Tag Archives: fiesta1989

11/18/21

The significance of Volkswagen

What is the significance of Papi’s Volkswagen in “Fiesta 1980”? Why does the main character, Yunior, always puke when riding it? Yunior’s dad believes that the vomiting has to do with poorly timed meals. The vomiting seems more likely to be a result of both Yunior’s anxieties and the new North-American lifestyle. The Volkswagen itself may be symbolistic of the change from the Dominican Republic to America. It is brand new, and representative of the lavish and over-the-top lifestyle of the United States of America. The change is too much for Yunior to handle, so he constantly throws up in this vehicle. This never happened to Yunior before in any other vehicle. Another thing that likely never happened, or Yunior was not aware of previously, is his father’s want for a new wife. Papi uses this van to cheat on his wife and impress the Puerto-Rican woman during his visits to her home. The brothers, Yunior and Rafa, fear their father the most, especially when he gets angry. This is shown in the first paragraph of page 23, where Yunior mentions that if Papi saw them running around naked, he would have kicked them. This may be another contributing factor to Yunior’s tummy issues when riding the Volkswagen. Yunior knows that his dad is cheating on his wife, and that his mom is hurting deep down because of her marriage. He may also be vomiting as a result of the anxieties brought on by his family-related issues and the radical change of lifestyle that accompanies the move between two countries.

11/17/21

The “Voice In-Between”

The adolescent “narrative voice” of Yunior in “Fiesta, 1989” is what intrigued me the most this week. In “Funeral for a Bird,” we explored the literary device of the child narrator, which we determined conferred a sense of innocence on the reading. For Máximo, it was his inexperience with life that shaped his worldview, and thus, the way that we as readers perceived his world. In other texts, alternatively, was the hyperaware “adult narrator.” In Grieving, for instance, the narrative voice of Rivera-Garza has seen and heard too much to ever operate once again from the state of childlike bliss; her reading is tainted by her knowledges of political unrest, death, and reality. Falling in the middle of this “child-adult” narrative voice is Yunior’s. Like Máximo, he is not yet old enough to identify how his father’s abuse, affair, and skewed family dynamics relate to deeper questions about political and social issues, poverty and diaspora. Yet like the “adult voice,” his is mature enough to advance a bit of a critique of his situation. So, as readers we are presented with this “in-between” narrative voice that simultaneously makes us sympathetic to the parts of it that are still “childlike,” while at the same time Yunior’s awareness of his situation resonates with us as readers from the outside looking in. I wonder what a younger reader (say, 13 or 14) would make of this text – would they find Yunior’s adolescent narrative voice overly mature, or on-par with their own?