Almost a Woman
Upgrade to the Flash 9 viewer for enhanced content, including the ability to browse & search through your favorite titles.
Click here to learn more!
Written by 
- Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
- Publisher: Vintage
- On Sale: September 7, 1999
- Price: $13.95
- ISBN: 978-0-375-70521-2 (0-375-70521-X)
TEACHER'S GUIDE
NOTE TO TEACHERS
Almost a Woman continues Esmeralda Santiago’s poignant, thoughtful, and vibrant journey, begun in When I Was Puerto Rican, from a poor but idyllic childhood in rural Puerto Rico to an unimaginably different life as an immigrant in New York City, where she struggles to fit in with her new friends and environment even as her traditional mother urges her not to become too “American.”
The move away from the warmth and rich colors of the Puerto Rican countryside to a three-room apartment in Brooklyn occupied by ten family members is
a shock to thirteen-year-old Esmeralda; so is her feeling of foreignness, of being hopelessly at sea in a strange world. Challenged by language barriers, cultural stereotypes, and her strict and fiercely protective mother, Esmeralda begins her triumphant struggle to make a place for herself in this new environment. By day she studies acting at Manhattan’s Performing Arts High School; by night, she accompanies her mother and sisters to Latin dance halls, but she is kept on such a strict leash that she does not go on her first date until the age of twenty. Undaunted, she makes up for lost time in a romantic apprenticeship at once hilarious and heartbreaking.
Filled with wisdom, humor, and a marvelous eye for detail, Esmeralda Santiago’s story is both universal and personal: the immigrant’s search for belonging, the adolescent’s search for identity, and the daughter’s fight, often at a great cost to herself, for independence from a beloved but too powerful parent.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Esmeralda Santiago is the eldest of eleven children. She spent her childhood in Puerto Rico, moving back and forth between the tiny village of Macún and Santurce, a suburb of San Juan. With her mother and siblings she moved to New York in 1961, at the age of thirteen. She attended junior high school in Brooklyn and Performing Arts High School in New York City. After the extraordinary years described in Almost a Woman, she graduated from Harvard University and received a Master’s degree from Sarah Lawrence College. Santiago is the author of When I Was Puerto Rican and América’s Dream, and is coeditor, with Joie Davidow, of Las Christmas: Favorite Latino Authors Share Their Holiday Memories, and Las Mamis: Favorite Latino Authors Remember Their Mothers. Santiago lives in Westchester County, New York, with her husband and two children.
TEACHING IDEAS
The questions, assignments, and discussion topics that follow are designed to guide your students in their approach to Almost a Woman as a work of literature and as a memoir that deals with two resonant subjects: the process, of vital interest to all young people, of growing up and growing inevitably away from one’s own family and into a new world of independent adulthood; and the experience of immigration, of leaving a familiar and comforting culture and beginning the slow, painful, and often frightening work of assimilation into a new one. The following suggestions should aid comprehension, prompt independent research and writing, and provide ideas for in-class discussion. Santiago’s themes, at once universal and personal, will inspire young readers to compare the narrator’s life with their own. The book is an ideal jumping-off point for discussions about immigrants and the immigrant experience in America; American culture as seen from the point of view of an outsider; ethnic, racial, and linguistic identity; the relationships between family members and the roles of parents in young people’s lives; and the inevitable problems and joys of becoming an adult.
DISCUSSION AND WRITING
1.What does the title of the first chapter—“Martes, ni te cases, ni te embarques, ni de tu familia te apartes.”—mean? Why does Santiago quote this little rhyme?
2.Why does the family move so often? What do you think their ideal neighborhood might have been like? Does such a neighborhood even exist?
3.What sort of home did the Santiagos have in Macún? How does it differ from the various homes they have in the United States?
4.Why do the Santiagos decide to leave Puerto Rico for New York? Are their reasons similar to those of other immigrants?
5.What does the little girl mean when she says Esmeralda is “Hispanic” [p. 5]? Why is this term so puzzling to Esmeralda? How many different countries can you think of that might be called Hispanic, and what do all these countries have in common? In what ways might they be different?
6.Why do the teachers place Esmeralda in a class for low scorers and problem kids? What should they have done with her instead? Why are the other kids “hostile” toward her?
7.What does Mami mean by algo? What does she fear when she says that algo could happen to Esmeralda?
8.Mami calls Esmeralda casi señorita [p. 14]. What does that mean to Mami, and how does it make her treat Esmeralda? Is this treatment different from the way most American adolescent girls are
treated by their parents?
9.What is a puta and what is a pendeja, from Mami’s point of view?
10.Why does the bond of friendship between Esmeralda and Yolanda separate Esmeralda from Mami and Tata? Why are the two older women anxious about this friendship?
11.What is a jíbaro [p. 24]?
12.Why does Esmeralda get so angry with Mami when Mami finds her wearing makeup [p. 28]? And why is Mami so much against makeup for her daughters?
13.Why does Esmeralda purposely step on Norma’s paper dolls [p. 29]?
14.From the little we learn about Esmeralda’s father, what can you deduce about his character, his relationship with Mami, and his relationship with Esmeralda? Do you blame him for his breakup with Mami, or for the small part he plays in his children’s lives? When Papi marries, Esmeralda feels “cast adrift” [p. 31]. Is she justified in feeling this way?
15.Why does Mr. Barone suggest Performing Arts High School for Esmeralda, although she has never considered acting as a career? Why does she go along with this idea?
16.How would you describe the relationship between Tata and Mami? Does it resemble that between Mami and Esmeralda, and if so, in what respects?
17.Why are Lulu and her friends so resentful of Esmeralda? Is she perceived by them as being in some way threatening? Why do they eventually beat her up?
18.What does Manhattan represent to Esmeralda as she begins considering going to school there? Why has Mami never taken her children to Manhattan before?
19.“Performing Arts was never mentioned in that apartment again” [p. 47], Santiago remarks. Why not? What keeps them from discussing it?
20.Why do Mami and Esmeralda’s siblings pretend not to notice Esmeralda’s wounds after she is attacked and beaten by the girls in her school [p. 51]?
21.Why does Esmeralda avoid the candy store after its owners come to her rescue [p. 51]?
22.What is a trigueña [p. 57], and what does it mean to Esmeralda to be described in this way?
23.In Brooklyn, Esmeralda wants more things, and is more ambitious than she was in Puerto Rico. Why is this? Is this feeling of wanting, of striving, a particularly American state of mind, or is it characteristic of urban culture in general?
24.Why does Esmeralda accept the dollar from Tío Chico [p. 63] without saying anything to her mother or Tata?
25.Why is Esmeralda chosen to play Cleopatra in her first scene? Why is she so often chosen for Cleopatra after that?
26.Why, as an actress, does Esmeralda refuse to venture into her deeper self [p. 74]? What is she afraid of finding? Is there any part of her teenage life during which she does not feel it necessary to act a role?
27.Why does Mami finally allow Esmeralda to wear makeup? What changes her mind so suddenly [p. 78]?
28.Why does Esmeralda consider herself a pendeja in the subway [p. 81]? Why doesn’t she react aggressively to the flasher, as she wishes she might?
29.What does Esmeralda’s fantasy, nighttime self [pp. 83–4] tell us about her hopes and dreams for herself, and about the sort of identity she most craves?
30.Mami is pleased that the sixteen-year-old Esmeralda, casi mujer, shows no interest in boys. Is Esmeralda really uninterested in boys? What does she mean when she says she knows “what happened to a girl who let a man take the place of an education” [p. 89]?
31.Why does the first play Esmeralda sees at the Yiddish theater have such a strong personal resonance for her? How does the play’s story relate to her own life?
32.What do you think of Don Carlos? Is Mami wise to have fallen for him? Is he a good mate for her and a good “stepfather” for the children?
33.Why does Esmeralda love dance so much? What is it about dancing that relieves the particular stresses of her life?
34.What does Mrs. Kormendi’s apartment symbolize to Esmeralda?
35.Why is Esmeralda filled with rage after the social worker’s visit to Mami’s apartment? Does this visit affect her ambitions, her ideas for her future?
36.Why does Esmeralda decide against going to college after her graduation from Performing Arts?
37.Why does Esmeralda cry during the night after her graduation performance [p. 145]?
38.Talking with Alma, Esmeralda insists that the most important requirement she has in a husband is that he be rich [p. 148]. Is she serious? Partly serious?
39.What does the film casting director mean when he says that Esmeralda doesn’t look Puerto Rican enough [p. 151]? How does he expect a Puerto Rican to look? Do his expectations reflect American stereotypes in general?
40.Why does Esmeralda react so negatively when Neftalí approaches her, even though she’d been daydreaming about him for a long time? What did he do or say to put her off?
41.Why does Esmeralda’s family mock Sidney, while she herself likes him? Why do they think it funny that he plays the violin?
42.Why do Mami and Don Carlos come to fetch Esmeralda at the Christmas party, instead of simply calling her there? Esmeralda feels that they had “gone to great trouble and expense to come get me, to humiliate me in front of my friends, to teach me a lesson I didn’t need” [p. 188]. Is this true, or were they genuinely worried? Were their worries justified?
43.Why does Ilsa disapprove of Otto and wish that Esmeralda would date Sidney instead?
44.Why does Esmeralda grow “defiant” [p. 241] about her ethnicity on her tour of New England? Why does she choose to confront everyone with it?
45.Why doesn’t Avery Lee want to marry Esmeralda? Does he ever understand why she is angry about his offer? Does he realize he is being insulting?
46.Why does Ulvi say that Shoshana is a “cheap” [p. 276] girl, while not thinking the same about Esmeralda?
47.Why does Ulvi kick Esmeralda out of his apartment after her dinner with Allan? Why does she accept this treatment wordlessly? Why does she go back to him, accepting all of his rules?
48.Why does Iris say that Esmeralda’s bracelet reminds her of shackles? Do you think Iris is right?
49.“I’d already made my choice,” Santiago says at the end [311]. What was that choice, and why did she make it?
For in-depth discussion
1.“In the twenty-one years I lived with my mother, we moved at least twenty times” [p. 1]. Santiago feels that this fact kept her and her family from attaching too much importance to possessions, or even to friends. What other effects did the family’s many moves have on their outlook on life, their relationships to one another and to outsiders, and, in particular, on Esmeralda’s developing character?
2.Almost a Woman could be described as, in essence, a search for identity, as Santiago changes from Negi, the little Puerto Rican girl she once was, to the young adult, part Puerto Rican and part American, whose persona she herself has gone far to create. In what ways are little Negi and grown-up Esmeralda different? What characteristics, on the contrary, does Santiago keep throughout her life? At the end of Almost a Woman, do you feel that Esmeralda has become the woman she will be, or is her character still in a state of flux?
3.The Santiagos felt that in New York, they would have a “better” life than they had in Macún. In what ways does their American life turn out, indeed, to be better? In what ways is it a less satisfactory life? Santiago, at the beginning of Almost a Woman, says that Mami would eventually return to Macún after ten years in New York. Do you think this was the right decision, for her?
4.Following her discussion with the neighborhood child soon after her arrival in Brooklyn, Esmeralda reflects that “Two days in New York, and I’d already become someone else” [p. 5]. What does the two girls’ conversation reveal about categories of identity? Is group identity, in a multicultural place like New York City, seen to be primarily racial? National? Linguistic? Regional? What different groups does Esmeralda identify herself with during the course of her narrative? How does she define herself—if, that is, she still thinks in those terms—at the memoir’s end?
5.Mami says that Esmeralda’s cousins Alma and Corazon are Americanized.
“The way she pronounced the word Americanized, it sounded like a terrible thing, to be avoided at all costs, another algo to be added to the list of ‘somethings’ outside our door” [p. 12]. What does Mami mean by “Americanized,” and why does the word have such negative connotations for her? Why is she so afraid of Esmeralda’s becoming Americanized, too? Isn’t it true that she also wishes for Esmeralda and her siblings to enter into American life and to
succeed there?
6.Listening to Mami, says Santiago, “had taught me that men were not to be trusted” [p. 14]. The same could be said of Esmeralda’s observations of her father, and of some of the other men in her community. What mixed messages about men, women, and love does Esmeralda pick up, as a child, from her parents? How does her mother’s example affect her own early relationships with men and boys? Does it make her more passive? Wary? Fearful? Impulsive? Why does she never feel “affection” for any man outside her family until she meets Allan, although she is not in love with him, whereas she has been in love with several other men?
7.How does Mami’s trip to the welfare office [pp. 43–4] make Mami look? Does this image that Mami presents to the welfare agent resemble the real Mami that we have come to know from the book?
8.What does Esmeralda learn about “another United States—the trim, horizontal suburbs of white Americans” [pp. 26–7] from Archie comics? How much of the picture she constructs of the white suburbs is a true one, and how much is simple fantasy? In what ways is Esmeralda’s life deeply different from those of real suburban teenagers?
9.Mami has high expectations for her daughters: that they will remain virgins until marriage, that they will find good and responsible husbands, and that they will get married in church. Esmeralda is not even allowed to date until the age of twenty. Yet the example Mami herself has provided is very different: eleven children by three different men, none of whom has married her. “Whenever we discussed it at home, it was agreed by the adults around the kitchen table that ‘the Pill’ was nothing more than a license for young women to have sex without getting married. The fact that my mother, grandmother, and almost every other female relative of ours had sex without marriage was not mentioned” [pp. 156–7]. Is Mami entirely unreasonable on this subject? Do you have any sympathy for her and the discrepancy between her standards and her behavior?
10.How, according to Santiago’s account, do race relations and racial consciousness differ between Puerto Rico and New York [see pp. 56–7]? Have the racial attitudes and stereotypes encountered by Esmeralda in the 1960s changed over the ensuing decades? Are things better, worse, or much the same?
11.At Performing Arts, Esmeralda finds that there is a new hierarchy into which race does not much enter. How would you describe this hierarchy? How do students earn status and respect within the school? In what essential ways does this hierarchy differ from the one in Esmeralda’s community? How would you describe the hierarchy in your own school? In your community?
12.How does the lack of a father during her formative years affect Esmeralda’s life, her character, and her relationship with the rest of the world? How might her life differ if she had a father at home? How might she, as a person, have developed differently?
13.The relationship between Mami and Esmeralda is a complex one; in some ways it is the classic mother-daughter story, while other elements of it are more unusual. “I felt guilty,” Esmeralda remembers, “that so much of what little we had was spent on me. And I dreaded the price” [p. 86]. What price does Mami, in fact, try to exact? What does she expect of Esmeralda, and how far is Esmeralda willing to go to please Mami? What concessions does Esmeralda refuse to make, when it comes to her own life?
14.At what point does Esmeralda’s home cease to be a refuge and start to seem like a prison? When does it begin to seem as though she is a visitor in her family, and that her real life is in Manhattan? What causes these changes?
15.Jaime, who acts with Esmeralda in Babu, is a political activist who promotes Puerto Rican culture in New York. What is it in Esmeralda’s life and experiences that makes her resist his perorations, and believe that “I could be of no help to ‘my’ people until I had helped myself” [p. 288]? Do you think she is justified in this attitude?
16.How can you explain the fact that Esmeralda accepts the marriage proposal of Jurgen, a man she has known only a few hours, when by her own admission she is deeply distrustful of men in general?
17.“Why him?” Esmeralda asks about Ulvi [p. 272]. “Why not Otto or Avery Lee or Jurgen?” Can you answer her question? What needs in her does Ulvi, alone of all the men she knows, meet? Why does she go along with his dominating manner, his wish to separate her from family and friends, his rules and regulations? Does Iris have a point when she says Esmeralda’s bracelet, a gift from Ulvi, reminds her of shackles? Or do you agree with Santiago’s own retrospective opinion that Ulvi served as a substitute father for her?
18.Esmeralda’s observations of her own family have taught her that “love was something you get over. If Ulvi left, there would be another man, but there would never, ever be another Mami” [p. 310]. Why, then, does she opt to leave for Florida with him? Does this move amount to an out-and-out rejection of Mami? What else is she leaving behind, when she leaves her mother and family?
BEYOND THE BOOK
1.In what ways does the Puerto Rican extended family, as represented by
the Santiagos, differ from its American counterpart? Does it provide more support, or less? Is the family more constricting? More powerful? More protective? How do the conceptions and ideals of certain roles—mother, father, son, daughter—differ between the two cultures? Write an essay on your
perception of the family, and the roles of its individual members, in your own culture. What sort of expectations are placed on each family member?
2.“I couldn’t speak English, so the school counselor put me in a class for students who’d scored low on intelligence tests, who were behavior problems, who were marking time until their sixteenth birthday, when they could drop out” [p. 8]. This was in 1961. Since that time bilingual education has come into the picture, which allows students to be taught in their native languages until they speak English well enough to enter the mainstream. Some think this is a good idea; others believe that if the students are not “immersed” in English, as Esmeralda was, they will never learn it properly. Which system do you think is potentially the most effective? What problems are inherent in each system? Write an argument for and against each system. Stage a debate in class in which one team defends bilingual education, and one attacks it.
3.Santiago describes in some detail the public schools she attended in Brooklyn in the 1960s. In what ways have American schools changed since those days? Which of Esmeralda’s experiences seem particularly odd or strange to you today?
4.How might you compare the Latino experience of assimilation with those of, for example, Chinese, Jewish, Irish, Haitian, Russian, or Korean immigrants? How might the cultural barriers between these groups and mainstream America differ? What roles do race and language play in the process? Record your own “oral history,” in which you interview everyone you know who has come to America as an immigrant, or whose parents have done so. How do all these experiences differ, and how are they similar?
5.In the summer of 1964, Esmeralda witnessed riots in the streets of Brooklyn [pp. 100–2]. What riots have occurred in American cities during your own lifetime? Research the causes of the riots, and their aftermath. Can you figure out why these riots happen when they do? Why will people tolerate things for so long, and then suddenly crack? Research a particular riot, and write an essay describing it from the point of view of an eyewitness. Try to put yourself into the mind both of the rioters and the police.
OTHER TITLES OF INTEREST
Isabel Allende, The Infinite Plan; Julia Alvarez, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, ¡Yo!; Harold Augenbraum and Ilán Stavans, eds., Growing Up Latino: Memoirs and Stories; Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land; Lorene Cary, Black Ice; Denise Chávez, Face of an Angel; Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street; Julia Ortiz Cofer, The Latin Deli; Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain, True North; Karin Cook, What Girls Learn; Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban; Alma Gomez, Cherrie Moraga, and Mariana Romo-Carmona, eds., Cuentos: Stories by Latinas; Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black; Nicolas Kanellos, ed., Short Fiction by Hispanic Writers of the United States; Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John, Autobiography of My Mother; Oscar Lewis, La Vida; Nicholasa Mohr, Nilda; Pat Mora, The House of Houses; Rosario Morales and Aurora Levins Morales, Getting Home Alive; Edward Rívera, Family Installments: Memories of Growing Up Hispanic; Earl Shorris, Latinos: A Biography of the People; Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club; Piri Tomás, Down These Mean Streets.
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
This teacher’s guide was written by Brooke Allen. Brooke Allen has a Ph.D. in literature from Columbia University, and has spent several years in France as a teacher and a journalist. She writes regularly on books for The New Criterion, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications.
