In both stories, a young boy who either narrates the story or offers his point of view through indirect

discourse witnesses and becomes complicit in an extramarital relationship. In Diaz's story, Yunior, the
narrator, sees his father cheating on his mother and senses that this familial transgression is potentially
threatening to his family's happiness; he does not fully appreciate his father's motivations, and
comprehends only partially how this adulterous affair might connect to his father's changing identity. In
Vapnyar's story, Misha sees his grandfather, who seemed utterly unable to adjust to American life,
develop a new self-identity when he embarks on a friendship with a Russian immigrant he meets in an
English-language class. Both narrators come to understand that although they themselves do not feel
nostalgic for their home countries, the older generation's infidelities are the result of the constant
emotional push-and-pull of forming a transnational identity that stretches between the home country and
a new life in the US.
"Fiesta, 1980" is part of a set of interlocking short stories about a family that moves from the
Dominican Republic to New Jersey. A simple plot frames the story: the family goes on an outing to
attend a family party, the fiesta of the title. They take a newly purchased van, the smell of which causes
poor Yunior throw up; so before they leave for the party, Yunior's father refuses to feed him. The van, a
symbol of the family's rising prosperity in the US, is a source of pride for the father, but a nuisance to
Yunior, whose sensitive stomach is a figurative barometer of his family's troubles: as their prosperity
grows, so, too, does his parents' marital discord. Yunior is no innocent, and he is aware of his father's
philandering. Yunior's knowledge is revealed in small flashback vignettes that interrupt the party scenes.
He remembers his father taking him to the "other woman's" home, where, after Yunior has vomited in the
van, the other woman cleans him and treats him affectionately. She then disappears upstairs with his
father for an hour, during which time Yunior sits, "ashamed, expecting something big and fiery to crash
down on our heads" (36). He quickly realizes, however, that this potentially devastating event is actually
normalized within his father's life; his father begins to take Yunior and his brother Rafa to the woman's
house repeatedly, with Yunior becoming a silent collaborator in the indiscretion.
Yunior's father (whose name is Ramon, but who is called "Papi") is figured as a stereotypical "macho"
Latino and is highly sexualized. As Bridget Kevane notes, gender roles in the story "follow the typical
expectations for men and women in a patriarchal system, the male macho and the submissive Latina....
Yunior's father is no exception to the cultural stereotypes of machismo" (82). Papi not only cheats on his
wife and takes his sons to his mistress's home, but he also regularly beats and terrorizes his children,
thereby establishing his role as head of the household.
However, his role becomes ambiguous when his wife begins to Americanize. Yunior's mother's new
life in America has changed her: "The United States had finally put some meat on her; she was no
longer the same flaca who had arrived here three years before. She had cut her hair short and was
wearing tons of cheap-ass jewelry which on her didn't look too lousy" (24). The description of Yunior's
mother -- although not entirely flattering -- gives the reader a sense that the Dominican woman
transformed herself from an overly skinny, perhaps undernourished, immigrant woman (a flaca) to a wellfed, middle-class American woman who can afford to wear jewelry and cut her hair in a short, possibly
nontraditional style. This transformation, although enabled by Papi's work in America, does not bring
pleasure to Papi; rather, the changes he sees in his wife drive him away from her and into the arms of a
woman who is Latina, "very thin" and has a "narrow face" (35). This "flaca" -- although Puerto Rican and
not Dominican -- is reminiscent of Mami in her pre-American days, and perhaps, therefore, attractive to
Papi. Yunior interprets his father's adultery as a rejection of his mother's newfound prosperity and
changing beauty standards, and a search for a woman who resembles his mother as she was before:
thinner, and perhaps by extension, more vulnerable.
Within the context of this story, Yunior's explanation of his father's bad behavior is that his father is
simply a philanderer and skirt-chaser. However, in a later story in Diaz's collection titled "Negocios," a
grown Yunior imagines what his father's early days in America must have been like, and he pieces
together memories and imagined daily events of his father's past that might explain how and why his
father came to be the adulterer we see in "Fiesta, 1980." Yunior recalls that his Papi initially left the
island because he had been caught cheating on Mami with a woman he describes as a puta -- possibly

a prostitute. The adult Yunior remembers that Papi was trying to get the money together for a visa for
quite some time, and Ramon's desire to leave the island and immigrate to the United States was far
greater than his desire for either his wife or his lover. His initial dalliance with the puta might have simply
been an extension of Ramon's machismo, but his subsequent actions exceed this clichd reasoning for
his later marital transgressions. Paradoxically, it is Ramon's wife's father who ultimately puts up the
money for his visa, with the promise that Ramon will bring his wife and children to the US later.

Themes and Meanings

Several themes compete in this story, but they are subordinate to the main theme of a young boy, an
innocent in many regards, who struggles with the difficult knowledge of his fathers extramarital affair.
The story can be interpreted as a coming-of-age story or as part of the journey from innocence to
experience. However, because the story entails only one evening in time, the transformation from
innocence to experience is not complete. In fact, Yuniors knowledge of his fathers extramarital affair
troubles him but leads, at the end of this story, to confusion rather than resolution.
The father, a loud, domineering man, is a foil to his sensitive son Yunior and exhibits his controlling
patriarchal character, if not his misogyny, throughout the story. Papi makes all the decisions. Yunior
describes how the decision to have the fiesta was Papis, even though it takes place at Tia Yrmas
house. Dressed and ready to depart, the entire family must wait for Papi, who arrives home at the last
minute and must take a shower first, as Yunior suspects, to rinse away the perfume of the Puerto Rican
woman.
Another recurring example of the fathers controlling patriarchy is his use of corporal punishment to
make his family obey him. Yunior states his father expected your undivided attention when you were
getting your ass whupped. The entire family accepts and endures this treatment.
The family alliances in the story divide along gender lines, the masculine types associated with control
and coercion and the feminine types with passivity and compassion. For example, big brother Rafa
follows Papis example, demeaning his younger brother verbally and punching him to humiliate him. Papi
and Rafa think of themselves as strong men, but their strength is defined mainly as the ability to control
others, and it is a particularly misogynistic type of control. They think of women as playthings, and Rafas
constant flirting and boasting of sexual conquests are not unlike his fathers having a mistress.
Mami, on the other hand, is passive and compassionate; she sides with her weaker son Yunior,
consoling him when Papi or Rafa humiliates him for being carsick. An archetypal long-suffering wife,
Mami looks away from the petty, and not so petty, abuses of her husband. The characters align
themselves in conflicts polarized by gender, with the shallow masculine characters, Papi and Rafa,
oppressing the sensitive feminine characters, Yunior and Mami. For the time being, the young daughter
Madai avoids this conflict, most likely because as a preadolescent her sexuality is not fully formed and
presents no threat to the polarized stasis of the family.
Whether the conflict among the family is created by the characters or by the Latino culture is debatable.
Although Papi and Rafa are cruel in their attitude toward Yunior and women in general, one must also
recognize that the Latino culture, as depicted in the story, encourages their actions, or at the least,
tolerates them. For example, the girls whom Rafa ogles do nothing to discourage him, and one of them
encourages his sexual advances at the party. Moreover, when Papi brings Yunior to his mistresss
house, the Puerto Rican woman gladly obliges Papis sexual advances even while his son waits in the
living room downstairs. At the party, it is Tia Yrma who questions Yunior how he feels and how his
mother is doing while Tio Miguel simply jokes about how a boy Yuniors age in the Dominican Republic
would be getting laid by now.
These events and relationships seem to demand that the twelve-year-old Yunior position himself as a
man in an immigrant Latino American culture. However, he is not sure exactly what that means. The
bold, domineering actions of the male role models, particularly his father and brother, seem at odds with
Yuniors natural inclinations toward reflection and compassion. Yuniors confusion as to his developing
identity is underscored in the final scene, in the van returning from the fiesta, when he becomes

nauseated while looking at his parents seemingly content in the seat in front of him. Yuniors nausea is a
physical manifestation of his confusion about gender roles in his family and his culture.