Catalina

“I wanted to be the photograph. I wanted to be Art. I knew it was only a matter of time before a boy in a band wrote a song about me, but that would require patience and I suspected the song would not be very good. Once again, I would have to rely on my own scruples to make things happen. I would have to become a writer myself.”

Catalina wants to become a writer so that she can take control of her own story. She sees herself as the subject: a muse and an art object in and of herself. She has no doubt that others will be inspired by her and turn her into art. However, she worries that they won’t do her justice, so she endeavors to take matters into her own hands.

“My grandparents did a quiet math around me, balancing the reality of the present and all its dinginess with the possibility of a happier future. I tried very hard to make the sacrifice seem worth it. What was The Sacrifice? It was everything they did or went without to help me make it in America. My grandfather’s job was demeaning and he did it for me. He did it for money but it was money for me. And not enough money, my grandmother would be the first to remind you. Being undocumented is not for the weak of heart. My grandparents lived hunched over, arms linked; climbing up in this world meant standing on their backs, and they let me know.”

Throughout the novel, Catalina challenges stereotyped perceptions of immigrants, breaking stigmas that suggest that undocumented people are taking advantage of the system and intentionally not following rules for their own benefit. Here, she paints the literal physical sacrifices that her grandparents have made, as her grandfather has destroyed his body through manual labor so that Catalina could get an education. This passage also suggests Catalina’s conflicted sense of responsibility toward her grandparents. They make sure that she is aware of their sacrifices, implying that they expect some kind of compensation.

“I very badly wanted to fall in love before graduating college. I had never been in love and being in love meant cues about how to feel and when. When I got dressed, I could look at myself how I imagined a boy in love might. I could see how, in the right lighting, even my headaches and nosebleeds, my sensitivity to light, the way I flinched at the slightest graze on my arm from a stranger, could be hot. A little eyeliner and a push-up bra and I could be one of Almodóvar’s women on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But, for that, I’d need an audience. Lucky for me, boys constituted a reliable one.”

This passage establishes a crux of Catalina’s character: that she nurses an obsession with being seen and evaluated by others. She is constantly considering how others see her and what she can do to change that perception. However, she needs an audience to explore these different facets of herself, and she thinks that falling in love is the best way to achieve this. Catalina also believes that being in love will help anchor her in the world, giving her purpose and a sense of belonging.

“Walking in the rain made me feel invisible, and for a long time I was. It could be horrifying, the way white people walked into me if I didn’t move out of the way first, but other times being invisible was exhilarating.”

As much as Catalina craves attention from others, she also finds a certain power in invisibility. Here, she describes how white people completely ignore her while walking on New York sidewalks. While feeling like she doesn’t exist can be “horrifying,” there is also a certain freedom and relief that comes with the removal of objectifying gazes. The phrase “and for a long time I was” hints at Catalina’s increased sense of agency later by containing the opposite possibility within it.

“For my first three years at Harvard, I heeded that advice, kept my head down, and sir’d and ma’am’d my elders. This was another way to keep my dignity intact, avoiding perception and judgment, invisibility by design. By the start of senior year, I could tell in my bones that I was done. For three years, I had been too busy feeling small and tragic to accept my razzle-dazzle coming-of-age at the most famous school in the world. Things were different now. There was catching up to do. I felt like I was emerging whole and without a backstory, like Athena born from Zeus’s forehead fully formed.”

In this passage, Catalina describes her attempt to fit in and conform to Harvard’s expectations. Catalina avoided judgment and objectification by crafting an “invisibility” over her first three years. Now, however, she is ready to take control of her experience. Because she has essentially been invisible, her classmates don’t truly know her, and she feels like she can start from scratch as she reinvents herself. This is a turning point in her character. The reference to Zeus and Athena highlights the learning that occurs at Harvard but also alludes to Catalina’s orphaned status, as Athena has no mother in many versions of Greek mythology.

“I was usually self-conscious around other Latinas at school. I knew too much about them. Everything about me hurt, and I imagined that everything about them hurt, too, and in the exact same ways. I imagined their rain boots were, like mine, from TJ Maxx.”

Here, Catalina describes her trepidation when it comes to making friends with the other Latina students at Harvard. She assumes that they have too much in common—that they also grew up poor, shopping at discount stores. This passage suggests that Catalina’s self-consciousness stems from a worry that it won’t be so easy for her to shape their perceptions of her, indicating how important it is for Catalina to project an image she feels she can control. Her attitude to her fellow Latinas also conceals an irony because it suggests that Catalina generalizes and makes assumptions about those from a South American background in the same way that she fears others will make assumptions about her based on her racial identity.

“White people have always tried to bond with me about Latin America in this anxious, insecure, and very awkward way. I never had anything to contribute to these conversations, which were largely based on vacations to Machu Picchu or Rio de Janeiro. I didn’t know how to surf. I didn’t know how to swim. I was terrified of South American animals.”

This passage explores Catalina’s sense of dislocation and her awareness of white people’s need to acknowledge her racial background in a way that she suggests is clumsy, condescending, and, perhaps, an expression of “white guilt.” Catalina’s language here makes it clear that she considers herself the victim of these “awkward” conversations, which seem to be more about the other person’s self-projection than any real attempt to understand Catalina. The repetition of the short, negative refutations at the end of this passage emphasizes Catalina’s sense of alienation—both from her “home” country and from those who attempt to “bond” with her in this way. The subjects—“Macchu Piccu” and “surfing”—show how far these tourist experiences are from the normal life experiences of South American communities.

“I figured out quickly that in order to learn about Latin America, I had to go to Anthropology or Literature. There were no professors of Latin American History at Harvard. Real live Latin Americans taught in the Romance Languages and Literatures Department but the professors and TAs for most of my Anthro classes were white.”

The fact that many of the classes about Latin America are housed in the anthropology department and taught by white professors suggests a constant sense of othering and objectifying at Harvard. Catalina perceives that Latin America is seen as something to be studied and analyzed from the outside, not something that should tell its own story on its own terms. The Latin American story is gatekept by white academics; the people to whom the story belongs do not have power over their own narrative. Catalina’s language, “I figured out I had to,” demonstrates that she is forced to be part of this system: This mixture of survival and complicity forms a large part of Catalina’s character conflict in the novel, as she tries to figure out who she is and who she wants to be.

“I didn’t want to be out about my status for many reasons—fear, pride, the fact that my dream was to be an exceedingly serious and important capital-A artist the likes of which the world had never seen before and there was no chance of that happening if I became an undocumented poster girl.”

This passage encapsulates the catch-22 in which Catalina finds herself: To have a chance of staying in the US, she fears that she will lose control of her future path. This highlights the irony that Catalina’s dreams—in themselves no more unrealistic than those of many students—are based on a fragile denial of her status and reality.

“Whenever he conquered a new group of people and forced them to become Inca, Atahualpa ordered that the people’s quipucamayocs be killed and ordered that their khipus be burned. He wanted to control the narrative. He wanted history to belong to him. He wanted to erase their memories. He really wanted them gone. There, working, paying taxes, but gone.”

This passage is an allusion to Catalina’s own experience in the US and that of the wider undocumented community. The text conveys that many citizens of the US—especially in Catalina’s experience—want immigrants to take undesirable jobs and pay taxes but prefer them to be out of sight. They do this by controlling the narrative—creating a public refrain that demonizes immigrants and takes away their power. This passage emphasizes that destroying someone’s story is a way of making them invisible, part of the novel’s patterning of invisibility and self-narration.

“Now that I had Nathaniel’s attention, I had no idea what to do with it. He was looking at me and I was looking at myself being looked at. It’s a powerful thing, being an object, but it’s boring. All you have to do is sit there. If I was born to be an object, #98 on the call sheet, understudy to the white girls, Tijuana for the boys, I could at least take creative control. I could make myself into something to behold, like the golden calf and the wrath of Moses. I, too, could quote Charles Bukowski. I could wear headbands. Learn to drink port. You can be whoever you want in America.”

As she feels that she will be objectified, Catalina reasons that she can at least dictate how people see her and what kind of person they take her to be. This is something she has control of, and it is a way to make the intoxicating effects of attention more intellectually stimulating. The statement, “You can be whoever you want in America,” is deeply satirical, as this is usually an expression of the American dream ideal, a pathway that is denied to Catalina as an undocumented person.

“Now, I do not fault Nathaniel for having been hopelessly drawn to my continent and its neighboring islands, isthmuses, and peninsulas. I understand the allure myself. But for all his love of exotic, sensuous, beautiful Latin America, Nathaniel didn’t seem too interested in Latine people. He didn’t have very many friends like me, did he? Real friends, not ethnographic subjects.”

Here, Catalina describes Nathaniel’s interest in Latin America. While she understands the appeal, she faults him for his lack of Latine friends. This suggests that he doesn’t see Latin America as a living, breathing place, nor does he see it as equal to the United States. The people there are subjects to be studied and observed, not individuals with hopes, dreams, and worries like himself. Catalina’s use of the phrase “friends like me” foreshadows her later realization that she is not a real friend of Nathaniel: Rather than being an exception to this rule, the novel shows that Nathaniel’s treatment of her is part of this pattern of exoticization.

“The only responsibility I could handle was my shift at the Peabody. It felt extremely right to cry in there. The working class has always felt the simultaneous warmth and chill of the church when we visit museums and I was never able to shake it.”

As Catalina’s life starts to spiral out of control toward the end of the fall semester, she only feels comfortable in the Peabody Museum. She takes comfort in being around the relics of annihilated civilizations, these objects that have also had the power of controlling their own narrative stripped away from them. This passage emphasizes her isolation, as it suggests that Catalina can cry openly in the museum without anyone approaching or helping her.

“Men! Men men men men men men men. I knew what they were thinking. I had read Freud and Norman Mailer, Murakami and Díaz and Bellow and Nabokov Nabokov Nabokov and I was submerged in the world of indie rock so I was intimately familiar with the music catalog of Ryan Adams. I knew what I could aspire to in the eyes of a sensitive man.”

In this passage, Catalina describes having phone sex with men she meets on Craigslist. She describes how easy it is for her to contort herself into the girl they want her to be. She finds little pleasure in the experience; it is more an exercise in power and observation. The exaggerated repetition of “men” reflects Catalina’s obsession and her own satirical awareness of it. It is also notable that the cultural figures she references are not at all known for being “sensitive men” in regard to women: All of these men are recognized for objectifying and othering women in their work.

“When faced by the enormous question mark that was my life after graduation, my grandparents retreated into a fantasy world where their golden grandchild would keep pulling herself up to ever greater heights by her tough, weathered bootstraps.”

Catalina’s grandparents believe completely in her ability to miraculously overcome any obstacle, even the impossibility of her legal status. She has survived many near misses over the course of her life, and her grandparents assume that she will find a way around this new obstacle after graduation. This assumption represents another added pressure on Catalina that contributes to her breakdown over the winter holiday. The juxtaposition of “golden” with “tough, weathered” encapsulates the chasm between these real and fantasy ideas.

“Finnegans Wake is the richest, most indulgent, full-fat ice cream of a book and taking an entire semester-long class on any single text was already indulgent, so taking Finnegans Wake felt like an impractical and extravagant thing to do under the circumstances, which is why I did it. It felt like a fuck-you to someone. Not God, but someone.”

By the spring semester of her senior year, Catalina is well aware of the irony of graduating from an Ivy League university and being unemployable. In many ways, her education has been “indulgent” and “impractical,” and taking a semester-long class on a single text mocks this paradox and Harvard’s self-seriousness. Comparing the book to “ice-cream” is an ironic reminder that Catalina is experiencing disordered eating at this time, highlighting that her method of seeking control is to turn inward intellectually while denying herself physical sustenance.

“It was very hard to not blame my classmates. They were right here, playing Ultimate Frisbee and squash, buying pot from local Cambridge kids, fueling the crisis in Mexico. It wasn’t a moralistic stance. It was horror at the horror. I was part of the same ecosystem as the girls in Juárez passed hand to hand. I was part of the same ecosystem as the boys thrown in Rikers if they so much as looked at a dime bag of marijuana. But I was also part of the same ecosystem as my classmates, that was part of the horror, too.”

Here, the novel alludes to a chapter in Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666, in which he describes women murdered in a fictional stand-in for Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez. This passage highlights a paradox that is at the center of Catalina’s identity crisis: She is both part of the Harvard college world and that of the murdered Mexican girls. She feels a “horror” at belonging to these different and conflicting worlds. This passage also exposes the hypocrisy at the center of the “war on drugs”: that Harvard students can buy and sell with impunity, while others are treated harshly by the justice system.

“Around the time of the Oscar nomination, an open letter addressed to Byron circulated on the Internet. Wheeler’s fondness for South America strives to be apolitical and in doing so he rejects the current-day realities of the subjects in the countries he presents to Western audiences. Wheeler also aestheticizes and romanticizes Latin America without showing any awareness of geopolitical realities.”

Catalina’s friend Delphine worries that Byron Wheeler is helping Catalina in order to salvage his own reputation and prove his awareness of the issues facing modern-day Latine people. As a result, she shares this review with Catalina. Like others such as Dr. Murphy and Nathaniel, Byron’s fascination with Latin America is wholly aesthetic and surface level. He doesn’t treat it like a real place inhabited by real people with problems and complex lives. Here, the novel invents an external source to quote, which creates authority for Delphine’s concerns, moving the perspective outside of Catalina’s own voice.

“His dark brown curls in between my fingers felt like owning an American Girl doll I could give to a less fortunate girl after I was done. I kissed him with deep concentration, hoping he knew what a good man I thought he was, wondering if he would choke me if I asked. I had wanted him for so long. He was the Roman wing at the Met, and I wanted to carve into him with a knife.”

In some respects, Nathaniel, the rich, all-American Harvard student, represents empire and colonizing forces. Having a relationship with him is Catalina’s opportunity to dominate a piece of the empire that has taken so much from her and her ancestors. She isn’t interested in keeping him forever, but she wants the chance to change him and mark him like white people have done to their colonies across the globe. Her violent and dark language expresses revenge and hatred. By comparing him to a “doll,” the novel makes explicit that Catalina is objectifying Nathaniel as a representative of what she sees as his “type.”

“‘Craziest fucking thing,’ he began, pulling out of the parking lot. ‘I was in the line to check out and it was taking forever and I see that the person holding up the line is a lady paying for her groceries with food stamps, which—good for her—and I look at what the cashier is ringing up and it is various, as in more than one, seriously expensive cuts of steak.’”

Returning from the skiing trip, Nathaniel stops for snacks and returns to tell Catalina about the woman buying luxury products with “food stamps.” His criticism implies his belief that government assistance should only be used for essential purchases, a controversial view surrounding welfare provision. His assumption that Catalina will also be shocked and outraged also illustrates how little he understands her and her experience. This passage precedes the crisis when Catalina throws herself out of the car, heightening its tension in the narrative: For Catalina, it is the final straw.

“The therapist was going to just say this was about my dead parents and my dead uncle, maybe my aunt who was still alive in Ecuador doing this and that without me, eating salad and going for haircuts and knitting in front of the news. I was too cute and smart and interesting to have been damaged by such low-hanging fruit, could you imagine?”

When Catalina finally meets with her thesis advisor, she is referred to a therapist. Catalina is resistant to calling this therapist because she worries again about losing control of her own story. She worries that the therapist will assign a narrative to her about being “damaged” by her traumatic past, and Catalina wants to decide for herself what her story is. This passage is ironic because the narrator, Catalina, is looking back on herself in the past. The satirical expression of her own past arrogance and lack of self-knowledge highlights that Catalina is on a journey of maturity. While her denial is understandable, she will have to reckon with it before she can recover emotionally.

“My grandparents were proud that I was at Harvard, and a lot of that pride had to do with the safety afforded by nearly universal brand recognition. Harvard was as big as Nestlé and Coca-Cola, maybe bigger. My grandparents now possessed something loads of American citizens wanted, something valued and rare that had evaded others but not them. But seeing them wear any Harvard merch crushed me. When my grandmother wore a pink Harvard Grandma baseball hat, she moved differently, she was more bouncy and giggly, relaxed. I suspected people were nicer to her when she wore Harvard gear. Maybe people acknowledged her presence in an elevator, said, Good day, ma’am. What floor?”

In this passage, Catalina describes how her grandparents’ social status is elevated by their proximity to Harvard. It affords them a level of respectability that they haven’t been able to achieve on their own, and this makes Catalina both proud and sad. The word “crushed” suggests that Catalina is both upset by this realization and under huge pressure to maintain the “branding” that enhances her grandparents’ life so much.

“They wanted to document everything. It was this initial impulse to document the world that they were themselves destroying that made my blood boil. So I rooted against the khipu codebreakers. I hoped that they would never unlock the secrets of the khipu. I hoped that for them, it remained an unfulfilled longing. There were consequences to empire.”

Here, Catalina describes how the Spanish strove to document the “New World,” even as they were destroying it. It seems immensely unfair to her that these colonizers controlled how the things they were destroying would be preserved and remembered. She sees the khipus’ ability to keep their secrets as a final act of defiance and refusal to give away control of their narrative. Catalina’s wish is subversive, as it goes against the intellectual, academic culture that promotes the pursuit of knowledge.