Uninvited Intimacy: U.S. Imperialism and Male Victimhood in Junot Diaz's "Aguantando"
Early in his story “Aguantando,” Junot Diaz’s narrator catalogs the conditions under which his family must live, contrasting his grandfather’s nostalgic view of the countryside with his mother’s developmentalist one. Here, although he tries to connect the violent exploitation of
Mami’s body to U.S. militarism and the new neoliberal order, Diaz’s contrasting of her success under and advocacy of this order with Abuelo’s rejection of it reinforces the popular argument that women benefit from neoliberalism while men suffer:
We lived south of the Cementerio Nacional in a wooden house with three rooms.
We were poor. The only way we would have been poorer was to have lived in the campo or to have been to have been Haitian immigrants, and Mami regularly offered these to us as brutal consolation.
At least you're not in the campo. You'd eat rocks then…
Mami worked at Embajador Chocolate, putting ten-, twelve-hour shifts for almost no money at all. She woke up every morning at seven and I got up with her because I could never sleep late, and while she drew the water out of our steel drum I brought the soap from the kitchen. There were always leaves and spiders in the water but Mami could draw a clean bucket better than anyone. She was a tiny woman and in the water closet she looked even smaller, her skin dark and her hair surprisingly straight and across her stomach and back the scars from the rocket attack she'd survived in 1965. None of the scars showed when she wore clothes, though if you embraced her you'd feel them hard under your wrist, against the soft part of your palm.
…when Abuelo was around (and awake) he talked to me about the good old days, when a man could still make a living from his finca, when the United States wasn't something folks planned on. (71)
In using the Cementerio Nacional as a marker to locate the house, Diaz alludes to the death of the possibility of national sovereignty, the moment in 1965 when Juan Bosch’s leftist government was destroyed by the U.S. rocket attack and the United States regained military, economic, and ideological control over the country. This ideological control is evident in Mami’s
“brutal consolation” that living in the campo and/or as a Haitian would be much worse than the poverty and exploitation they endure daily; the 1965 attack ensured the persistence of the developmentalist ideology that the city is always better than the country (a place where you can only cultivate rocks) and the nationalist ideology that encouraged Dominicans to violently contrast themselves with Haitians rather than uniting against their oppressors.
Even as he documents the restoration of imperialist structures in the 1965 invasion, Diaz notes the changes under the neoliberal order in the nature of imperialist exploitation and oppression. Mami provides for the family by working in a chocolate factory, producing luxury

Uninvited Intimacy: U.S. Imperialism and Male Victimhood in Junot Diaz's "Aguantando" goods for international markets while she and her children go hungry. Junior knows that she works in the factory for “almost no money at all” and observes her unpaid labor in and around their home, though his observations are tinged more with admiration for his mother’s strength and beauty—her “surprisingly straight” hair, her ability to draw a “clean bucket better than anyone” despite her “tiny” stature, her ability to camouflage her scars from the 1965 invasion in order to fulfill her proscribed role in the new neoliberal order—than anger at her exploitation.
Moreover, by making Mami literally embody the violence of the US rocket attacks, Diaz aestheticizes her pain. While Mami’s scars serve to definitively link her everyday exploitation to the structural violence of neoliberal capitalism and US imperialism, that connection can only be discerned “if you embraced her.” Diaz’s slippage into the second-person draws the reader into an uninvited intimacy with Mami’s body, turning her into an object that communicates the history of her country’s suffering, rather than an agent who can tell her own story. When Diaz does give
Mami a voice, she offers only that “brutal consolation” that they are not in “the campo,” making her both the hero and advocate of the very economic order and ideology that exploits her. In contrast, Diaz’s decision to let Abuelo voice his nostalgia for the days “when a man could still make a living from his finca” and “when the United States wasn’t something folks planned on” makes Abuelo into both the primary victim of the neoliberal system and the only character to oppose it.