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Symbolism In Junot Diaz's 'Fiesta 1980'

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“Fiesta 1980” father and son. Junot Diaz story “Fiesta 1980” is a story about an immigrant family that came to the US in the hunt for better opportunities. The story includes a myriad number of culturalisms to show that Yunior’s family is still new and that they still conserve their traditions. Nevertheless, Yunior’s family is not so different from many other Hispanic families in the US; a great amount of Hispanics families can be represented by “Fiesta 1980”. The story reveals a conflicted family with a son that is in need of affection and a dedicated wife, who is not blind and it’s able to see what the situation is. Diaz uses symbolism to represent the disapproval that Yunior feels for his father’s affair. Among the symbols Diaz uses are the van, the vomiting, the showers Papi takes, and papi starving Yunior. Diaz does not gives a specific age for Yunior but given the clues in the text one can estimate his age to be around ten or eleven. Yunior is an immature kid who is very aware of what …show more content…

On the other hand, Starving is another symbol that the writer uses to represent how the family feels about Papi. Papi is starving his family of affection and love, while they all seem to desire some of Papi’s love and affection Papi seem very distant from them. Yunior disapproves completely of his father’s affair by the vomiting when he gets in the van, a van his father got to impress his mistress. The van is a symbol of Papi’s affair and therefore Yunior dislikes the van. The reason he doesn’t tell his mom about the affair is because he wants his father to like him in part and in part because maybe he does not want to see his family split and to see his mom suffer. From what the writer tells us we are able to see that the mom is aware of the affair but maybe she is too scare to say anything fearing that it would destroy their

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