Summary
"How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie" is told from Yunior's point of view. It is written in the second person, and he presents it as an instruction manual on how to date girls of different races.
The story begins with Yunior telling the audience to wait until their brother and mother go to visit their aunt in Union City by pretending that they are sick. He then tells us to hide several items in our house: the government cheese, embarrassing family photos, and the waste basket in the bathroom. Then, he tells us to sit and wait.
If the girl is from out of town, her parents will be upset about bringing her to the Terrace. If she's from our neighborhood, she will come when she is ready. Sometimes, she will bring all of her friends and sometimes she won't come at all.
If we get antsy waiting for the non-local girl, we can go out to the corner and say hi to our friend. Eventually she will drive up in a Honda or a Jeep. She might get out of her car and tell us that her mom wants to meet us. We can run our hand through our hair and tell her that's not a problem. Yunior tells us to greet the girl's mother, and she will see that she is not scared of us. She will ask for better directions out of the neighborhood, and Yunior advises us to give them to her even though we gave her the best directions already.
Yunior tells us that we have choices when it comes to where you take the girl. If she's from out of town, we can take her to El Cibao and order everything in our "busted-up Spanish" (145). If she's local, we can take her to Wendy's. If she's from out of town, we can tell her stories about the neighborhood. He tells us that we should hope we don't run into our nemesis, Howie, who is from Puerto Rico and has two "killer mutts" (146). If his mutts aren't killing a cat and ripping it to shreds, he will follow us for a little while, asking if the girl we are with is our "new fuckbuddy" (146). Yunior advises us to let him talk because he is about two hundred pounds, and it's a bad idea to lose a fight on the first date.
Yunior tells us dinner will be tense because we have a hard time finding things to talk about with strangers. After dinner, walk her home and point out the vivid New Jersey sunset. He tells us to pull out the bottle of Bermúdez rum that our father left in the cabinet. He tells us that a local girl will only let us kiss her because she has to live around here and see us. A whitegirl might sleep with us right there. He tells us not to stop her if that happens. We should tell her that we love her hair, her lips, and her skin. Afterwards, she will want to wash up.
He warns us that it won't usually work out this way and we have to prepare ourselves. The person we are with might act in surprising ways, nothing like the way she acts in school. It might confuse us. When she leaves, we should give her a subdued goodbye. After she is gone, we can watch what we want on TV without any of our family members bothering us. He reminds us to put the government cheese back in the fridge before our mother kills us.
Analysis
"How to Date" is told from Yunior's point of view. He presents the story as an instruction manual for how to date different kinds of girls according to where they are from and their racial identity. One question that you might have had is who the audience of this story is. Throughout the story, Yunior directs it to a "you" who seemingly would understand the situation that he is in. Marisel Moreno suggests in "Debunking Myths, Destabilizing Identities" that the audience of "How to Date" is a "presumably male interlocutor who shares with him the ultimate goal of 'scoring' with his date." On a certain level, Yunior assumes that his audience shares his worldview when it comes to women and that this person is equally as invested in making himself palatable to the female gaze. However, as Daniel Bautista argues in "In and Out of the Mainstream: Dominican-American Identity in Junot Díaz's 'How to Date,'" the audience of "How to Date" is also Yunior himself: "for the most part, Yunior directs his instructions to himself; he is both the first-person subject (the 'I' that speaks) and the second-person object of his address (the 'you' he speaks to)." This, as a result, makes "How to Date" a "peculiarly self-reflexive narrative point of view that makes him both narrator and direct object of his narration at the same time." No matter who the audience is, by the end of "How to Date" the reader is left knowing more about Yunior and his life experiences than knowing how to successfully date a girl.
In fact, even though Yunior adopts an authoritative tone in "How to Date," you might have been left with the impression that he does not know much about dating at all. As Bautista points out, "although [Yunior's] flat, matter-of-fact tone can give his directions an aura of authority and objectivity, the fact that Yunior is essentially speaking to himself calls these same things into question." The fact that all of his encounters with girls do not happen in real time result in undermining the validity of his advice. It is not clear at all whether or not Yunior is speaking from past experience or if he is merely imagining these encounters. The result is a blurring of the line between the 'real' and the hypothetical as well as the past and the present. As a result of these ambiguities, what the story mostly reveals is that Yunior considers dating girls something that is "presumably complicated or confusing enough to require an instruction manual." Ironically, though, "what the story often reveals instead is Yunior's own lack of instruction."
As a result of Yunior's uncertain authority within the world of the story, what the story serves to do more than anything else is to express how complicated stereotypes about racial and ethnic identity are in the real world. In the story, Yunior "reduces every situation into a kind of formula for seduction" (Bautista). Different identities are different variables in this formula as Yunior suggests that a girl's identity and hometown will determine how she will react to his advances. For example, he imagines that local girls will act very differently from out-of-town white girls when spending time with him: "A local girl may have hips and a thick ass but she won't be quick at letting you touch. She has to live in the same neighborhood as you do, has to deal with you being up all in her business... She might kiss you and then go, or might, if she's reckless, give it up, but that's rare. Kissing will suffice. A whitegirl might just give it up right then. Don't stop her" (147).
As Moreno points out in her essay, by changing his behavior according to the identity of the girl he is going out with, Yunior's imagined interactions with these girls "replicate the social structures of power that affect Latinos/as and other minorities." Like the society that they live in, he teaches his love interests differently according to their background. He justifies his decisions on the basis that his actions come down to what each girl would expect from him. However, since each girl represents a different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic class, he is also reproducing a stratified dating world that places wealthy and white love interests above girls who are non-white or who come from a lower socioeconomic class. Yunior himself even reflects this dynamic when talking to the white girl: "Tell you that you love her hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because, in truth, you love them more than you love your own" (147). In this way, he unquestioningly participates within a dating culture that idealizes whiteness as the ultimate ideal. As the story suggests, his participation within this harmful culture has to do with his own perceptions of himself, as he "loves" the "whitegirl"'s physical attributes more than he loves his own.
We have already seen several examples of machismo throughout Drown, starting with Rafa's exciting excursions with girls in "Ysrael," to Papi's domination as head of the household and womanizing ways in "Fiesta, 1980," to the way that men treat Mami in Santo Domingo in "Aguantando." "How to Date" fits within this continuum quite well: Yunior bases his own perceptions of his masculinity (and perhaps as a result his worth) on the success of these encounters. He sees his interactions with other girls as inherently tied to himself and his own self-worth. It is interesting, therefore, that Yunior's navigation of the dating world relies heavily on him changing himself. In every interaction, Yunior attempts to portray himself in ways that maximize his chances of successfully hooking up with each girl. As Bautista argues, Yunior's attempts to repackage himself "offer an interesting perspective on Dominican-American identity politics that transcends any simple opposition between ethnic solidarity and assimilation." In so doing, he reveals "the limits of stereotypes" by understanding race and ethnicity "as performative, provisional, and even strategic roles that individuals assume or take off according to the demands of their environment." For example, when the "whitegirl" finally arrives at the Terrace, she tells him that she would like for him to meet her mother: "Look, she'll say. My mom wants to meet you. She's got herself all worried about nothing. Don't panic. Say, Hey, no problem. Run a hand through your hair like the whiteboys do even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa. She will look good. The white ones are the ones you want most, aren't they" (145). This line demonstrates how much of Yunior's identity is performative, as he sees it as a "role that you can play with certain acts or gestures that [he] chooses to take up and put down at will" (Bautista). Similarly, when the "whitegirl" tells Yunior that she "like[s] Spanish guys," Yunior responds "I like you" even though "[he's] never been to Spain" (148). In this scene, Yunior plays into the "whitegirl"'s stereotypical allusions about his identity in the effort to eventually hook up with her.
While Yunior's racial and ethnic identity is fluid through his performance, however, the racial identities of the girls that he dates seem to be set in stone. In fact, they are reduced completely to their racial identities and it is assumed that everyone from the same background will react in stereotypical and predictable ways. Moreno underscores the fact that Yunior referring to each girl solely by their racial identity erases their subjectivity within the text. Instead of being presented as living, breathing human beings, they are converted into placeholders, mere objects of Yunior's desire, that he uses in order to further his own machista desire to get with girls. Moreno continues that "the lack of proper names in the story, and the insistence of the narrative voice on using racial epithets to refer to his partners, symbolically erase them and contribute to their sexual objectification." However, Moreno allows that Yunior's process of categorizing women "mirrors the process through which the Dominican community has been racialized and rendered invisible in the United States." It would also stand to argue that he is simply replicating a dating culture that we have seen throughout the entire text—from Boyfriend leaving Girlfriend for white girls in "Boyfriend," to Loretta leaving the narrator for an Italian who works on Wall Street in "Boyfriend," to the the ex girlfriend of the narrator of "Edison, New Jersey" moving on to date a white girl.
