Violence

Violence is the villain of the memoir, driving all the action. As a young boy in Puerto Rico, five-year-old Reymundo was brutally beaten by his aunts and cousins while his widowed teenage mother was on her honeymoon with her new husband, Emilio. Even worse, Reymundo's eighteen-year-old cousin raped him, brutally sodomizing the boy. It was Reymundo's last memory of Puerto Rico. The family moved to Chicago. After the birth of Emilio's daughter a few months later, he began beating Reymundo, Reymundo's mother and his three sisters. When Emilio left the family, Reymundo's beautiful, illiterate mother found another man to support them. The routine of beatings soon began again, this time with Pedro. They became even more violent when the family moved back to Puerto Rico. Eventually, when Remundo was thirteen, his mother gave up on him and sent him back to the U.S. to live with an...