Junot Diaz

Yunior sits on the couch, palms sweaty. Waiting. He hears a car slow and he jumps up to peer out the window of his family’s apartment in the Terrace housing project. The car, a Ford sedan, stops and two men get out. Not her. He slinks back to his seat on the couch, peeps the TV, and then lets his eyes wander around the clustered apartment, making sure his handiwork in hiding the pieces of his life will go unnoticed. While he hides tangible objects like cheese and photos, in reality what he hides is himself. He hides his identity, afraid of what those who walk through his door will think; afraid of what they’ll make him feel. Yunior replaces longing with indifference, family with solitude, feelings with masculinity. While he himself does not recognize these exchanges, Yunior alludes to them throughout his story of wooing girls; what he really desires is to not desire. Contentment, his end goal, can only be reached in his mind by proving himself to the world as the man he aspires to be, not the child who did not want to go visit his aunt with his family. In his story, How to date a brown girl (black girl, white girl, or halfie), Junot Diaz, the author, paints the strange world that some male Dominican teens grow up in. His subtle and overt mentions of race, masculinity, and identity constantly tangle themselves throughout the whole piece. Through his masculinity, his insecurity, and his identity, the main character, Yunior, illustrates the conflicted and shifting minds that teenage boys struggle to cope with as they become men. , ironically attempts to exude

His skin will never be so fair, his hair so fine, or his words so crisp as the man he envisions; however, the confidence, the acceptance, the attitude of this man are all attainable through Yunior’s mindset. A mindset that must and will change while he becomes a man naturally as time passes. While he strives for masculinity, his insecurity is always close