Summary
This short story begins with Yunior explaining that his aunt and uncle have moved to the United States and the family has decided to celebrate their arrival. It is clear that time has passed between this story and the previous one because the family is living in the United States and Yunior mentions his little sister, Madai, who was born after the family immigrated to the US. On the day of the party, the family has dressed up nicely and is waiting for Papi to come home. He arrives at six, right after work, and wordlessly goes straight to the shower to clean the evidence of his Puerto Rican mistress off his body. He quickly gets angry when Mami tells him that she fed the children because Yunior gets carsick whenever they have a car trip. He warns Yunior that he better not get sick in the car. The car ride begins smoothly enough, which causes Papi to loosen up. However, once they cross the George Washington bridge, Yunior begins to "feel woozy" and he soon throws up out of the car window to Papi's great irritation. He punishes Yunior by jamming a finger into Yunior's cheek and the family drives the rest of the way to the Bronx in silence.
When the family arrives at Tío Miguel and Tía Yrma's apartment, Tío Miguel is the first to greet them. He tells Yunior that he looks horrible, and Rafa reveals to their uncle that Yunior threw up in the car. Tío consoles Yunior and tells him that they should have seen him on the airplane to the United States, when he was convinced they were all going to die. However, "everybody could tell he was lying" (31). Tía then comes out to greet the family. When she reaches Papi she hesitates a little bit, "like maybe she'd seen a wasp on the tip of his nose," but greets him anyway (31). Mami tells Yunior and Rafa to join the other kids in the living room but Tío insists on giving them a tour of the apartment. Tía derails the tour by bringing out several of their neighbors to introduce to Mami and Papi, which results in only the adults getting a tour of the "four-room third-floor" apartment (32).
Rafa and Yunior join the other kids in the living room, who are already eating. Yunior meets the other children in the living room: Leti, Wilquins, and Mari. Yunior is immediately drawn to the girls, but he also knows that Rafa is going to "gun" for Mari because she is physically endowed. Both of the girls smile at Rafa and only give Yunior a cursory glance, but Yunior is not bothered. He turns to Wilkins and asks him what they should do to entertain themselves, but Mari notifies him that Wilquins does not speak. Yunior takes a seat next to Wilquins on the couch and the group of kids soon start playing dominos. Yunior can hear his parents socializing in the kitchen. Yunior ventures into the kitchen twice during the party. He notices how his mother and Tía prepare the food for the party and is drawn to his mother's beauty.
In retrospect, Yunior describes the first time he met Papi's Puerto Rican mistress. It was right after Papi had first gotten the VW van. He would drive Yunior around on short trips in the hopes that his carsickness would improve. On one of these drives, Yunior got sick, but instead of taking him home, Papi took him to his mistress' house to get cleaned up. Papi's mistress helped Yunior clean up but she rubbed a towel on his chest too aggressively. She asked Yunior for his name and called him "the smart one" (36). She showed him her books, but Yunior quickly realized that they weren't hers but his father's. Papi told Yunior to go watch TV and took a private moment upstairs with his mistress. After an hour, Papi and Yunior left.
Back at the party, the food is served. Yunior gets excited when he sees all his favorite foods on the table, but Papi tells him that he is not allowed to eat. The other adults in the room pretend they don't hear anything, and Tío smiles sheepishly. The kids (who increased in number to about ten children) return to the living room to enjoy their meals while the adults eat in the kitchen and dining room. Papi warns Yunior that if eats anything, Papi will beat him, and if Rafa gives him food, Papi will beat him, too. When Yunior returns to the living room without a plate, he tells the other kids that his father is a "dick." Rafa reproaches him, but Yunior tells him that's easy for him to say with food on his plate. Yunior concentrates on the TV before Tía comes into the living room and tells him to help her get some ice.
In the hallway outside of the apartment, Tía opens her pocketbook and reveals that she smuggled out a few pastelitos for Yunior to eat. She tells him to brush his teeth as soon as he gets inside after eating them. As Yunior eats, she smokes a cigarette. She asks Yunior how things are at home and whether he and his siblings are doing ok. Yunior decides not to say anything in response to Tía's questioning. She asks how his mother is doing and whether she and Papi have been fighting. Yunior evades those questions as well.
By midnight, Yunior is sitting outside of Tía's room, guarding the door for Rafa who is "getting busy" with Leti inside. Yunior occasionally looks into the main room, seeing all of the adults dancing inside. It seems to Yunior that his parents are having a good time. He watches as Mami engages in a whispered conversation with Tía. Occasionally, she goes to dance with Papi, but quickly returns to her sister's side so that she can continue their conversation. Yunior tries to imagine what his mother was like before she met Papi. He foreshadows that in a few years Papi and Mami will break up. He thinks about the family photograph of Mami as a young woman before she met Papi. In the picture, she is surrounded by extended family, who have clearly been dancing. Mami catches Yunior watching her and sends him a smile. He falls asleep and wakes to Rafa kicking him and telling him that they are leaving.
Yunior remembers that he must have seemed off after meeting the Puerto Rican woman because Mami started asking him questions. He chose not to tell her about Papi's mistress, and wonders if he had told her, if everything would have been different. On the way back home, Yunior begins to feel queasy.
Analysis
In "Fiesta, 1980," we get a sense of Yunior's life and family a few years after they have joined Papi in the United States. Díaz peppers this story with several details that mark the changes experienced in the United States, including a change in Yunior's language. In "Ysrael," Yunior did not use any American slang and instead relied solely on Dominican words to express himself, but by "Fiesta, 1980," American slang has made its way into his speech. See, for example, the way that Yunior describes his family's dynamic in deciding whether they should attend Tío Miguel and Tía Yrma's party: "Actually, my pops decided, but everybody—meaning Mami, tía Yrma, tío Miguel and their neighbors—thought it a dope idea" (23). In this line, Yunior refers to Papi as "my pops," a term which he did not use in the previous story. Additionally, he uses the word "dope," which solidly places him in the cultural environment of the United States in the 1980s.
It is clear throughout "Fiesta, 1980" that Yunior is not the only one who has changed as a result of the family's migration to the United States. Mami's physical appearance and style has changed as well: "The United States had finally put some meat on her; she was no longer the same flaca who had arrived here three years before. She had cut her hair short and was wearing tons of cheap-ass jewelry which on her didn't look too lousy" (24).
Rafa, who in "Ysrael" commands the scene as Yunior's leader and often the oldest male, becomes quieter and more cautious in his father's presence. As Papi reprimands Yunior, he keeps to himself in the backseat, refusing to meet Yunior's eyes.
Perhaps this change is most apparent with the difference between Tío Miguel and Tía Yrma's living situations in the campo in "Ysrael" and in the Bronx in "Fiesta, 1980." In the campo, Tío Miguel and Tía Yrma live in a wooden house that has no electricity or television, surrounded by natural beauty. In the Bronx, they live in a four-bedroom apartment on the third floor of their building in New York City. Even though Yunior is a bit mocking when he sees their furniture, it is a sharp contrast to their furniture in "Ysrael," which did not warrant special mention. Like Mami's jewelry, the way that Tío Miguel and Tía Yrma furnish their house is coded as being slightly cheap and gaudy: "from what I'd seen so far," Yunior describes, "the place had been furnished in Contemporary Dominican Tacky. The less I saw, the better. I mean, I liked plastic sofa covers but damn, Tío and Tía had taken it to another level. They had a disco ball hanging in the living room and the type of stucco ceilings that looked like stalacite heaven. The sofas all had golden tassels dangling from their edges" (32). These details demonstrate the change that Tío Miguel and Tía Yrma have experienced upon arriving in the United States; where golden tassels and a disco ball would have looked out of place in Ocoa, they seem appropriate in the Bronx, where they have begun their new life.
The family's Volkswagen van clearly represents the change that Yunior, his mother, and his siblings have undergone upon arriving in the United States. As Yunior describes, the van is "brand-new, lime-green and bought to impress" (27). Like Mami's jewlery and Tío and Tía's furniture, these objects are chosen for their image and status just as much as for their functional use. In this way, the van is a symbol for the family's new life in the United States, one that is complicated by Yunior's intense physical disgust whenever he is inside its walls: "Oh, we were impressed, but me, every time I was in that VW and Papi went above twenty miles an hour, I vomited. I'd never had trouble with cars before—that van was like my curse" (27). Yunior's revelation that he does not usually get carsick and only seems to inside his father's flashy, very American van suggests that the family's adaption to American society does not come without its consequences. Mami's response to Yunior's carsickness—a suspicion of anything American—is notable because it shows the emotional context to Yunior's physical unease: "Mami suspected it was the upholstery. In her mind, American things—appliances, mouthwash, funny-looking upholstery—all seemed to have an intrinsic badness about them" (27). Yunior does not reveal whether or not he also sees an "inherent badness" in American products, but his body goes into revolt every time he enters the van, which his father uses to go to and from work and also to visit his Puerto Rican mistress. Papi's use of the car to transport himself (as well as Rafa and Yunior on several occasions) to his mistress' house suggests that it acts as a vehicle for the emotional turbulence that the family is undergoing. As Natalie J. Friedman explains in "Adultery and the Immigrant Narrative," Yunior's "sensitive stomach is a figurative barometer of his family's troubles." These troubles, however, never come to light and instead bubble beneath the surface throughout "Fiesta, 1980." As the performance of their prosperity—plated in lime-green or covered in gold tassels—grows, so, too, do their problems.
Other facets of "Fiesta, 1980" that warrant analysis are gender roles and machismo. Machismo is defined as strong or aggressive masculine pride, and it is prevalent all over the world. It originated as a way to explain the gender dynamics often found in Latinx societies which uphold enduring stereotypes that often determine behavior, with the idea of a "strong" man and "subservient" woman. However, machismo is not limited to Latinx societies, as we will later see in Drown, as Yunior begins to express interest in and interact with women himself. Throughout "Fiesta, 1980," Papi and Mami are painted as versions of this machista stereotype. Friedman describes Papi as "a stereotypical 'macho' Latino" and "highly sexualized." She continues that he "not only cheats on his wife and takes his sons to his mistress's home, but he also regularly beats and terrorizes his children, thereby establishing his role as head of the household." The way that Mami and Papi express themselves reinforce these roles. At the party, Papi's voice fills up the room: "Papi's voice was loud and argumentative; you didn't have to be anywhere near him to catch his drift" (33). Mami acts as a foil to Papi in nearly everything. Where Papi's voice is loud, Mami's voice is soft: "And Mami, you had to put cups to your ears to hear hers" (33). In the same vein, while Papi is harsh towards his children, particularly Yunior, Mami is kind. She stands with Yunior on the side of the highway while he brushes his teeth so that he won't feel alone. However, she does not put a stop to Papi's behavior and instead yields the responsibility for disciplining the children to him. When Papi tells Yunior that he cannot eat anything at the party, "Mami pretended to help Rafa with the pernil" so as to not get in Papi's way (37). Overall, you get the sense from "Fiesta, 1980" that the way that Mami and Papi interact with each other and others is less determined by themselves and more a result of their cultural notions about how men and women are meant to interact with each other. When the food is served at the party, Yunior wonders why the men do not thank the women: "About two hours later the women laid out the food and like always nobody but the kids thanked them. It must be some Dominican tradition or something" (36). Yunior's assumption, that the reason the men and women act in pre-determined ways comes from "Dominican tradition," shows how he is unaware of the larger social forces that are at play within his family. However, it also demonstrates how pervasive this kind of behavior is—it seems so engrained into the adults' behavior that it is likened to a "tradition" which would have passed from family to family for generations.
