Summary

This story is narrated in the second person. However, the protagonist and the narrator are one and the same, as the narration is told in Yunior’s signature cadence and from Yunior’s perspective. Yunior is a student at Rutgers University in New Jersey. The story opens with a description of Yunior’s girlfriend, Alma. Like Yunior, Alma is of Dominican heritage, although unlike Yunior, Alma was born in the United States as opposed to the Dominican Republic. Yunior’s describes Alma in terms of her physical attributes. He describes her “long tender horse neck and a big Dominican ass that seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond jeans” (47). Yunior is highly attracted to Alma’s physical form. He likes her large posterior, her skinny arms, and “the sliding tendons of her neck” (47).

Yunior states that “Alma is a Mason Gross student” (47), meaning...