Summary
"Aguantando" is told from Yunior's point of view and set in the Dominican Republic, before Yunior and his family emigrated to the United States with his father. Yunior begins the story thinking about his absent father, as he tells us in the first line of the story: "I lived without a father for the first nine years of my life" (69). Yunior tells us that the only way he knows about his father is by looking at the photographs of him that Mami keeps under her bed. She keeps them in a plastic bag because the zinc roof of their wooden house leaks, which causes everything inside to have water stains. Yunior describes a specific picture of Papi that was taken "days before the US invasion" in 1965. In the photograph, Papi is in his Guardia uniform. Yunior reveals that Papi left the Dominican Republic when Yunior was four. He doesn't think of his father often, but when he does, he imagines him as the soldier in the photo. In Yunior's head, he is a composite of the other father figures in his life.
Yunior describes his life in Santo Domingo. He and his family live in poverty, and they often eat boiled vegetables rather than beans or meat. When Yunior and Rafa get their "annual case of worms," Mami has to make their dinners even leaner so that she can afford the medicine that will kill the parasites. Yunior and Rafa go to a school called Mauricio Baez, and they are not bullied despite the fact that they cannot afford the school uniform or mascotas (notebooks) to take notes on. Mami sews together loose pieces of paper to give them something to use. Yunior and Rafa each own one pencil which they are not allowed to lose. Mami works long hours at the chocolate factory, waking up at seven every morning. Yunior wakes with her and they bathe together in the water closet. Yunior describes scars on Mami's torso that were left after she survived a rocket attack in 1965. When Mami is at work, Abuelo is supposed to watch over Yunior and Rafa, but instead he hangs out with his friends or works on his rat trap, which he commissions out all over their neighborhood, since they have a rat problem.
While Abuelo is busy, Yunior and Rafa are left to their own devices. Rafa hangs out with his friends and Yunior hangs out with their neighbor, Wilfredo, or climbs trees. Mami returns from work after the sun has already set, and because their barrio (neighborhood) is not the safest, she usually comes home accompanied by one of her co-workers. As soon as she arrives home, Mami sits in her rocking chair. She is so exhausted after a long day of work that she can't focus on her children or domestic duties and instead sits with her eyes closed on the back patio, letting "the bugs bite mountains onto her arms and legs" (73).
Yunior notes that when Mami is short of cash, she sends Yunior and Rafa away to live with relatives. Rafa usually goes to the campo to live with Tío Miguel and Yunior is sent to live with Tía Miranda in Boca Chica. Yunior wishes that his relatives would turn Mami down, but they always say yes, and he has to be cajoled into going. In contrast, Rafa never minds going because he is at that age when he'd rather be away from family, meeting new people. Tía Miranda lives in a middle-class neighborhood near the beach. She is divorced and she has two kids, Yennifer and Bienvenido. She is nicer to Yunior than her children while he visits her, but she also often makes sly comments about Papi.
Yunior moves on to recount the year that Papi comes back to the Dominican Republic to take his family to the United States, when Yunior is nine. Mami has less work at the chocolate factory that year, which means that she is often in the house. Papi sends a letter announcing his arrival, but Yunior does not know about this letter until later. She disciplines Yunior for trying to hit their mango tree with Abuelo's machete by making him kneel on pebbles in the corner with his face pressed to the wall. Yunior goes to play with Wilfredo, and they race paper boats down a rain gutter. Yunior plays with Wilfred for a while before he realizes that there is a foreign motorcycle parked in front of his house. When he goes back home, the motorcycle driver departs, and he finds Mami and Abuelo having a conversation on the back patio. Yunior notices that Abuelo is upset. Mami sends Yunior back outside. When Rafa comes home from a pool game with his friends, Yunior tells his brother what is going on. Rafa goes in to talk to Mami and comes back out to get Yunior. They go to their room to wait. Rafa tells Yunior about his father's letter. In their room, Rafa smokes a cigarette. Mami serves Yunior and Rafa dinner, and she is cold and distant. Yunior tries to hug her, but she pushes him away and sends them back to their room. Yunior wakes in the middle of the night and Rafa is watching him. Everyone else in the house is asleep. Rafa tells Yunior that he read their father's letter. Rafa tells Yunior that in the letter, Papi says that he is coming to get them. He then tells Yunior to not believe it because he has made that promise before. Yunior is surprised that his brother can read. He reveals that he is nine and he still doesn't know how to write his own name.
Yunior recalls the last time that Papi told them that he was coming back. It was two years after he had left. When Mami receives the letter, she is so excited that she tells everyone. Mami throws a party, going so far as to acquire a goat for slaughtering. When Papi does not show up, she sends everyone home and sells the goat back to its owner. She falls into a deep depression. Abuelo tries to reach Papi on the phone, but the men who lived with him tell Abuelo that they don't know where Papi has gone. Yunior and Rafa get excited about their father's return, and Yunior becomes obsessed with seeing the old photograph of his father. When Mami one day refuses to show it to him, he screams so loudly that it can be heard down the street. Mami disciplines Yunior, but he will not stop screaming. She locks him in his room, and when he starts tearing his clothes, Rafa tells him to stop. Following this incident, Mami spends a lot of time out of the house, either with friends or by the ocean. A few months pass like this, until Yunior wakes up one day and learns that Mami has gone to spend time in Ocoa with Tío Miguel and Tía Yrma. Five weeks later, Mami returns, and they never talk about the time she spent away. She comes back looking younger. Yunior notes that his relationship changed with his mother while she was gone. When she gets back, they are no longer as close.
Yunior is cautious around his mother in the week after the letter arrives. She seems calm on the outside, but he can tell that there is "something volcanic about the way she held herself" (85). A hurricane passes through close to Santo Domingo and the neighbors talk about how high the waves are at the beach. They say that some children were swept away from the waves. The next day, Mami tells the family that they are taking the day off as a family. She dresses up and even pays for a taxi instead of having all of them take an autobus. Mami looks beautiful, generating attention from a lot of men. She takes the family out to a movie. Yunior sits with his family but Rafa sits in the back to join a group of boys. After the movie, Mami buys them flavored ices. They stand by the ocean to watch the waves. A man approaches, trying to flirt with Mami, and she is cold to him before he walks away. In the final moments of the story, Yunior thinks about his father one day coming home. Rafa used to think that he would simply appear in the middle of the night and they would wake up to them there. Yunior imagines the day that his father will finally come, his father walking down the street in expensive clothes and taking Mami out to a movie.
Analysis
"Aguantando" is about Yunior's complicated family dynamics when he lives in the Dominican Republic. He describes his life, which is affected greatly by poverty and his father's absence, as well as his relationship with Mami, Rafa, and Abuelo. In Spanish, aguantando translates to something like "to take" or "to bear." In this way, we can understand this story as a testament to everything that Yunior's family has to bear while Papi is away. There are several important literary elements at work in this story, including the extended motif of water, which weaves throughout the story to communicate the family's emotional turbulence in the face of Papi's absence. (Please view the Symbols, Allegories, and Motifs section of this guide for a in-depth look into this motif.)
Throughout "Aguantando," there are several allusions to the United States. These allusions show Yunior and his family's complicated relationship to the US as well as the complex relationship between the United States and the Dominican Republic at large. Early in the story, Abuelo reminisces to Yunior about the past, telling him that there used to be a time when poverty was not so pervasive in the Dominican Republic: "when Abuelo was around (and awake) he talked to me about the good old days, when a man could still make a living from his finca, when the United States wasn't something folks planned on" (73). Abuelo's reminiscing implies that in the present, many people see the United States as an escape from poverty and a chance for a better life.
Even though Abuelo is upset about this mindset, it very much exists in Yunior's family, as they struggle to get by in the hopes that Papi will come and carry them to a brighter future. At the end of the story, Rafa and Yunior look forward to the day that Papi will come home, imagining the ways that he has prospered in the United States. Rafa believes that he will be taller as a result of eating American food, and Yunior believes that he will arrive richly dressed: "He'd had gold on his fingers, cologne on his neck, a silk shirt, good leather shoes" (87). In this way, Rafa and Yunior are very much "planning on" their eventual escape into the United States for a better life. (However, when they do arrive in the United States with Papi, they have to face a different set of challenges and a new kind of poverty. This irony is discussed further in the Summary and Analysis section of "How to Date.")
There is also an allusion to the United States' 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic. Some historical context is needed to understand this allusion. In 1965, the Dominican Republic underwent a civil war after the dictator Rafael Trujilo was assassinated in 1961. Despite the fact that Trujillo was a brutal dictator, the United States supported him because of his anti-communist stance. In 1962, a man named Juan Bosch was elected president, but the Dominican military was against his liberal policies. They clashed with each other, inciting political unrest in the nation. For a few years, the military controlled the government, and the United States expressed fears that the Dominican Republic would become another Cuba. As a result, Lyndon B. Johnson sent American troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965 and forced them to establish a conservative government that was not run by the military. For many people, historical events simply exist within the pages of history books, but Yunior can see the tangible effects of this invasion on his family. It is clear from the photograph of Papi that he worked as a soldier in the Guardia, which was the Dominican national army. Additionally, Mami bears long, hard scars across her torso from a rocket attack during that time: "across her stomach and back the scars from the rocket attack she'd survived in 1965. None of the scars showed when she wore clothes, though if you embraced her you'd feel them hard under your wrist, against the soft part of your palm" (71-2). In this way, the context of the United States invasion greatly affected Yunior's life even though it occurred before he was born. This adds a complex dimension to his idealization of the United States while he waits for his father's return: it is both a means for a better life and, perhaps, the very reason why he would need one in the first place.
Along with the exploration of family dynamics, the theme of machismo is pervasive throughout "Aguantando." Mami lives in a society where she struggles to get by as a single mother. Not only does she have to work hard in order to feed and clothe her children, but she also has to navigate constant male attention upon her as a single woman. She is forced to work in a chocolate factory until late in the night. As a result, she often asks her male coworkers to walk her home after work for safety. Despite the fact that she does not flirt with them, many of these men read her request for assistance as sexual advances: "Our barrio was not the safest of places and Mami usually asked one of her co-workers to accompany her home. These men were young, and some of them were unmarried. Mami let them walk her but she never invited them into the house. She barred the door with her arm when she said good-bye, just to show them that nobody was getting in... From my perch I'd watched more than one of these Porfirio Rubirosas say, See you tomorrow, and then park his ass across the street just to see if she was playing hard to get" (73). In these lines, Mami is forced to request the assistance of men even though they misread her requests and often expect her to give them romantic attention in return. Similarly, near the end of the story, an uninvited man spends time near Mami in the hopes that she will give him attention: "A man in a red guayabera stopped by us. He lit a cigarette and turned to my mother, his collar turned up by the wind" (86). In order to evade his advances, Mami lies that they are from out of town and invents an imaginary husband. When she tells him that she is married, he eventually walks away. In this way, Mami's independence is consistently undermined by men who see her as a sexual object. When the man finally walks away, Rafa tells his mother that he could have protected her from him: "Rafa lifted up his fist. You should have given me the signal. I would have kung-fu punched him in the head" (87).
