This Is How You Lose Her

Rafa is Yunior’s older brother, a tough guy and athlete who obstinately battles cancer and dies. Yunior says, “He prided himself on being the neighborhood lunatic, wasn’t going to let a little thing like cancer get in the way of his official duties” (93). He is intense and bright but burns out quickly. Rafa is hypermasculine even after getting sick, as exhibited through his relationship with Pura. Mami does all his cooking, cleaning, and paying of bills. He’s very successful with women and becomes increasingly mean and vindictive as he’s dying in an attempt to retain his manhood. Despite Yunior possessing some of his macho tendencies, Rafa also functions as foil to Yunior.

Mami is Rafa and Yunior’s mother. She is strong and typically reserved. She takes care of the home and the sons. She tolerates Papi despite her knowledge of his infidelity. She is a firm woman of great pride, as Yunior explains: “My mom wasn’t the effusive type anyway, had one of those event-horizon personalities—shit just fell into her and you never really knew how she felt about it. She just seemed to take it, never gave anything off, not light, not heat” (91).

Papi only shows up in two stories, “Invierno” and “Otravida, Otravez,” but his crass personality is implied throughout the story collection through brief recollections of his cheating, alcoholism, violence, or absenteeism. This is similar to how he is characterized in Diaz’s prior story collection Drown, which also chiefly follows Yunior and his family.

It’s mentioned that Papi left the family without a trace—something given more detail in a story in Drown. He is uptight about trivial things, like the way shoelaces are tied, and he is mean. He forces Yunior to shave his head during winter. He is the authoritative head of Yunior’s Dominican household and the breadwinner and shows little affection for his family. Yunior says, “He was free with his smacks and we spent whole afternoons on Punishment Row—our bedroom—where we had to lay on our beds and not get off” (130).

Nilda is a sexual partner of Rafa’s who Yunior has a crush on. She appears in her namesake story in the collection. Her mother is an alcoholic, and Nilda is promiscuous from an early age. After Rafa, she dates anyone who helps her or shows an interest in her, and men play manipulative, emotional games with Nilda. Of one of these men, Yunior says, “Motherfucker was like three hundred years old, but because he had a car and a record collection and foto albums from his Vietnam days and because he bought her clothes to replace the old shit she was wearing, Nilda was all lost on him” (32). Her dysfunctional and poverty-stricken family enhances her tragedy, and her decline arrives while she is still young. In Nilda, readers see the female morph from highly-sexualized to effectively abandoned, left to fend for herself when she can no longer gain the attention of men.

Miss Lora is a single, childless, middle-aged former gymnast and intellectual who wears Howard University sweatshirts and discusses plans for a PhD. Her life path as the daughter of a crazy Dominican doctor and mother—the latter of whom absconded with an Italian waiter—set the tone for her rebellious nature. It’s implied that rebellion and doom are in her blood. She followed a Black solider to Berlin and lived there for years. She has thick skin and doesn’t care what people say about her body. She is lonely enough to want company and treats Yunior tenderly, despite the fact that, through their relationship, she committed statutory rape. Yunior at least implies that this relationship affects his subsequent ones.

Alma is an artistic, rebellious, confident Dominican-American. To Yunior, she is sexually adventurous and is presented as relatively Americanized. Despite the fact that she would seem to be the sexual ideal for Yunior, he nonetheless cheats on her and is caught. Assuming falsely from her name that Yunior’s paramour is of South Asian descent, Alma calls him a “fake-ass Dominican” (48). This name-calling arrives as Alma expresses a desire to relocate the portion of her own identity that she perceives as Dominican.

Magda is a mixed-race Dominican American girl who appears in the collection’s first story. Yunior terms her a “good girl,” by which he means that she is close to her father and believes in Christ. Her purity is reflected in her name which means “high and noble.” Yunior says, “She’s the nerd every librarian in town knows, a teacher whose students love her” (5).

Unlike Alma, who curses at Yunior upon learning he’s been cheating, Magda’s response to trouble in the relationship is to hyperventilate, an involuntary reaction redirected inward. Yunior says, “She threw Cassandra’s letter at me—it missed and landed under a Volvo—and then she sat down on the curb and started hyperventilating. Oh, God, she wailed. Oh, my God” (4). Magda would seem to fall victim to the Madonna complex, in which a male is unable to maintain sexual desire for his partner because he cannot debase or degrade them.

Though Flaca’s real name is Veronica, Yunior gives her the nickname of Flaca which means “skinny.” She is another lover of Yunior’s. She is described as having a lazy eye and being pale and undernourished. She is considered “white trash” by Yunior. She is bookish and employed as a teacher. She is generous to Yunior, and a nurturer to him, despite the fact their relationship is clearly a broken one:

You [Yunior] have to decide when and where, you [Flaca] said. If you leave it up to me I’ll want to see you every day. At least I can say you were honest, which is more than I can say for me. Weekdays I never called you, didn’t even miss you. I had the boys and my job and Transactions Press to keep me busy. But Friday and Saturday nights, when I didn’t meet anybody at the clubs, I called. We talked until the silences were long, until finally you asked, Do you want to see me? (81).

Flaca’s declaration of love leads to Yunior’s abandonment of her, and it’s through her ultimate departure that Yunior claims to earn respect for her.