on depicting masculinity and male characters as a central conceit of the story. 

In the first story in which Ysrael appears, we see him as a twin of Yunior. The way that his physical deformities mark him as an outcast and a misfit mirror the ways that Yunior’s failures as a male child mark him for disgrace and ridicule. In “Ysrael,” Ysrael becomes the target of Rafa’s merciless physical abuse, and he is clearly the scapegoat of an entire community. In the collection’s penultimate story, “No Face,” Ysrael comes back and is effectively turned inside-out. No longer merely a blank slate onto which the anxieties of a community are projected and exorcised, he becomes a fully fleshed-out character with his own interiority. He is a lonely, intelligent, vulnerable, and sensitive child who acutely feels the weight of the rejection and ridicule he has done nothing to earn. He takes solace by imagining himself as the protagonist of his very own comicbook, or as part of a Lucha Libre adventure. In Lucha Libre, wrestler’s masks catapult them into the realm of the fantastic and the larger-than-life. Ysrael’s mask, ostensibly designed to protect him, can be seen as functioning just as much as a means to protect others from having to look at his disfigured face. In “No Name,” Ysrael instrumentalizes the mask: seeing himself in the heroes that Lucha Libre produces, he attempts to achieve catharsis by and reconciliation with a society that rejects him by fashioning himself as an underdog superhero. Through him, Díaz puts a mirror up to the brutality and hypocrisy of a society that reveres rebel, underdog superheroes while at the same time rejecting and brutalizing those very figures in real life.

Ysrael is also very likely a reference to La Familia de Pascual Duarte, a 1942 novel written by Spanish Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela. In the novel, Ysrael is a character whose face has been eaten off by a pig.