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In reading Junot Diaz's stories, I am struck by the touching portraits he paints of a young man's struggle to grasp the myriad insecurities of his life in particular as they apply to infidelity and all its consequences and ramifications. In both stories Diaz explores the all-too-familiar, cultural stereotype of Latin male infidelity. He perfectly captures the feeling of gnawing uncertainty of what the future holds if and when these stomach-wrenching, illicit secrets are discovered.
In Fiesta, the protagonist appears to be a pre-teen Dominican male, who I understood to be the same only, slightly more grown-up central character in The Sun, The Moon, The Stars. I found Diaz's juxtaposition of "sucia" and "sucio" in these stories interesting. In Fiesta, it is Papi's Puertorican lover who is the "sucia", while in The Sun, The Moon, The Stars, Yunior, himself, takes on that brand. In Fiesta, Yunior is an innocent who silently suffers with the reality of his father's affair; however, in The Sun, The Moon, The Stars, it is he who becomes the cheateräthe "sucio".
In the first story, the injured person, Mami, does not outright uncover the secret liaison between her husband and the Puertorican woman, but in The Sun, The Moon, The Stars, Yunior's infidelity to Magda is revealed. In both stories, however, the pain of the infidelity is agonizing. The infidelity produces an intense sense of loss, which is in one story intangible, and, in the other, physical.
In Fiesta, there is a moment when Yunior is watching his mother at tia Yrma's party that he is overwhelmed by his feelings for his mother and her predicament. "I tried to imagine Mami before Papi. Maybe I was tired, or just sad, thinking about the way my family was. Maybe I already knew how it would all end up in a few years, Mami without Papi, and that was why I did it". I found Yunior's examination of his mother's life to be truly moving, because so much was happening within him at this time. This moment points to the fact that Yunior was already preparing for the loss of his family life, and in a way acknowledging that from the moment his father brought him to the Easter-egg blue house his childhood was lost to him.
Of course I have drawn the assumption that the Yunior in Fiesta is one and the same as the Yunior in The Sun, The Moon, The Stars. Based on that assumption, I find it most interesting that after having experienced the discord caused by Papi's infidelity, Yunior would, in his early adulthood, be unfaithful to his girl, Magda. To an extent, it seems to me that the infidelity that occurs in Latin American families becomes a vicious cycle, and that each younger generation of men is destined to follow in the footsteps of their fathers' in a manner that can only be described as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It seems that regardless of the insight Yunior had as a young boy witnessing his father's affair and its effect on his mother, he was unable to carry it over into adulthood. The are moments in The Sun, The Moon, The Stars, that Yunior seems genuinely puzzled that Magda would have such difficulty overcoming the pain of his affair with Cassandra. "But what was strange was that instead of shit improving between us, things got worse and worse. My Magda was turning into another Magda".
The Sun, The Moon, The Stars, is a story of the unraveling of a relationship after an affair is discovered. In this story Yunior realizes that as hard as he tries to put the relationship back together "änothing seemed to pan out. Every movie we went to, every night drive we took, every time she did sleep over seemed to confirm something negative about me". What Yunior doesn't seem to realize is that the 'negative something' that was being confirmed about him was that he had the character of someone who could be unfaithful with a considerable degree of facility and ease. He was someone that was not to be trusted, someone who like Papi, could walk into the house, push past his woman and go directly into the shower in order to rid himself of the 'evidence' of having been with another.
At the same time, however, Yunior does not see himself as a cheater, "a bad guyäa typical Dominican man, a sucio, an asshole". He felt so terrible lying next to Cassandra that he called Magda to tell her he missed her. He sees his relationship with Magda as one that hit a rocky patch of road and he sees himself as a true optimist who is sure that all can be worked out. It is unfortunate that the adult Yunior can't see what the young Yunior did. He can't see that due to infidelity he is without Magda in much the same way he imagined Mami to be without Papi.
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