"The Pura Principle" by Junot Diaz (March 22, 2010, in The New Yorker)

If you are a fan of the short stories of Junot Diaz, you will be happy to know that several of his stories are now available in the open to the public for the summer archives of The New Yorker.   

A couple of days ago I posted on his story "The Cheater's Guide to Love".  Like that story, "The Pura Principle" is set among emigrants from The Dominican Republic living in the New York City area.  You have to be tough to survive in the world of the stories of Diaz.  Father's abandon their families for much younger women, people smoke a lot of marihuana and drink a lot,  mothers tend to run and hold the family together.  A young man's dominant motivation is the continuous pursuit of women, often called "putas".  Of course a Dominican man's best love is his mother, which does not mean he won't take advantage of her.  If a Domincan girl won't have sex with her boyfriend it means she is a bitch trying to act like a white girl, if she does then the boy's mother will see her as a whore out to trap her angel.  Dominican women are known to have large rear ends and the stories make constant sexual refrences to this.

"The Pura Principle" plays all this out.  A woman whose husband left years ago for a young "puta" supports two late teenage early twenty year old sons.  She is very dedicated to the Catholic Church. One is not a bad kid, goes to college and the other runs the streets.  The bad one is diagnosed with Leukemia and everything changes.  He goes through chemo, loses a lot of his hair and his strength.  He is supposed to stay home but he goes stir crazy.  He meets a Dominican girl named Pura.  The two sons were born in the USA so they can get a permanent visa for a Dominican wife and eventually citizenship.  You can get a good feel for the prose style of Diaz in the morher's reaction to Pura:

"Pura, man, was another story. For some reason, Pura brought it out in Mami. Right from the beginning it was clear that Mami did not like this girl. It wasn’t just that Pura was mad obvious about the paper thing, dropping hints non-stop about her immigration status—how her life would be so much better, how her son’s life would be so much better, how she would finally be able to visit her poor mother and her other son in Las Matas, if only she had papers. Mami had dealt with paper bitches before, and she never got this pissy. Something about Pura’s face, her timing, her personality, just drove Mami batshit. Felt real personal. Or maybe Mami had a presentiment of what was to come."

This story takes place in a very macho culture.  Violence, especially within the family, is always a risk.  This is a fun story to read.

I hope to read more Diaz stories from the archives, which are only open for the summer.

You can read it here 

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/03/22/the-pura-principle

Please share your experiences with the work of Junot Diaz with us.

My Post on "Miss Lorna" contains background information on Diaz