The student argued that the illness was symptomatic of the toxicity of Yunior’s relationship with his parents. This short-term fix avoids the underlying cause of the vomiting. As a quick solution, Papi prohibits Yunior from eating before every car ride.

Yunior’s parents suspect that his carsickness is from the smell of the upholstery. One student analyzed the theme of illness in the short story “Fiesta 1980,” in which Yunior never fails to vomit while riding as a passenger in his dad’s car. As students related Díaz’s short stories to their personal lives, the openness of one student would encourage another. Reading and discussing the work with my students led to a sustained dialogue on dealing with poverty. More importantly, the narrator of most of the stories in the collection, Yunior, an inner-city Afro-Dominican immigrant youth living in the Dominican Republic and then New Jersey, is extremely relatable, particularly for this group of students.īeing partially written in Spanglish, confronting issues of drug addiction, parental abandonment, and prejudicial attitudes regarding race and national identity, the text resonated on several registers for the students. I selected Díaz’s Drown to explore the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality.Īs a collection of easily digestible short stories, I knew I could cover a few stories per class. Having lived several of my adolescent years in a Section 8 housing project in Southern California, I saw early on how incarceration as a form of social control resulted in so many family members becoming exposed to the criminal-justice system. Volunteering at the jail for five weeks was a gesture of support for those caught in this country’s regime of mass incarceration. After a background check and an orientation, I was permitted to facilitate discussions on Junot Díaz’s first collection of stories, Drown. I volunteered to teach a course at the Travis County Correctional Complex, a pretrial facility in Del Valle, Texas.

Junot diaz aurora