Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

VOICELESS AND COLORLESS...
off for an extended stay, my mother made sure she helped pack her bags.
She would sprinkle in a special powder made of her ground fingernails
and bits of her hair and some other elements the santera had charged her
twenty pesos to prepare” (Yo 54).
Her daughter Sarita’s plight is a very common story in the Dominican
Republic. Her mother, like most maids who work for an upper or upper—middle
class family, are live-in maids and see very little of their own
children who are usually raised by grandmothers or other relatives, as Isis
Duarte points out in her essay on household workers in the Dominican
Republic (198). In order to keep Sarita as close as possible to her work
and living quarters, Primi puts her in a Catholic boarding school. When
Primi moves to New York, Sarita goes to live with her grandmother in
the countryside. After five years of living abroad, Primi is able to save
enough money to send for Sarita, already thirteen, to live in New York in
the García household as the maid’s daughter.
Even though her mother is always warning her to never forget her
place or they will be sent back, Sarita takes advantage of living in a society
whose class structures are more relaxed and one can seep through
the cracks. Marta Caminero-Santangelo argues that while the García girls
play at identity, “Sarita understands difference” (62). So she convinces
Mrs. García to send her to the same school her daughters had attended
before going off to boarding school. While Mrs. García is gratified for
having done a good deed by providing a good education for a poor girl
who probably won’t go too far anyway, Sarita plays on this patriarchal
feel-good to get ahead. She will get the highest scores in school and win a
full scholarship to a private university where she will major in science to
the astonishment of the entire García family.
While Primi’s only dream, after she was no longer useful to the García
household, was to go back to her island and spend her remaining days close
to the land of her birth, Sarita will redefine her homeland. The United
States is the place where she is able to stop being the maid’s daughter and
become successful on her own merits: complete a professional career and
as a result acquire economic prosperity and stability. Going back to the
island is looking back at her own and her mother’s past life of poverty
and serfdom. She will buy a house back home for her mother and send
money, but will not return to a country where her merits have no value
to the upper classes. She has secured her own place in this country which
has transformed from foreign to familiar: “...I doubt I am ever going to
see any of the García girls again. Mamá has died. The past is over. I don’t
have to make believe anymore” (Yo 72).
In ¡Yo!, through education and exposure to other lifelines in this contested
space, there is an opportunity for these women, perpetually encased
back home as backward, to choose what to preserve and what to erase from
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Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 • HOMINES •