55 pages • 1 hour read
Esmeralda SantiagoAlmost a Woman
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6
Chapter 4 Summary: “But they’re still legitimate...”
As Mami’s pregnancy progresses, she quits her job and has Esmeralda accompany her back to the welfare office. Esmeralda explains to the social worker that Mami and Francisco aren’t married, and that Mami and Papi were never married either. The social worker notes Esmeralda and her siblings are “illegitimate” (43). At home, Esmeralda looks up the word and realizes she and her siblings technically are bastards, which troubles her. A few months after little Franky is born, Francisco dies. Mami goes into deep mourning. Esmeralda resents her father for not fixing the family and making things right with Mami. At school, Mr. Barone congratulates Esmeralda on making it into the Performing Arts High School. Esmeralda tells Natalia, who is overcome with excitement. During class, Mr. Barone makes an announcement over the speaker and Esmeralda receives praise and congratulations from her teachers and many classmates. However, Esmeralda worries “that something good had at last happened to me, afraid that it was too good and that it would disappear before the day was over” (46).
At home, Mami gives Esmeralda a rare hug and congratulates her, though afterward, “Performing Arts was never mentioned in that apartment again” (47). Natalia stops showing up at school, so Esmeralda goes to her apartment to find her and learns from a neighbor that Natalia and her family moved back to Puerto Rico. Esmeralda feels sorry for Natalia, but also wishes she could return to Puerto Rico. Esmeralda frequents a candy store across the street from the high school, owned by an old couple. After school one day, Esmeralda finds Lulu and two of her friends waiting for her. They beat Esmeralda up in an alley. The old couple from the candy store witness it and help Esmeralda clean up afterward. Esmeralda returns home but hides her scratches from her family and no one says anything.
Mami takes Esmeralda shopping for a graduation dress. First, they stop at the cash-checking office, where they are treated disdainfully by the staff. At the store, Mami and Esmeralda argue over which dress to buy: Esmeralda wants something young and bright, but Mami wants her in something more conservative and subdued. Esmeralda wins out in the end, but Mami gripes that she’s changed, becoming “stubborn, and disrespectful” (56), especially now that she’s going to the school for white kids. Esmeralda muses that she has changed, in ways that her siblings haven’t since coming to America. Esmeralda feels a dissatisfaction in her life and wants to embrace more of the American culture, along with owning her own things like books and clothes. Esmeralda feels a rift growing between herself and Mami: “She looked at me resentfully, as if I had betrayed her, as if I could help who I was becoming, as if I knew” (58).
Chapter 5 Summary: “What’s a Cleopatra dress?”
Esmeralda’s family moves to a new apartment on a commercial block, where owners watch “their Puerto Rican and black customers with mistrust and resentment” (60). Esmeralda continues to act as an interpreter for Mami at the welfare office until Mami finds a new job in Manhattan. Still grieving for Francisco, Mami seems to just be going through the motions, and Esmeralda worries about her: “Was she as afraid for herself as she was for us?” (61). Esmeralda looks forward to the weekly grocery shops now that Mami has a job, because they can buy more exciting things. Tata’s brother, Tío Chico, finds a room nearby and visits often. One night he grabs Esmeralda’s breast and tells her not to tell anyone, giving her a dollar. Esmeralda knows she should tell but uses the money on ice cream. Afterward she avoids Tío Chico, “aware that we shared a shameful secret, weighing whether the blame should fall heavier on him who touched me, or on me who let him do it” (63).
Mami has a telephone installed so Esmeralda can call if she gets lost on her way to school. Esmeralda and her siblings read about all the crimes happening in the city and humorously reenact them, but also fear danger coming too close to home, “certain that the only safe place in the world was the four walls that enclosed us, small and vulnerable, in our mother’s shadow” (64). At Esmeralda’s new school, the teachers give strict rules about behavior and dress code and warn the students about the harsh realities of performers’ lives. Mami tells Esmeralda that it doesn’t matter what she learns at school: “As soon as you graduate, you better get a job” (66). Esmeralda and the other actors are required to take dancing classes, which make her feel like she did in Puerto Rico: “free, open to possibilities, unafraid” (67).
Teachers train the students to lose their accents and suggest changing their names to things easy to remember that don’t sound foreign. Esmeralda notices the difference in wealth amongst her classmates and realizes what she’s lacking. After being assigned a scene from Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, Esmeralda makes herself a tight Egyptian-style dress out of an old tablecloth. Mami resists at first, but Esmeralda convinces Mami to let her use it just for class. Esmeralda loves reading about plays and thinking about character development, but she has a hard time giving herself over to acting. She feels like her whole life is a performance, and it’s too difficult to “act while acting”: “[T]he minute I left the dark, crowded apartment where I lived, I was in a performance, pretending to be someone I wasn’t” (74). Esmeralda feels like she’s living out a character she has invented to fit in with her surroundings.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Don’t you want to sound Puerto Rican?”
Esmeralda returns home to find strangers in her apartment: Provi, Papi’s “wife” before Mami, and Margie, Papi’s daughter and Esmeralda’s half-sister. Esmeralda feels excited to see Margie, but also notes a tension in the room as Provi and Mami subtly dig at each other: “I [...] listened to our mothers babble, aware they were still competing for my father” (77). After they leave, Esmeralda comments on Margie’s makeup, so Mami lets Esmeralda try some eyeliner. In doing so, Mami acknowledges that Esmeralda is growing up, which excites Esmeralda, even as she realizes Mami is still competing with Provi: “I had stopped being a little girl because Mami wouldn’t be outmothered by Provi” (79). On the subway one day, a man stands in front of Esmeralda and flashes her his penis. Esmeralda is too embarrassed to say anything and pretends she doesn’t see it.
Esmeralda takes a theatre makeup class at school, and she loves watching her face transform. In one exercise, Esmeralda makes herself look like an old woman and begins crying. When the teacher asks why, Esmeralda pretends she is upset at looking old, but she is taken aback by how much she resembles her two grandmothers. Esmeralda muses about the secret life she daydreams about, where she is free from pressures of her family, her poverty, and her race. During another class exercise, Esmeralda practices phonetic sounds so she can learn to speak English without an accent, though she keeps getting interrupted by her siblings. Esmeralda calls the whole family together to tell them what she’s doing so they’ll leave her alone. Her brother taunts her, “Don’t you want to sound Puerto Rican?” (84), but Mami shuts down the teasing; since Esmeralda has started Performing Arts High School, she has noticed special treatment from Mami, who wants her children to dream big and have more than she had before.
Esmeralda appreciates this, but also feels the pressure: “I was certain that no matter how hard I worked, I’d never be able to repay all she’d given up so that I could have what I needed” (85). Not wanting to let Mami down, Esmeralda hides some of her bad experiences—like being sexually and racially harassed—from her mother. Mami praises Esmeralda for not getting distracted by boys, but Esmeralda worries that she gets no attention from boys whatsoever. Overall, that might be better: “All I had to do was look around me to know what happened to a girl who let a man take the place of an education” (88).
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
As Esmeralda attempts to understand the world around her, she notices the discrepancies in how people are treated due to race and poverty. Esmeralda realizes she has always noticed race, even back in Puerto Rico:
I’d noticed that white skin was coveted by those who didn’t have it and that those who did looked down on those who didn’t. Light-skinned babies in a family were doted on more than dark ones. ‘Good’ hair was straight, not kinky, and much more desirable than the tightly coiled strands of ‘bad’ hair, which at its tightest was called pasitas, raisins. Blue or green eyes proclaimed whiteness, even when surrounded by dark skin (56).
However, Esmeralda’s education at the Performing Arts High School opens her eyes to how very differently some people live. At the predominantly white school, Esmeralda encounters what it means to be “advantaged,” which includes “trips to Europe during vacations, [...] tennis lessons and swim meets, choir practice, clubs, academic tutoring, dates” (69). By contrast, Esmeralda begins to become ashamed of her own background, turning down invitations from classmates and not inviting them to her home “because I didn’t want them to see the wet diapers hanging on ropes strung from one end of the apartment to the other” (69). Though Esmeralda finds others in the school who share a similar background, her introduction to this new, privileged world increases her awareness of how different her life is by comparison.
As a result, Esmeralda begins fantasizing about a secret life, which she describes in detail in Chapter 6. Some of the desires that Esmeralda expresses in her secret life include not having to share a bed with her sister, and becoming a pilot, a movie star, or a scientist. Many of Esmeralda’s desires are materialistic, such as driving a convertible, or being “surrounded by books that I didn’t have to return to the library” (83). Yet many of Esmeralda’s desires also reflect her troubled sense of self and her confusion about who she is as she is pulled between two worlds:
In my secret life I wasn’t Puerto Rican. I wasn’t American. I wasn’t anything. I spoke every language in the world, so I was never confused about what people said and could be understood by everyone. My skin was no particular color, so I didn’t stand out as black, white, or brown (84).
No longer entirely Puerto Rican but not quite American, not still a girl but not yet a woman, no longer only Spanish-speaking but not yet fluent in English, Esmeralda feels pulled in many directions and wishes for a simpler existence where she could be free from those forces. One of these forces is Mami, who Esmeralda loves but resents, and admires but doesn’t want to be like, creating another dichotomy Esmeralda must contend with as she struggles to define who she is.
Esmeralda details two unwanted sexual advances, a common but unfortunate coming-of-age ritual for young women. The first occurs when her great uncle touches her breast, and the second occurs on the subway when a stranger flashes her his penis. In both cases, Esmeralda becomes confused about why she receives this attention: “I sat stony-faced and silent, pretending to read, angry that I was being such a pendeja, wondering what I’d done to provoke him” (80). Esmeralda doesn’t tell Mami about either encounter, and she feels overwhelmed with guilt, especially because she takes money from Tío Chico, essentially to buy her silence. Like many young women, Esmeralda feels pressure from society to be pleasant and not make a fuss, which is why she doesn’t choose to speak up. Women are often accused of provoking negative sexual attention, and Esmeralda may fear that she will be accused of doing so, or that she won’t be believed. Esmeralda feels pressured to stay silent and put on a good face, though these encounters contribute to her confusion about her place in the world and just how much agency she has.
