Aguantando

"Aguantando,” a form of the verb aguantar (to endure), is a short story dealing with a young boy from the Dominican Republic. The narrator, Yunior, “lived without a father for the first nine years of” his life. Aguantando is the story of Yunior and his family enduring, or lasting, through the time the father is gone. The family scrapes by on boiled everything, but mostly plantains. Yunior is too young to remember his father before he left for America. Yunior holds an idealized picture of his runaway father in his mind. The family literally barely endures. Neither of the boys has books, they are each given a pencil every few months, and the mother works twelve-hour days. The mother is by all definitions a saint, yet it is the father who Yunior’s young juvenile mind fixates upon.
Yunior’s idealized picture of his father’s arrival is ironically placed in Junot Diaz’s collection of short stories. The reader already has a picture of the father in their minds while reading “Aguantando” because of previous stories detailing his cruelty. Ironically in earlier chapters, it is Yunior who is most bullied by the father. Yunior’s father forces him to ride in a car to get over his car sickness, threatening Yunior with harsh consequences if he pukes. Diaz is using a kind of sick humor, allowing the reader into the thoughts of the young innocent boy who is excited to meet his father.
Why is there such excitement? Yunior, when he is younger, should have been afflicted by his father’s unreliability. Yunior’s mother receives a letter from his father, detailing his return. The father however never shows up. Yunior is enraged, he throws tantrums, and destroys clothing, but he seems to not associate the anger with his father. Papi makes Mami distraught, never shows up, and leaves the family destitute, yet Yunior never makes the connection. I do not think that Yunior is given enough credit. Though children may be young, innocent, and naïve, they are still able to remember and hold grudges. It does not make sense to me why Yunior does not remember how the family was wronged by the family. Also, nobody seems to fill Yunior in on the father’s less than stellar reputation. 
Yunior’s depiction of his father is like a scene from a movie. His father struts up the walkway greeting everyone, eventually his eyes resting on his youngest son. He greets him, squats down and looks Yunior right in the eyes. For the reader, the entire story is frustrating. I am stuck powerless, wanting to scream at Yunior that his father is nothing like he imagines. The interesting thing, is that Yunior never bemoans his father being gone. He narrates the first nine years of his life as a happy period. The family is content, they scrape by, but they are happy. His father never shows up in this story. You would think the culmination would be a happy ending with Yunior’s father coming home, but rather we are left with a vision. Maybe, the father coming home is the end of Yunior’s contented juvenile life. He was happy with everything including his vision until the father actually arrives. 
The placing of “Aguantando” threw me off. The whole story did not sit quite right because we as readers were privy to info that the narrator wasn’t. Still, I liked the narrative voice. Yunior did not implore his audience to feel bad for him and his family. He stated what happened as fact, never complaining about his family’s condition. 

Comments

  1. Dale RobbennoltMay 10, 2018 at 8:49 AM

    I agree that it seems like there would be a lot of reasons for Yunior to resent his father's absence rather than continuing to idealize him and hoping for his return. But I think you have to also think about what it would mean for him when his father did return. First, it is something his mother is really looking forward to. Yunior knows how much his mother was looking forward to his father returning and how distraught she was when he didn't come, so it makes sense that Yunior would continue to hold onto his return as a good thing. Also, imagining Yunior's situation, his father's return would symbolize an escape from the suffering that they go through in this story. Presumably he knows that the plan is to go to America when he returns and he would see this as the escape that was the father's goal of delivering by leaving in the first place.

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  2. MayaMay 10, 2018 at 8:54 AM

    I thought part of the point was that we know things that Yunior might not know. But in a way I think this story still gave me the hope of little nine year old Yunior about his dad coming home. Even though I knew that their Papi isn't a very good father, I think Aguantando is a really interesting emotional journey.

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