Race and Ethnicity
Race and ethnicity is a major theme in Drown. All of the characters deal with issues of race and ethnicity in their own way. Yunior, in particular, has a complex relationship with his race, and we see him navigate it in different ways as Drown progresses. In "Ysrael," we are given a description of Yunior's physical appearance through Rafa's taunting: "Back in the Capital he rarely said anything to me except Shut up, pendejo. Unless, of course, he was mad and then he had about five hundred routines he liked to lay on me. Most of them had to do with my complexion, my hair, the size of my lips. It's the Haitian, he'd say to his buddies. Hey Señor Haitian, Mami found you on the border and only took you in because she felt sorry for you," (5).
In "How to Date a Browngirl, a Blackgirl, a Whitegirl, or a Halfie," Yunior suffers from insecurity because of his race and does what he can to make himself appear more like the "whiteboys." This includes hiding incriminating items from around his apartment, including the "government cheese" and pictures of himself with his cousins in the campo. When the "whitegirl" tells him that she wants him to meet her mother, he tries to respond as smoothly as possible: "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" (145). Later, he reveals that he wants the "whitegirls" more than girls of other races because he sees whiteness as something positive and powerful: "Tell her 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).
Gender Roles
Many of the familial relationships in Drown are defined by rigid gender roles. In "Fiesta, 1980," for example, Mami and Papi have strict roles for how they interact within their families. While Papi chats with the partygoers at Tío Miguel and Tía Yrma's party, Mami passes the time cooking with Tía Yrma in the kitchen: "Mami and Tía were frying tostones and the last of the pastelitos. She appeared happier now and the way her hands worked on our dinner you would think she had a life somewhere else making rare and precious things. She nudged Tía every now and then, shit they must have been doing all their lives" (34). When the food is ready, none of the men in the room thank them, suggesting that it is taken for granted that they would fulfill this role: "About two hours later the women laid out the food and like always nobody but the kids thanked them" (36).
In "Negocios," Papi demonstrates a similar dynamic when interacting with his new family. Nilda spends most of her time working or fulfilling Papi's needs: "She brought the clothes home in a garbage bag and spent her time off sewing and listening to the radio, getting her time off sewing and listening to the radio, getting up only to bring Ramón a beer or change the channel for him" (188). Once they have a kid together, Nilda is the one who takes care of the baby, while Papi spends most of his time watching TV: "The third Ramón was a handsome child who roamed the house restlessly, tilted forward at full speed, as if he were a top that had been sent spinning. Papi was good at playing with the baby, pulling him by his foot across the floor and tickling his sides, but as soon as the third Ramón started to fuss, playtime was over. Nilda, come and tend to this, he'd say" (204).
Difference
Different characters have to negotiate many forms of difference throughout Drown. Many characters struggle with racial and ethnic difference as they find their way in the United States. One of the most notable examples of difference comes with Ysrael, who is ostracized from his community because of his disability. Because of his physical deformity, he is seen both as super-human and less-than-human by his neighbors. In "Ysrael," Rafa explains the effect that Ysrael has on his community: "Ysrael was a different story. Even on this side of Ocoa people had heard of him, how when he was a baby a pig had eaten his face off, skinned it like an orange. He was something to talk about, a name that set the kids to screaming, worse than el Cuco or la Vieja Calusa" (7). Despite his infamous reputation, however, they mistreat him to his face, which culminates in explosive violence on many different occasions. Ysrael describes the way that his community members treat him in "No Face" as a result of his difference: "He watches for opportunities from corners, away from people. He has his power of INVISIBILITY and no one can touch him. Even his tío, the one who guards the dams, strolls past and says nothing. Dogs can smell him though and a couple nuzzle his feet. He pushes them away since they can betray his location to his enemies. So many wish him to fall. So many wish him gone" (155).
Like anyone, the threat of being labelled as "different" can lead to a crisis of confidence. Yunior experiences this kind of crisis in "Drown," when it is revealed that he had two sexual encounters with his childhood friend, Beto. As a result, he spirals into a state of anxiety, hoping that it won't mark him as different in the eyes of his community: "Mostly I stayed in the basement, terrified that I would end up abnormal, a fucking pato" (104). As this passage suggests, it is much more comfortable to be seen as "normal" in the eyes of one's community. However, characters like Ysrael who cannot control that which makes them different, have no say in the matter. Perhaps it is this threat to be "normal" which causes Yunior to try to hide those parts of himself that create tension.
The Immigrant Experience
Many stories in Drown deal with the theme of the immigrant experience. The Dominican housekeeper, for example, is unhappy in her new life in the United States. She works for a rich white man, Pruitt, who mistreats her.
Perhaps the most striking picture of the immigrant experience in Drown is Papi's story in "Negocios." When he comes to the United States, he struggles to find his way and works himself to the bone. When he first gets to Miami, for example, he works long hours that significantly impair his quality of life: "Papi slept in the living room, first on a carpet whose fraying threads kept sticking to his shaved head, and then on a mattress he salvaged from a neighbor. He worked two long shifts a day at the shop and had two four-hour breaks in between. On one of the breaks, he slept at home and on the other he would handwash his aprons in the shop's sink and then nap in the storage room while the aprons dried, amidst the towers of El Pico coffee cans and sacks of bread" (171). After Papi leaves Miami, he walks 390 miles to New York City so that he can have enough money for rent when he arrives. In New York, his situation doesn't get much better: "Don't get me wrong; it wasn't that he was having fun. No, he'd been robbed twice already, his ribs beaten until they were bruised. He often drank too much and went home to his room, and there he'd fume, spinning, angry at the stupidity that had brought him to this freezing hell of a country, angry that a man his age had to masturbate when he had a wife, and angry at the blinkered existence his jobs and the city imposed on him. He never had time to sleep, let alone go to a concert or the museums that filled entire sections of the newspapers. And the roaches. The roaches were so bold in his flat that turning on the lights did not startle them. They waved their three-inch antennas as if to say, Hey puto, turn that shit off. He spent five minutes stepping on their carapaced bodies and shaking them from the mattress before dropping into his cot and still the roaches crawled on him at night" (179).
For many readers, the grueling descriptions of Papi's life in the United States are harsh wake-up calls for the reality of the immigrant experience in the United States. Often, it is too easy to believe the "American Dream" that life in the United States is far superior to life in the home countries of immigrants. The reality, however, is that they often have to work themselves to the bone, facing poverty, hunger, and racism.
Masculinity/Machismo
Masculinity and machismo are huge themes in Drown. All of the narrators are men, and all of them—besides Ysrael—struggle with their masculinity and with women. Machismo is a sense of being "manly," of exhibiting "masculine pride." This is generally associated with harsh gender roles that envision the man as the authoritarian head of the family as well as an attitude towards women that reduces them to sexual conquests. "Boyfriend" is, perhaps, one of the most striking examples of the machismo theme throughout Drown. Throughout the story, the unnamed narrator stalks his downstairs neighbor, who he refers to solely as "Girlfriend." He listens from the apartment above hers as she mourns her failed relationship. The narrator never questions the motivations or implications of his stalking, and instead takes it for granted since she lives so close to him. Machismo directly leads to the failure of Girlfriend's relationship. The narrator knows that Boyfriend leaves her so that he can pursue other women: "He wasn't sticking around, though. That was obvious. He was one of those dark-skinned smooth-faced brothers that women kill for, and I knew for a fact, having seen his ass in action at the local spots, that he liked to get on with the whitegirls. She didn't know nothing about his little Rico Suave routine. It would have wrecked her" (114). Girlfriend is negatively affected by machismo, then, on two levels: Boyfriend leaves her so that he can sleep around with other women and the narrator intrudes on her life without questioning it at all. As the passage suggests, the question of machismo is often intertwined with the theme of race. Girlfriend, who is not white, is left in favor of the whitegirls that Boyfriend might be able to score with.
Dominican Identity
Dominican identity extends throughout Drown. Every single one of the narrators in the work is Dominican. Many of the people that they surround themselves with, as well, are Dominican. What it means to be Dominican, however, changes according to each characters' context and their relationship to their culture.
For example, the narrator of "Edison, New Jersey" and Pruitt's housekeeper have different relationships with the Dominican Republic because they have been in the States for different amounts of time. The narrator has lived in the United States since he was a kid, but the housekeeper has only recently moved to New York. When he takes her to Washington Heights, however, he feels just at home as she does in the Dominican-heavy neighborhood: "Everything in Washington Heights is Dominican. You can't go a block without passing a Quisqueya Bakery or a Quisqueya Supermercado or a Hotel Quisqueya. If I were to park the truck and get out nobody would take me for a deliveryman; I could be the guy who's on the street corner selling Dominican flags. I could be on my way home to my girl" (137). Outside of Washington Heights, the narrator's Dominican identity would have easily marked him as a delivery man in the majority white neighborhoods where he works. However, here, the narrator is simply part of his community, one of the many Dominicans surrounding him, which allows him to imagine a brighter future for himself: one where he "could be on [his] way home to [his] girl." It can be assumed that he imagines "his girl" to be the housekeeper or Loretta, both of them Dominican women. In the real world, both of these women turned him down for white men. But in Washington Heights, the narrator allows him to fulfill his own fantasies, where he has a girl waiting for him, in a place where his Dominican identity is not a hinderance but instead a connection to their wider community.
Class
Socioeconomic class is a major theme throughout Drown. Every single character in Drown is affected by this theme to varying degrees.
These issues affect characters in the Dominican Republic as well as in the United States. For example, Yunior and Rafa must reckon with their lower socioeconomic class in Santo Domingo in "Ysrael" and "Aguantando." In "Ysrael," Yunior and Rafa are sent to spend the summer with their Tío Miguel in the campo (countryside) because Mami has to work long hours at the Chocolate Factory and can't watch over them while they are out of school. Yunior and Rafa hate it in the campo, where the people are not much better off than they are in Santo Domingo. Tío Miguel touches on his socioeconomic position as well as the socioeconomic positions of his neighbors when his rooster wins in a fight and he considers taking it to the capital, where he believes people would wager larger bets: "People around here don't bet worth a damn, he was saying. Your average campesino only bets big when he feels lucky and how many of them feel lucky?" ("Ysrael," 8).
However, it is clear in "Aguantando" that the people in the capital, Santo Domingo, aren't so much better off. Yunior describes his family's struggles in Santo Domingo: "We lived south of the Cemeterio Nacional in a wood-frame house with three rooms. We were poor. The only way we could have been poorer was to have lived in the campo or to have been Haitian immigrants, and Mami regularly offered these to us as brutal consolation," ("Aguantando," 70). As this second passage suggests, issues of socioeconomic class are tied to race: those who are worse-off than Yunior's family are Haitian immigrants, who more often than not come from African descent.
