I love Junot Diaz and really got into the short stories in his book, Drown. I read the whole book last summer, I think, but just re-read this story twice and am looking at it through the lens of race and "sex in the black diaspora."
It is clear that the narrator, Yunior, is a high school kid from New Jersey hoping to get some. Though he doesn't truly loathe himself and his Dominican background, he acts that way around girls who aren't from his neighborhood, because that's how he thinks he is supposed to act. He has a different game plan for getting with each type of girl, each race, but he generally treats all girls from out of town the same. He allows girls who don't understand him to call him Spanish, and hides pictures of his trips "home" to the Dominican.
Yunior sarcastically mocks the self-hatred he sees other Dominican's feel when he says, "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)."
The girls he really wants to be with are the girls like him, from his neighborhood, but they are harder to catch. It is easier for him to get with white girls, but he enjoys spending time with Dominican girls ("Sometimes she'll run into her other friends and a whole crowd will show up at your apartment and even though that means you ain't getting shit it will be fun anyway and you'll wish these people would come over more often (144)).
Why do you think Yunior puts his effort into hanging with girls from out of town? Is it really because "homegirls" are more difficult, or because there is an element of self-hatred manifesting itself, making him unable to connect with someone who looks like him?
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I too entertained the idea that Yunior's feelings of self hatred are responsible for his wanting to be with girls from out of town, but I can also see how this may just be considered on a more basic level-he is a kid who wants "some" and there is only one way to attain his desires. Perhaps he is okay with the fact that the homegirls would come over and spend time without doing anything because he has a certain level of respect for them (because they are like him and like his mother) that he does not have for girls from the outside. It is possible for him to feel detached from the outsiders for the same reason that the girls in his neighborhood refuse to "give it up"...he doesn't have to see them again.Many of his statements seem ambiguous. For example, when Diaz writes, "Tell her that you love here hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because, in truth, you love them more than your own (147)", I am unsure about whether he genuinly feels that she is better than him or if he just knows that these are the things that she wants to hear. The fact that the girls often ignore him in school succeeds to further prove how trivial these relationships are.
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