Catalina

Francisco is Catalina’s grandfather. He migrated from Ecuador to the United States with his wife in the 1980s, just a few months after the cut-off date for the 1986 amnesty law. He works in construction but is “[aging] out of manual labor” and feels increasingly frustrated with his inability to obtain citizenship (12). He often comes home in pain from long days at work and is prone to flying into rages if Catalina and her grandmother aren’t keeping busy in the apartment. At times, he can “be deeply misogynist, and a machista, and a narcissistic know-it-all” (106). He expects his wife to do the housework and complains that Fernando looks like “a dyke” because she no longer makes an effort to be beautiful for her husband. He also sometimes faults Catalina for her sexuality, complaining, for example, that she “look[s] like [she] ha[s] a filthy mouth” and becoming angry when she talks to Nathaniel on the phone over the winter break (98).

However, Catalina insists that her grandfather is not a bad person; he is a “complicated man” who has also made many sacrifices to support and provide for Catalina. Growing up, Francisco entertained Catalina at the dinner table with stories about Latin American history, offering her a glimpse of the home she barely remembers. Catalina knows that her grandfather would kill anyone who hurt her, “and anticipating it, fearing it, wondering how it would feel, [i]s part of the life-sustaining chaos of [their] home” (131). He is someone who can “make anything, fix anything, build anything, deconstruct anything, survive anything” (133). However, due to his immigration status, he is plagued by the sense that he cannot “protect” and “provide” for his family. Fernando has undergone “[e]masculation at the hands of the state” (88), and he takes his frustration and feelings of impotence out on “the subjects in [his] own [kingdom]” (88), his wife and granddaughter.

At the end of the novel, Francisco acts to retake control of his life. He steals a khipu from the Peabody’s exhibition and leaves it with Catalina before he “self-deports” with no explanation. Taking the khipu that originates from the Andean high country of his ancestry is a symbolic act of retaking control of his narrative and heritage. He leaves the United States on his own terms, thereby refusing to comply with the system that has dictated his life for so long.

Fernanda is Francisco’s wife and Catalina’s grandmother. She was abandoned by her parents as a young girl in Ecuador and raised by her aunt and uncle. She attended an all-girls Catholic school, where she was the top student. Although Fernanda “could do nothing about the fact that she was an orphan,” she could become the “valedictorian” of “all the orphans in the world” (16).

In the United States, Fernanda worked in a factory as a seamstress until her eyesight began to fail. She is “a woman who wanted to work” (13), but now, she stays home, “juggling the duties of a housewife with the ghosts of what could have been breathing down her neck” (13). Similar to Catalina’s desire to control her narrative by becoming a writer, Catalina describes her grandmother as a “spectacularly sensitive” woman who “need[s] to create a different world for herself because what [i]s before her wo[]n’t do” (17). She has often created these worlds for Catalina as well, filling a kiddie pool on the roof or creating labyrinths of “curtains and canopies and trains” in Catalina’s room (18). Catalina sees herself in her grandmother and is acutely aware of Fernanda’s capacity. She is sure that her grandmother could have done everything she is doing better if she had only had Catalina’s luck, and this knowledge weighs on Catalina with its injustice. Although Fernanda cared for Catalina and often babysat neighborhood children, Catalina “never saw [her] grandmother carry a baby” (13). Despite a number of “adorable toddlers and cherubic infants” at their church, Fernanda “[refused] to perform maternal instinct” (13), indicating a subtle yet powerful rejection of society’s gendered expectations.

After Francisco leaves the country without explanation, Fernanda initially goes “absolutely ballistic,” destroying every trace of her husband that she can find in the apartment. However, shortly afterward, she jumps into action, looking for work and pursuing interests “like she’d been waiting for this moment her whole life” (198). Without her husband, Fernanda has a chance to reinvent herself and tell her own story.

Nathaniel is an anthropology major at Harvard and Catalina’s love interest. He is a “legacy” student, meaning that both his parents also attended Harvard. His father is Byron Wheeler, a famous film director known for his work on Latin America, and Nathaniel grew up spending every summer in Colombia. Now in his senior year, Nathaniel is working on a thesis exploring the khipu as a form of written language.

Catalina and Nathaniel meet outside of the Peabody one afternoon and immediately begin a flirtatious exchange. From the start, Catalina isn’t sure if she likes Nathaniel or if she just “like[s] what liking Nathaniel says about [her]” (167). Dating him is a way for Catalina to try out being a “good girl” who might have a career, a family, and a handsome white husband. For his part, Nathaniel is fascinated by Latin America but has little understanding of the modern-day realities of Latine people like Catalina. To him, Latine people are generally not friends but rather “ethnographic subjects,” individuals who are inherently other and meant for study and observation. As their relationship progresses, Catalina sees Nathaniel as a “cliche” of Harvard’s ultra-privileged world. He can quote Edward Said and Karl Marx but has no understanding of what it means to be a marginalized or working-class person and often behaves in a way that shows a blatant disregard for his own privilege. The breaking point in their relationship comes when Nathaniel admonishes a woman at the grocery store for using “food stamps” to buy expensive cuts of meat. Catalina is furious at his assumption that EBT should only be used for basic groceries and can no longer overlook his fundamental lack of respect for marginalized people and failure to understand the systemic barriers to success that exist for many individuals.

Delphine is Catalina’s best friend at Harvard. She is a beautiful Puerto Rican girl from Texas who studies organic biology and plans to become a doctor. Delphine’s mother took her own life when she was young, and she and Catalina initially bonded over the loss of their mothers. They develop a close relationship that is “urgent and possessive and full of ups and downs” (41). When Catalina first arrived at Harvard, she was “self-conscious” around the other Latine students. She worried that she knew “too much about them,” thinking that everything that hurt her also hurt them “in the exact same ways” (40). However, she quickly learned that there were vast differences within Harvard’s Latine population, and this was “a revelation” for her. Delphine is an example of this diversity. Even though she and Catalina are both Latine, they are very different. Importantly, Delphine is a US citizen and not politically active, and this is sometimes a point of contention between her and Catalina.

Despite their differences, Delphine also does a great deal to look out for Catalina, especially as she starts to spiral out of control at the end of the fall semester. By the spring, Delphine has “made it her personal mission to make [Catalina] complete [her] thesis” (166), and she forces her friend to meet her for study sessions. As Catalina gets more involved with Nathaniel and works on her “trauma porn” documentary with Byron Wheeler, Delphine cautions Catalina against changing herself in the face of these men’s expectations.