The Big Short Story

The title "Aguantando" means "holding on." I think this is a very fitting title as this story revolves around the theme of Yunior and his whole family holding onto the possibility of Papi coming home. Yunior has relatively no memory of his father as Papi left the family for New York when Yunior was only four years old. The first line of this story is Yunior explicitly stating that he "lived without a father for the first nine years of my life." The closest thing to a "memory" Yunior has are pictures of his father and there's one in particular that stands out to him. It's a photograph of Papi in a uniform before Yunior was born. Yunior likens Papi's unsmiling his to his own. Yunior's family lives in very poor conditions--even poorer than the community around them. However they're still above the people living in the campo or who were Haitian immigrants. From previous stories, we know that Papi is living in the states while th...

I am a huge fan of the teenage drama genre, so I loved this short story. However, I had no idea what was going on for a good chunk of the story. I had to read many parts over a few times before I started to grasp the crazy futuristic world that Hero and the narrator lived in. The first show this story reminded me of was  Black Mirror . "Valley of the Girls" has that eerie futuristic vibe to it that is a signature of  Black Mirror  episodes. The story is a critique and analysis of social media, teenage youth, and wealth as the characters live in one huge social media simulation. The kids come from extremely privileged backgrounds and their parents are over-protective of what people will think about their kids. It's like the show  Gossip Girl . Gossip Girl  is a teenage drama that revolves around the extravagant lives of privileged upper-east side teens. Just like the characters in "Valley of the Girls," the teens in  Gossip Girl  party, do drugs, an...