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 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 7 Summary: “Invierno”
In winter, Yunior, Rafa and Mami arrive in New Jersey from the Dominican Republic. They are reunited with Papi, who has been working in the U.S. and who sent for them after five years apart. Yunior feels he doesn’t know him and is defiant, stating, “Had I known my father even a little I might not have turned my back on him” (122).
Papi is disappointed that Yunior cannot tie his shoelaces properly. Papi tells the barber to shave Yunior’s head bald, despite how cold it is outside. Papi is very authoritative and doesn’t let the boys go outside to play all winter. Sometimes Yunior sneaks out for a few minutes. Most of the time, they stay cooped up inside watching TV in order to learn English. Their mom performs domestic duties. Yunior says, “Mami cleaned everything about ten times and made us some damn elaborate lunches. We were all bored speechless” (123).
Mami is terribly lonely and begs Papi to bring friends over for dinner. One night during a snowstorm, Papi calls to say he’s not coming home. Yunior and Rafa chase Mami outside in the snow. There, they see the landfill and the ocean for the first time.
Story 7 Analysis
“Invierno,” which means “winter” in Spanish, focuses on the struggle of Yunior’s family, apart for half a decade and now reunited in a cold, isolated place that fills Yunior, Rafa, and their mother with loneliness. Their father’s hypermasculine assertiveness, which Yunior says he brought with him from Dominican culture, continues to manifest stateside. For example, he is unconcerned about showing his family natural elements, like the ocean, that might make them feel more at home. Yunior says,
From the top of Westminster, our main strip, you could see the thinnest sliver of oceans cresting the horizon to the east. My father had been shown that sight—the management showed everyone—but as he drove us in from JFK he didn’t stop to point it out. The ocean might have made us feel better, considering what else there was to see (131).
Papi adds: “Decent people live around here and that’s how we’re going to live. You’re Americans now” (122). The inclusion/exclusion binary that arrives in other stories in the collection continues here. At a sociological level, the family sees White flight come to its neighborhood. Now that non-Whites have arrived to the neighborhood, Whites themselves leave, as opposed to living alongside migrants.
Yunior and Rafa don’t outwardly respect Mami very much and make fun of her English. Yet at the same time they are protective, demonstrated by how they worry about her and follow her outside, thereby showing both childlike acts of exclusion and more mature acts of inclusion. The story concludes with seeing the ocean, which Yunior, Rafa and his mother still associate with home. Yunior says, “We even saw the ocean, up there at the top of Westminster like the blade of a long, curved knife. Mami was crying but we pretended not to notice” (145). This need on the part of Yunior and Rafa to not notice their mother crying can be viewed as a disavowal of their homeland and a precursor to the hypermasculine forms of identity that both will adopt.
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By Junot Díaz
