Fruit (Symbol in "Ysrael")
In "Ysrael," the first story in Díaz's Drown, fruit acts as a symbol for violence enacted on innocent victims. The first time that fruit appears in the story is when Yunior describes Ysrael's disability: "when he was a baby a pig had eaten his face off, skinned it like an orange" (7). In this image, a helpless baby is ruthlessly attacked by a pig, and the vulnerable skin of his face is likened to an orange peel. Later in the story, the pig's violence turns into Rafa's as he torments his little brother, Yunior, and later Ysrael. When Rafa is caught up in the fascination of what Ysrael might look like, he studies Yunior's face: "my brother kept pinching my face during the night, like I was a mango" (9). Here, Yunior equates his face to Ysrael's, foreshadowing the torment that is coming Ysrael's way at Rafa's hands. When Rafa and Yunior depart from their tío's house to track Ysrael down, Rafa steals two oranges as a snack: "Rafa went into the smokehouse and emerged with his knife and two oranges. He peeled them and handed me mine" (9). Through the symbol of fruit, the story likens Rafa's cruel bullying of Ysrael to the pig's violent action when Ysrael was a baby. In each case, the entity with more power—the pig and Rafa—enact violence on those with less power—Ysrael and Yunior—and the story likens these less powerful entities to fruit.
Water (Motif in "Aguantando")
Water is a powerful motif throughout "Aguantando." It ties in with the title of the entire collection, Drown, as well as the title of this story itself, "Aguantando." In Spanish, aguantando means something like "to take" or "to bear." For example, if you have a headache but no aspirin on hand, then you will aguantando that headache until you get home. However, because of its first syllable agua, meaning "water," there is also a sense of "treading water" that is carried by the word aguantando, which is exactly what Yunior and his family do as they wait for Papi to arrive. Throughout "Aguantando," water crashes against their lives, threatening to drown them or take them under. The very first image of the story, for example, shows how water has invaded Yunior's home through a leak in the roof: "Since our zinc roof leaked, almost everything we owned was water-stained: our clothes, Mami's Bible, her makeup, whatever food we had, Abuelo's tools, our cheap wooden furniture" (69). Nothing is safe from the water in Yunior's home except for Papi's picture, which is protected by a plastic bag. Similarly, everyone besides Papi in the family has to reckon with the aguantando, waiting for his return so that he can bring them to an imagined better life in the United States.
Similarly, when Mami sends Yunior away to Boca Chica because she is short on money, he expresses his feelings about having to be away from home through an evocative description of the ocean: "On the ride to Boca Chica I was always too depressed to notice the ocean, the young boys fishing and selling cocos by the side of the road, the surf exploding into the air like a cloud of shredded silver" (75). In this image, the water in the ocean threatens to escape its bounds by forcefully "exploding" into the air. It is not calm or peaceful; instead, it a dangerous and volatile presence. When Mami is depressed after Papi doesn't show up the first time, she goes down to the coast to watch the waves: "Mami spent a lot of time out of the house, at work or down by the Malecón, where she could watch the waves shred themselves against the rocks, where men offered cigarettes that she smoked quietly" (83). In this moment, the violence of the waves mirrors the emotional turbulence inside Mami, when the aguantando of waiting for Papi's return becomes almost too much to bear.
Finally, when Papi's second letter finally comes, a hurricane passes through Santo Domingo: "On Saturday a late hurricane passed close to the Capital and the next day folks were talking about how high the waves were down by the Malecón. Some children had been lost, swept out to sea and Abuelo shook his head when he heard the news" (85). In this moment, the violence of the water represents a very real physical threat. The next day, Mami takes the family to the movies, and they make their way to the Malecón to watch the waves themselves: "The waves were tremendous and some parts of George Washington were flooded and cars were churning through the water slowly" (86).
Pool Table (Symbol in "Edison, New Jersey")
Pool tables in "Edison, New Jersey" are a symbol for generational wealth. The narrator, who delivers pool tables to rich customers for a living, tries to save up his money to buy one of his own, but he thinks it will take him something like two and a half years. He explains in an extended passage why pool tables are so special to him: "Most people don't realize how sophisticated pool tables are. Yes, tables have bolts and staples on the rails but these suckers hold together mostly by gravity and by the precision of their construction. If you treat a good table right it will outlast you. Believe me. Cathedrals are built like that. There are Incan roads in the Andes that even today you couldn't work a knife between two of the cobblestones. The sewers that the Romans built in Bath were so good that they weren't replaced until the 1950s. That's the sort of thing I can believe in" (128). In the narrator's mind, the pool table becomes a symbol for something that can outlast him, something that will endure for many years to come. Despite his love for and proximity to pool tables, however, they are out of his reach. He can only admire them from afar. They generally only belong to men like Pruitt who, as the story progresses, enjoys everything that the narrator wants but cannot have, including Pruitt's housekeeper.
Government Cheese (Symbol in "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie")
Government cheese is a processed cheese sent to welfare beneficiaries. In 1981, Ronald Reagan signed an executive order promising to send five hundred and sixty million pounds of cheese that had been stockpiled across the United States to communities in need. He made this decision right on the heels of a controversial budget cut on the United States federal food stamp program. In "How to Date," which is written in the style of an instruction manual, Yunior advises the implied male reader to "[c]lear the government cheese from the refrigerator" as well as a variety of items that betray his socioeconomic status, including pictures of himself and his cousins in the campo (countryside) (143). In this moment, government cheese acts as a symbol for Yunior's disadvantaged socioeconomic class. When he hides it from the girls who are coming over, he is attempting to soften that side of himself in the hope of appearing more attractive in their eyes. Interestingly, Yunior changes his advice according to where the girl he is taking out is from and what race she is. However, his advice to clear out the government cheese is across the board, for all of the girls. This suggests that no matter who Yunior dates, he tries to change at least some part of himself and never presents himself as he accurately is. As we see throughout "How to Date," Yunior thinks about dating as a kind of performance, where he downplays or emphasizes different parts of his experience and identity in order to play into his date's expectations. However, his socioeconomic class, as symbolized by government cheese, must only be downplayed as it is not perceived as attractive to any of the girls—local or outsider.
Papi's Dream (Allegory in "Negocios")
When Papi first arrives in Miami, he has a dream which acts as an allegory for all of his expectations for life in the United States: "Within an hour he was asleep. He was twenty-four. He didn't dream about his familia and wouldn't for many years. He dreamed instead of gold coins, like the ones that had been salvaged from the many wrecks about our island, stacked high as sugar cane," (169). On the surface, Papi's dream clearly expresses his desire for the attainment of the "American Dream": hoards of wealth. However, it also contains elements that suggest that Papi's journey won't be completely smooth. The allusion to shipwrecks suggests a disaster—a complete loss of wealth. Additionally, it can be assumed that the shipwrecks that surround Hispaniola are previous slave ships. The "gold coins" that would have been "salvaged" from them would have come from wealth built off of slave labor. Additionally, sugar cane has a dark history. For hundreds of years, Europeans terrorized the Dominican Republic and used slave labor to cultivate this crop. In this way, Papi's dream both yearns for wealth but suggests that there is a bloody history implicated within this success. Countries like the United States grew as economic superpowers off of the backs of slave labor. In dreaming for that wealth, Papi is hoping to gain off of this ugly past. Any wealth gained in the United States comes at the cost of people like him in the Dominican Republic and across the Caribbean.
