He is, of course, rebuffed more often than not. He always wants to tag along on Rafa’s ‘grown up’ adventures. Having my own older sibling, I could not help but recognize the persistent admiration that the younger brother (speaker/”Yunior”?) has for and displays to his older brother, Rafa. By choosing to use the slang, Diaz made his the short story Ysrael much richer and more vivid to readers. It also made the characters and narration sound more real. This had the effect of making the story sound more authentic-I could get a better sense of the world Diaz was trying to portray through the speaker’s eyes. In the story, Diaz used real-life Spanish slang. Likewise, it is obvious that the speaker admires his brother (maybe grudgingly, at times), and likewise, he adjusted his own way of being to reflect a version of himself that is more like his brothers. If Rafa was friends with them, it serves to reason that he has adapted himself to be like them. Inspecting the piece closer, the crowd Rafa hangs around with (a bunch of tigres) seem like a rough lot of people who know their way around. The speaker does not seem to find it unusual at all that he has most of the vivid details of his pre-teen brother’s sex life. He talks about it to his nine year old little brother as if he will be doing the exact same thing by the time he turns twelve. This is shocking to me because Rafa, the speaker’s big brother, talks as if he is totally savvy in terms of sex… and he is twelve. It’s possible that the story is not explicit about its own chronology, but from my reading, I see that the speaker is only nine years old and his brother is only twelve years old during the course of events. Upon reading Ysrael by Junot Diaz, I was amazed by the contrasts in culture.
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