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Drown By John Riofrio Summary

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The scholar, John Riofrio has a very good understanding of Junot Diaz’ influence as well as the intention behind the collection of short stories known as Drown. The essay examines Drown as a way to describe the impact of immigration on the male psyche and how relocating to a new society may cause the instability of a person’s identity thus making integration into a new society much more difficult. When taking identity into consideration, how memory and nostalgia impact one’s identity is very important. The essay was written with the understanding that the stories relate to working class individuals. Identity is what or who a person or thing is. It is what gives someone their own sense of individuality. It is the collective intimate and personal details of one’s life that includes: race, sexuality, beliefs, and qualities. In the story, the narrator recalls memories that he has been through with his family and friend, experiences that they had been through. If the memory is significant enough, it adds to the person’s identity and they learn from it. With memories comes …show more content…

“films like Zorro where Zorro is the ideal archetypal Latin male” (Riofrio 25), personified by Antonio Banderas. This evidence exemplifies U.S. culture having similar ideas of what qualities a macho Latin American man should have compared to the ideal macho Latin American man in Latin American culture. The issue is how to maintain that machismo when many Latin American individuals come from a very impoverished homeland and struggle to assimilate. How do you express machismo in a completely new place with a different economic system, culture and different form of

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