Catalina

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

It’s the summer of 2010, Instagram has just launched, and Catalina Ituralde is spending the break before her senior year at Harvard with her grandparents in Queens. There is a cricket infestation, and their incessant sound reminds Catalina’s grandfather, Fransisco Ituralde, of the loud summer nights in his hometown in Ecuador. Catalina has never been to her grandfather’s hometown, and she cannot return to Ecuador because she is undocumented.

Catalina spends the summer as an unpaid intern at “America’s third-most-prestigious literary magazine” (4). She thinks this “sound[s] like a setup for a romantic comedy” and spends her daily subway commute waiting for Woody Allen to “discover” her (4). She is about to enter her senior year at Harvard, knowing she cannot legally work after graduation due to her immigration status. However, unpaid internships don’t ask for papers, so Catalina takes full advantage of her ability to live with her grandparents. Since she was a child, Catalina loved newspapers and magazines, but her desire to be a writer came from somewhere else. She was named after a song by Manuel Vallejo called “La Catalina” and nursed a soft spot for songs named after women. Catalina “wanted to be Art” (6). She thought that one day “a boy in a band” would write a song about her, but she worried it wouldn’t be “very good” and knew she needed to “rely on [her] own scruples” to get the job done (6). She started out writing a music blog on Tumblr and pitched herself to publications to cover music shows. Even though she was underage, she got gigs covering shows at 21+ clubs, and her grandparents would drop her off and pick her up in a “very wholesome” show of family unity.

At the magazine, Catalina works under Jim Young, the literary editor, and spends her days reading through short story submissions. She is “starry-eyed” in the office, thinking of all the “real writers,” like Truman Capote, who once worked in the very same place. It’s hard for her to wrap her head around the fact that these people are “definitely real”; they feel more like “Greek gods” to her, and she had a “world-destroying” experience when writer Jeffrey Eugenides visited Harvard during her junior year. His real presence threatened to break the barrier between the “sad” real world and the “beautiful” world of literature, and Catalina “couldn’t bear the possibility” of encountering his inevitable flaws (9).

Catalina was born in Cotopaxi, Ecuador, a small city at the foot of a volcano that has destroyed Cotopaxi three times. When Catalina was a baby, her parents died in a car accident, but she was “spared” by some miracle. She was raised by her aunt and uncle until she was five. Then, she was sent to New York to live with her grandparents. When she finally worked up the courage to ask her grandparents why they had sent for her, her grandmother, Fernanda Maldonado Ituralde, insisted that it was because of better educational opportunities, but Catalina isn’t sure. Her grandparents had moved to the United States many years before, just a few months after the cut-off date that would have granted them citizenship under the 1986 amnesty law. As Fransisco “age[s] out of manual labor” (12), he has become increasingly frustrated with his inability to obtain citizenship amid the “lucky breaks” he sees for other immigrants around him. Fernanda, on the other hand, never mentions their immigration status. She wanted a job and to earn her own money but spends her days at home, tending to Catalina and the housework. If Fernanda only had the opportunity, Catalina feels that she would have done anything and everything Catalina has done but better. Catalina feels like she lives “under the weight of the dead little girl with big Broadway dreams” that she sees trapped inside her grandmother (13-14).

Catalina has always felt like her grandparents are hiding things from her, so she spent her childhood searching the apartment and discovering their hiding places. There was a mysterious box in the back of the closet filled with papers, and Catalina used to fantasize that it was proof that her parents were still alive. However, when her parents failed to appear, year after year, Catalina “resigned” herself to life with her grandparents. The only way to impress them was to succeed “in a way that set [her] apart from everyone else” (14). Not only did she have to get good grades, but she had to be the only one who passed the test or “the first person to have ever gotten this question right” (14). Catalina was always aware that her grandparents were making “The Sacrifice” for her to succeed. They “lived hunched over,” and “climbing up in this world meant standing on their backs” (15). Fransisco would come home aching from work and remind Catalina that he was suffering for her success. They saw her as their “lottery ticket,” a chance to finally succeed in the United States.

Fernanda was an orphan raised by her aunt and uncle. She attended a Catholic girls’ school where she was the top student, determined to become the “valedictorian” of “all the orphans in the world” (16). She liked “self-serious, charismatic men” and fell in love with Francisco (16), who was a traveling used car parts salesman. In their wedding photo, “they both look sad” (17). This tendency to look “[s]ad in a historically significant and visually satisfying way” runs in Catalina’s family (17).

Fernanda was “spectacularly sensitive” and often “create[d] a different world for herself because what was before her wouldn’t do” (17). She would set up a pool on the roof or create canopies and curtains in Catalina’s room with streamers. However, she never forgot that Catalina was a girl, no matter how much her grandfather insisted that she was “the fighting cock you put all your money on” (18).

Francisco would come home from work in pain and with a short temper. If it seemed like Catalina and her grandmother weren’t staying busy enough, he would sometimes fly into a rage or “would give [them] the silent treatment” for days (18). Catalina’s job as a child was “to defuse the tension and lighten the mood” (19), cracking jokes to make her grandparents laugh.

Catalina interrupts her reverie about her childhood to wonder how “a twenty-year-old girl walking home from the train station” might eat a lollipop “non-pornographically” (20). She claims it isn’t “easy to do” (20).

Catalina hasn’t made many friends with the other interns, most of whom went to preschool and have parents in law or medicine. A few weeks into the summer, her boss, Jim, asks to see her. He notices that Catalina sometimes mispronounces words and asks her if she is “self-educated.” Jim is from rural Wisconsin and had to learn the rules of “the New York intellectual class” (22), just like Catalina. She wonders why no one ever corrected her before, and Jim suggests that there is a complicated “racial dimension” in her case and “a subconscious need to always have an outsider among them to remind them what they [a]re not” (22).

Catalina, however, claims to be “the opposite of self-taught” (23). Not only does she attend Harvard, but she also spent years listening to her grandfather’s lengthy stories and history lessons. In fact, Catalina sometimes worries that all her thoughts and feelings are “an amalgamation” of what she has read and learned from Fransisco. Catalina’s grandfather also taught her that “men might find [her] attractive” (25). As she started to grow up, her grandmother began scolding her for wearing revealing clothing around Fransisco, reminding her that “even grandfathers are men” (25). Sometimes, her grandfather would walk through her room in their railroad apartment at night, kiss her head when he thought she was sleeping, and repeat the same sentiment.

Catalina has never been in love and wants to experience it before she graduates. She often looks at herself as she imagines a boy in love might look at her and imagines that she “could be one of Almodóvar’s women on the verge of a nervous breakdown” (26). However, she needs “an audience,” and “boys constitute[s] a reliable one” (26). She begins dating Camilo, the only Hispanic boy at her internship, after he gives her a mixed CD at work. Catalina wants to be “discovered” by love, and she wants to make boys “sick” with love, like in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. Her “love language [i]s bloody sacrifice” (29), and taking communion was the first time she felt truly overwhelmed by love. However, her grandparents became Jehovah’s Witnesses when Catalina was 10. Several years later, her grandfather was called into the office. He had his “privileges,” such as leading the congregation prayer, revoked because he was undocumented and, therefore, “legally considered a fugitive” (31). When he left the meeting, Catalina imagines that he cried.

August in New York is rainy, but Catalina enjoys the “drama” of arriving home from her internship soaking wet. The rain makes her feel “invisible,” which is both “horrifying” and “exhilarating.” Back home, every Friday, her grandmother asks her to buy a lottery ticket, which she stashes inside a picture frame alongside her and Catalina’s “conspicuously maroon passports” (34). By the end of the summer, Catalina feels “crestfallen.” Her relationship with Camilo is “stalled,” and the summer has offered “[n]othing exciting, nothing definitive; no awakening of any kind” (34).