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Summary
Part II, Section 3 “Rough Draft of Assignment 3-describe someone you consider misunderstood by society” – “In Front of My Locker”
In her next essay, Xiomara’s rough draft about someone she thinks is misunderstood is about Mami who is a self-sufficient woman who works hard, and Xiomara finds that admirable. However, what Xiomara cannot admire is Mami’s drive to turn her daughter into the nun she herself always wanted to be. The essay she submits to Ms. Galiano, however, is about Nicki Minaj, a female rapper in an industry dominated by men. Ms. Galiano continues to publicize the poetry club and has a student come in to read a poem and invite everyone to a poetry slam event in three months. Xiomara wants to go and compete but doesn’t know how to get what she wants. She does find a way to go ice skating with Aman, an activity that she remembers made her feel free when she was younger. At the rink, Xiomara is impressed by how great Aman is on the ice, and she wonders if he feels the same way while skating that she does while writing. Aman also reveals that his father discouraged him from skating, and Xiomara relates to being held back from a beloved activity by a parent. On the train afterward, Xiomara and Aman kiss publicly, and she is filled with desire and compares herself to an addict who can’t get enough.
When she gets home, Xiomara hears Mami yelling and realizes that she saw Xiomara and Aman kissing on the train. She hides until Twin comes home and stays in their bedroom with her while their parents continue yelling, calling their daughter a whore. Just as Twin asks what she did, they hear Mami coming. She drags Xiomara to an altar of the Virgin Mary and makes her kneel on rice and pray for forgiveness. As she kneels, Xiomara thinks about the word whore and how all types of girls are called that word while her mother tells her how dirty men are and how women who allow themselves to be touched will never be clean. She endures the pain of kneeling on rice, her mother’s hands beating her, and the knowledge that she’s being punished for something that she once thought of as beautiful, kissing her boyfriend.
Later, Twin holds bags of frozen vegetables to his sister’s painful knees and face while reassuring her that they can leave their parents one day if she just stays out of trouble. It’s the first time Xiomara realizes that Twin is just as eager to leave as she is, but she’s hurt and very angry, so she ignores Twin and even Caridad when Twin texts her. More consequences follow when Mami says Xiomara has no phone, lunch money, or basically any freedom at all, and she’ll have to go to church every afternoon and go to confession with Father Sean. Xiomara wants to be with Aman and be comforted and held by him, but the next day at school, a boy gropes her in the hallway as he walks by with a group of friends. As she turns around, she sees Aman stop nearby, and she is relieved by the certainty that he will stick up for her. When he doesn’t step up, Xiomara is crushed and furious. She shoves and threatens the boy who grabbed her and then tells Aman to stay away from her as she walks away.
Analysis
Xiomara’s experience ice skating with Aman encapsulates her desires to have ownership over her own body. On the ice, Xiomara is happy, nostalgic for the time in childhood when she could use her body for herself rather than being fearful of how men might use it. Such a sense of freedom makes her feel bold, and she takes the initiative with Aman for the first time, inviting him to come closer. Before they leave, Aman shares how his father discouraged his love for skating because he didn’t think it was appropriate for a boy, and Xiomara reflects on how tragic it is for people to have their bodies limited by other people’s beliefs and expectations. On the train on the way home, Xiomara and Aman kiss publicly, and she embraces the experience as something beautiful because she’s doing exactly what she wants with her own body.
Xiomara’s experience while being with Aman juxtaposes dramatically when she’s confronted by Mami who perceives Xiomara’s actions in a contradictory way. Instead of having autonomy over her body, Xiomara is dragged by Mami and forced to kneel on dry rice. Instead of praying of her own volition, she is forced to pray for forgiveness for something that she saw and felt was beautiful and empowering. Although she felt big feelings about her day with Aman, she wants to be small around Mami. She uses the metaphor of an ant, an insect that can hold ten times their own body mass which represents the necessity for Xiomara to carry the heavy burden of her mother’s expectations. Likening herself to an ant is also apt because ants live in small places and feed on crumbs the way she must exist in crevices of her own identity and take only the small pieces of spiritual and psychological sustenance allowed to her. However, as Mami beats her, Xiomara abandons the comparison because she knows she is not an ant but a girl being broken physically and spiritually by her own mother.
During the abuse, Xiomara’s thoughts contrast with Mami’s words. Although Xiomara has fought against the label of cuero, or whore, she holds the word as a lifeline because she realizes that every girl can be called a whore regardless of what they look like or how they behave. She finally understands that the word is just a word that people apply to girls they don’t approve of for their own reasons. In contrast, Mami’s tirade focuses on men and how they soil and dirty women. In her experience, men have nothing to offer a woman and to expect anything different is to give over to disappointment and sin, revealing the entire foundation for Mami’s abuse of her daughter. As she sees Xiomara growing up and finding love, Mami is unable to see it as anything other than foul danger that will take her daughter further and further from the path she wanted for herself as a nun, away from the world of men.
Mami’s attempt to teacher Xiomara a lesson about never being able to count on a man to do anything more than cause pain is reinforced both during the abuse and after. Neither Papi nor Twin help her while she is humiliated and abused by Mami, and Xiomara has a memory of Papi peeling an orange in one strip before handing it to Mami to eat. That memory is symbolic of how Papi participated in the creation of children and then handed them over to Mami to figuratively consume with her own expectations and beliefs. His complete abandonment of any significant involvement in his children’s lives and Twin’s failure to act due to his own fear are not enough to completely convince Xiomara that she can’t count on men. She refuses to take any belated comfort offered by Twin and looks forward to being held and reassured by Aman. However, the next day at school when Xiomara is publicly groped while Aman witnesses it, Xiomara is disappointed by his failure to act in her defense, and her ability to trust in others is threatened.
