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"It's 1980. Ronald Reagan has been elected president, John Lennon has been shot, and a little girl in New Jersey has been hauled off to English classes. Her teachers and parents and tias are expecting her to become white--like the Italians. This is the opening to A cup of water under my bed, the memoir of one Colombian-Cuban daughter's rebellions and negotiations with the women who raised her and the world that wanted to fit her into a cubbyhole. From language acquisition to coming out as bisexual to arriving as a reporting intern at the New York Times as the paper is rocked by its biggest plagiarism scandal, Daisy Hernandez chronicles what the women in her community taught her about race, sex, money, and love. This is a memoir about the private nexus of sexuality, immigration, race and class issues, but it is ultimately a daughter's cuento of how to take the lessons from home and shape them into a new, queer life"--… (more)
User reviews
Although labeled a "memoir", it's really a collection of essays, most of which have been published elsewhere. As a result, Hernández' story is not told in a chronological way, but rather in themes.
Her parents were both immigrants to New York, her father from Cuba, her mother from Colombia. So Hernández grew up in multiple cultures, and these essays describe how she navigated divides of language, class, gender, sexuality, and came to appreciate and admire her family even as she moved into a life very different from theirs, a transition so common to first-generation Americans.
She has a real ear for language, particularly descriptive language. Her contrasting descriptions of two santeras, for instance: "La Viejita María is a woman who looks like dried corn. Her face is a light yellow, the skin dry and wrinkled; her white hair like a husk, with silk threads pulled back and running wild around her head" annd "Yvette is a woman who looks like a church bell. Her copper body curves with purpose, angles on a chair as if from a tower overlooking a village by the sea." Language for her is music: "The women in my family insist that I translated in those years, that I was the song between Tía Dora and the nurse . . . danced from English to Spanish and Spanglish and back again, following the music of questions . . ."
“Generally speaking, gay people come out of the closet, straight people walk around the closet, and bisexuals have to be told to look for the closet. We are too preoccupied with shifting.”
Daisy Hernández, A Cup of Water Under My Bed
A Cup of Water Under My Bed was chosen by my book
I have been sitting with this one for over a week because I just didn't have the words for the emotions I felt during and after reading this one. A Cup of Water Under the Bed by Daisy Hernandez had
The one word that comes to mind to describe this book's main theme is "reckoning":
☆ reckoning with being bilingual, one language feels like pebbles on the tongue while the other feels like home
☆ reckoning with the bittersweetness of American Dream and who reaps the benefits
☆ reckoning with the humanity and imperfections of parents
☆ reckoning with learning to love family despite the hurt and forgiveness
☆ reckoning with sexuality and identity within the rigidity of Latinx culture
☆ reckoning with feminism in a world dominated by machismo and patriarchy
☆ reckoning with the disparities in income, education, financial literacy and access to social capital as a Latinx person
☆ reckoning with faith and spiritual practices and colonialism
☆ reckoning with what healing looks like
☆ reckoning with assimilation vs. tradition
☆ reckoning with gender based violence and the social inequalities women face
☆ reckoning with the guilt of being a child of immigrants and not living up to expectations
Alot of the author's experiences resonated with me on a personal level. There were times when I felt like she was describing my own parents' experiences. This book helped me to see how our imperfections can also be beautiful and tell a story rich in history and resilience.
Bookdragon Rating: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥