Junot Diaz's How To Date A Brown Girl

Devine Guzman
Professor: Polidore
Experience in Literature
9 March 2023
How to Date A Brown Girl
The short story “How To Date A Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)” by
Junot Diaz, uses symbolism, listing, imagery, irony, and persona to portray identity and how we perceive others. The story occurs in New Jersey with the main character being Yunior. Yunior, in whose perspective the story is told from, is a macho and arrogant teenager in highschool who grows up with many difficulties, such as poverty and conflict of identity. Yunior presents us with a guide known as a “Dating Handbook” in which readers see his views on other people along with how he perceives himself.
Diaz uses symbolism with the government cheese to portray the acting

The government cheese symbolizes Yunior’s poverty as it is a processed item sent to welfare beneficiaries. Yunior preemptively advises the reader to ensure the government cheese is not in the refrigerator when a girl is over. Alongside the government cheese, another object used to symbolize Yunior’s poverty, is the pictures of him and his cousins in the campo (Country side), as seen in the text, “Take down any embarrassing photos of your family in the campo, especially, that one with the half-naked kids dragging a goat on a rope,”
(Diaz pg. 2). The pictures and government cheese provide background information on Yunior’s economic status. Although Yunior presents us with a dating handbook for girls of every ethnicity, we see his advice to hide the government cheese being a rule for every type of girl. This implies regardless of the person Yunior is with, he always tries to change a small aspect of himself and never truly shows who he is.
Diaz, uses listing to further the idea of Yunior changing parts of him slightly to be perceived differently. Yunior provides a set of expectations a male must meet in order to win over the girl they are on a date with. This listing is known as the “Dating Handbook”.

Yunior views dating as a kind of performance, in which he downplays different parts of his experience and life in order to play into his date's expectations, complicating his own thoughts about his identity.
Diaz uses imagery to continue portraying the identity crisis that goes into dating. For example, “She'll take her gum out of her mouth, stick it to the plastic sofa covers and then will move close to you…say, I like you. You'll sound smooth” (Diaz pg. 5). The imagery shows a potential scenario that can happen to Yunior. As if it was a movie, Yunior, in turn, has a script and actions that he would react with, proving that the whole thing is an act to him. He replaces his true reactions with these fake reactions to portray himself as better than he is, hiding his true self and going behind a character that is different for each type of girl he dates. He does not have a true identity that is consistent with all the girls he dates, thus finding ways to impress them with each personality.
The use of irony is shown when Diaz pictures his Tia stating “He’s gotten big,