Check out ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theatre's American Collection website at pbs.org for additional teacher information

Thematic Threads in Almost a Woman
By Patricia Penrose

Overview

Memoirs and coming of age novels move along similar thematic lines: the path to adulthood, parent-child conflicts, relationships with the opposite sex, sibling rivalries, friendships, and, at times, commentary on larger social issues. This lesson, geared for upper secondary students, focuses on these recurring themes in Esmeralda Santiago's, Almost a Woman. An extension activity, it will enable students to reflect on a whole work and trace the author's thematic development so they can begin forming the necessary scaffolding to construct meaning from the text. By finding particularly relevant passages in the entire work and ordering them into a cogent narrative, students will construct a thematic microcosm of the work.

Objectives

Students will:

• Read Esmeralda's Dream essay for an overview of Santiago's themes and works
• Identify recurring themes in Santiago's works
• Create memoirs of their own life experiences
• Appreciate and understand the importance of their young lives

Students will be able to:

• Read texts closely and analyze them.
• Identify and recognize recurring themes.
• Compare/contrast specific textual points.
• Construct a persuasive argument.
• Cite textual support.

Lesson Outline

I. Anticipatory Set

1. Reading Assignment: Have students read of Almost a Woman, flagging noteworthy passages with post-it notes while they read. Encourage students to flag those passages that carry meaning or have significance beyond the story.

2. Journal Writing Assignment: Have students respond to the passages they flagged in a dialectical reading journal.

II. Post-reading Activities

1.  Class Discussion: Engage students in a class discussion, in which they:

a. Have students reflect on the characteristics of a coming-of-age narrative.

b. Post these "themes" as they appear.

c. Have students connect these "themes" to Almost a Woman.

2.  Reading Assignment: Give student the following reading assignment:

a. Have them read the thematic microcosm, On Growing Up, below.

b. Instruct students to decide whether or not it gives an accurate rendition of the author's perspective, based on their reading of Almost a Woman.

3. Thematic Microcosm: Have student construct a thematic microcosm by:

a. choosing a "theme" from those previously posted.

b. also choosing 20-25 passages--based on the overall text, their journals, and the passages they flagged--from Santiago's text that best exemplify their particular theme.

c. putting these passages together into a thematic microcosm, illustrate them, and present to the class.

In the twenty-one years I lived with my mother, we moved at least twenty times…. We learned not to attach value to possessions because they were as temporary as the walls that held us for a few months, as the neighbors who lived down the street, as the sad-eyed boy who loved me when I was thirteen.

Each time I packed my belongings, I left a little of myself in the rooms that sheltered me, never home, always just the places I lived.

I'd always been Puerto Rican, and it hadn't occurred to me that in Brooklyn I'd be someone else.

Two days in New York, and I'd already become someone else.  It wasn't hard to imagine that greater dangers lay ahead.

I searched frantically for the right combination of words, the ones that said what Mami meant, to convince this man that she was not asking for aid because she was lazy but because circumstances forced her.

I'd decided that, even when it seemed that my head couldn't hold that many new words inside it, I had to learn English well enough never again to be caught between languages.

It was good to be healthy, big, and strong like Dick Jane, and Sally.  It was good to learn English and to know how to act among Americans, but it was not good to behave like them.  Mami made it clear that although we lived in the United States, we were to remain 100 percent Puerto Rican.  The problem was that it was hard to tell where Puerto Rican ended and Americanized began.

Archie, Veronica, Betty, Reggie, and Jughead were the only American teenagers I'd come to know.  There were no Americans in our Puerto Rican neighborhood, and the few that went to the same school as I did kept to themselves in tight, impenetrable groups of chattering, cardigan-wearing, ponytailed girls and pimply, long-legged boys.

My world was dominated by adults, their rules written in stone, in Spanish, in Puerto Rico.  In my world, no allowance was made for the fact that we were now in the United States, that our language was becoming English, that we were foreigners awash in American culture.

I wanted to live in those uncrowded, horizontal landscapes, painted in primary colors where algo never happened, where teenagers like me lived in blissful ignorance of violence and grime, where no one had seven sisters and brothers, where grandmothers didn't drink beer late into the light and mothers didn't need you to translate for them at the welfare office.

Every day we spent in Brooklyn was like a curtain dropping between me and my other life, the one where I knew who I was, where I didn't know I was poor, didn't know my parents didn't love each other, didn't know what it was to lose a father.

Until know, I'd not been allowed to wear stockings, and I knew the garter belt and the flat package that held a pair of "Nude" seamless stockings were a concession from Mami, an acknowledgment that I was no longer a child, although neither of us was ready to call me a woman.

But, as we neared our stop in Brooklyn, I cried because the weeks of anxious preparation for the audition had left me longing for a life I was now certain I'd never get.

I wanted books without a date due.  I wanted pretty clothes that I chose for myself.  I wanted to wear makeup and do my hair and teeter on high heels.  I wanted my own radio so that I could listen to La Lupe on the Spanish station or Cousin Brucie's Top 40 countdown on the American one.

I wasn't the only poor kid at Performing Arts – or in my class.  There were many of us.  We found each other and hovered on the fringes of the lucky few whose Monday reports of fun-filled weekends intensified our sense that our talent had to take us a long way, a very long way indeed, from where we were.

I was convinced that my life didn't provide enough variety to make me a good actress.  How could it, when every move I made was monitored by Mami?  But, whenever I so much as considered going against her wishes, a little voice went off in my head to remind me that between her and the rest of the world were nothing but hostile eyes and low expectations.  Were I to fall, only my mother would be there to pick me up.

I was seventeen years old and had never been in an American home.  Here I was, inside an apartment on the Upper East Side – thick carpets at my feet, dark brooding paintings on the walls, yards of fabric around the windows, two sofas, upholstered chairs, side tables with china and crystal figurines.  I ached with envy.

Now that I was almost a woman, I missed my father more than ever.  But I couldn't tell him, afraid that my need resembled a demand or looked like a criticism of Mami's ability to take care of us.  Instead, I stifled the hunger for a father who had become more and more of an abstraction, as illusory as the green flash of a tropical sunset.

Neither my mother nor my father had studied beyond elementary school.  And here I was, in a foreign country, in a foreign language, graduating from a school for dreamers.

But first I had to go home to Brooklyn with my mother and stepfather to celebrate with my sister, the clerk at Woolworth's; my brother, the pizza cook; my other six sisters and brothers; my grandmother and her boyfriend; my cousins, the deaf mute, the wrestler, and the Americanized sisters; with my alcoholic uncle.  That world in Brooklyn, from which I derived both comfort and anxiety, was home, as was the other world, across the ocean, where my father still wrote poems.  As was the other world, the one across the river, where I intended to make my life.  I'd have to learn to straddle all of them, a rider on three horses, each headed in a different direction.

Extension

1.  Have students select either On Privacy or On Dating, below, fragments of two microcosms based on Santiago's text.

2.  Following the model, On Growing Up, have them finish building a complete thematic microcosm, using that particular narrative thread.

On privacy

I woke in the middle of the night with something crawling toward my ear. I stumbled in the dark, frantically searching for whatever was caught in my hair.

 "Turn off the light," Delsa hissed from her end of the bed.

 "What are you doing?" Mami sat up on her bed. In the bottom bunk, Norma and Alicia moaned and turned over.

We moved for the fifth time in a year. In the new apartment on Ellery Street, the bathtub was again in the kitchen, covered with an enameled metal sheet to make a counter during the day, removed at night so we could bathe.

I ran into the front room where two bunk beds, Franky's crib and Tata's cot were lined up in rows…. Tata lay on her bed, cuddling Franky, and, when I came in, she looked up with a smile. I grabbed a dress from one of the hooks Mami had screwed into the wall because the apartment had no closets. With two towels pinched under the mattress of the top bunk, I created a private space in which to change out of my school clothes and put on the cotton dress.

Mami was in her room, which served as a passage between the front room and the kitchen.

I wanted a different life from the one I had. I wanted my own bed in my own room. I wanted to be able to take a bath without having to shoo the whole family out of the kitchen.

When I was arranging my things in the middle room with Delsa and Norma, I noticed that a hallway off the kitchen was wide enough to hold a foldout cot.

 "Mami, can I take this room?"

 "This isn't a room, it's a hall."

"If I close these doors," I shut the ones to the outside hall and to her room, "it still leaves me with a door to the kitchen, and I can put a cot in here, and a table, and have my own room."

I dragged the folding cot into the hallway, where it hugged the walls tight enough so that the only way I could get into bed was by climbing over the foot toward the head against the door to Mami's room.

The noncommittal social worker was the first American to see the way we lived, her visit an invasion of what little privacy we had. It stressed just how dependent we were on the opinion of a total stranger, who didn't speak our language, whose life was clearly better than ours. Otherwise, how could she pass judgment on it? I seethed, but I had no outlet for my rage, for the feeling that so long as I lived protected by Mami, my destiny lay in the hands of others whose power was absolute.

On dating

When the subject of dating came up in social studies class, I admitted that my mother didn't allow me to date unless chaperoned. That ensured no boy in the entire grade would ask. What was the point? If I asked Mami to let me date, I'd get a lecture about how boys only want one thing, and I wasn't willing to give it to anyone. All I had to do was look around me to know what happened to a girl who let a man take the place of an education.

Even though I was already sixteen and casi mujer, I'd never had a boyfriend, had never been kissed by anyone not related. I didn't think I was ugly, but no one had called me pretty. At home, my sisters Delsa and Norma were frequently told they were lovely, while I was called "intelligent."

What scared me most about Don Carlos's betrayal was that Mami was not immune to the seductive power of a man with a sweet tongue and a soft touch. "Men only want one thing," she'd said so many times that I couldn't look at a man without hearing it. If she could fall under the spell, how could I, younger and less experienced, hope to avoid the same destiny?

Here it was, my first potential boyfriend, about to go to war. It was too much like the radio novelas I'd listened to as a child, where the handsome hero went to war, while the beautiful heroine stayed home, wrote soulful letters, and fended off suitors not nearly as worthy as her beloved. I was torn between feeling sorry for Dona Lila and the romance of a boyfriend in a faraway country fighting for democracy.

This was not the way I'd imagined it. He was supposed to get down on one knee, to say he loved me, to offer a diamond ring, at least to use the word "marriage" in a complete sentence. It wasn't right that he expected me to propose to myself as we stood in a dim hallway holding bags heavy with trash.

This lesson was submitted by Patricia Penrose, the librarian at Nogales High School in California..