Almost a Woman

At her cousin Alma’s house, Esmeralda reads Archie comics, describing the characters as “the only American teenagers I’d come to know” (26). Archie and his friends, like the American teens Esmeralda glimpses at a distance in her school, are aggressively white, with blank ethnic backgrounds, and “short, easy-to-remember names like Sue, Matt, Fred, Lynn” (26). Although Esmeralda is disenchanted by the dark, boxy streets of Brooklyn, she fantasizes about the white suburbia depicted in the Archie comics, “their concerns as foreign to me as mine might be to them” (27). Esmeralda goes into a lengthy comparison of the difference between Archie, Veronica, Betty, and Jughead, and her own life, including adult supervision, the type of food eaten, dating and social life, and the lack of responsibility white teens get to carry.

Unlike Esmeralda, “[t]hey existed solely for themselves” (27). Esmeralda envies the lives of the Archie characters, so free from hardships and emotional pain. Because Esmeralda has so little exposure to white American teens, she imagines that all their lives must be this easy and carefree. Though, arguably, Archie and his friends are comic book characters and don’t reflect real life, Esmeralda uses these familiar staples of white American pop culture to show the inherent cultural differences between life for white American teens and herself.