Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in My Beloved World, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Optimism, Determination, and Adversity
Family and Friendship
Education and Learning
Puerto Rican Identity and Culture
Morality, Justice, and Giving Back
Summary
Analysis
Sonia says she didn’t understand Mami’s grief until nearly 50 years after Papi’s death. She knows now that her theory that everyone felt guilty was unsophisticated. As Sonia gets older, she begins to assume that Mami was just depressed. Eventually, she asks Mami and learns about a happy version of Papi. Sonia recounts her mother’s life story: Mami is born in 1927, and Mami’s father abandons the family around that time. Mami’s mother is unwell and near the end of her life, it affects her mind. Mami often has to lead her mother back to bed at night. They live in a wooden shack in the middle of a field, and it’s Mami’s job to carry water from the pump at a nearby uncle’s house. Mami’s mother once owned the farm, but she had to sell it to raise bail for her husband.
By going back in time to tell Mami’s story, Sonia makes the case that a person can’t fully understand a given situation without all the relevant context—and in this case, she needs to know that Papi wasn’t always the isolated, sad man that she knew. And indeed, it’s also important for her to understand that Mami grows up more or less on her own, also taking on more responsibility than she should at such a young age. Just as Sonia feels somewhat abandoned by Mami, Mami feels abandoned by her parents as well.
Themes
Some extended family members help out, but Mami’s siblings are really the ones who raise her. Aurora marries at 16 and leaves for the city, but she returns every two weeks to collect handkerchiefs from women who sew them. Mami hems 24 handkerchiefs per week as her contribution to the household. Mayo feeds the family and eventually marries Maria, but he punishes Mami harshly when she misbehaves. Mami hates Mayo for beating her, and her hatred is why she vows to never return to Puerto Rico. Sonia says that now, Mami recognizes that Mayo was doing the best he could—and at least they sent her to school.
Mami’s fraught relationship with Mayo may explain why she “rebels” as an adult by getting a job, sending her children to Catholic school, and moving to safer parts of the Bronx. She may be rejecting the parts of her upbringing and her culture that she believes held her back as a young person. Now that she’s an adult, she can make choices for herself and make the life she always wanted.
Themes
Mami loves school, though the kids tease her and get her into trouble. She reads everything she can. When she’s nine, Mami’s mother dies and Mami moves in with Aurora. Mami loses track of some of her other siblings and continues to hem handkerchiefs. She and spends most of her time in the library, but her grades suffer since she reads instead of doing homework. One morning, Mami and her classmates go wave goodbye to young soldiers and are late for class. A bit later, she sees an ad in the paper for the Women’s Army Corps and mails in her application immediately. She says she’s 19, though she’s only 17.
The Women’s Army Corps represents an opportunity to escape the oppression of Mayo and handkerchiefs that Mami suffers on the island—which may also explain why, as an adult, she briefly refuses to return to her birthplace. Note too that Sonia seems to imply that Mami’s grades would’ve been fine had she done her schoolwork. This is an early indicator that a person cannot succeed without putting in the work.
Themes
The Women’s Army Corps asks Mami to appear in San Juan, and Aurora grudgingly sends her. Mami passes all the tests, and they tell her to reappear in four days to ship out to Miami—with her birth certificate. Aurora and Mayo find a lawyer willing to come up with a birth certificate stating that Mami was born in 1925. Sonia says that when she was a child, Mami’s stories of being in the army were some of the only ones Mami would share. It was a time of discipline but also freedom and of coming of age. For many women like Mami, being in the armed forces was how they came to see themselves as American.
For all its faults, Mami’s family still comes together to help Mami follow her dreams. This likely impresses upon Mami just how important it is to support family members when opportunities like this come up. The idea that being in the armed forces helped Mami to see herself as American may also explain Mami’s unwillingness to return to Puerto Rico. In the contiguous U.S., Mami may feel more powerful and American than she does in Puerto Rico.
Themes
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Mami and her fellow recruits land in Miami in December. Basic training is difficult, as the women have to learn how to use a telephone and how to speak English, for instance, in addition to how to function in the army. Mami’s group heads for New York next and they work in the post office. Mami makes her first friend, Carmin, there. They explore New York together and are seeing a movie when it stops suddenly for the announcement that the Germans have surrendered.
It’s telling that it’s not until Mami is in her late teens that she makes her first friend. This likely makes Carmin seem even more important to Mami, and it may help Mami see that she can look outside her blood family to find support. Through the army, Mami also begins to develop a sense of self-sufficiency and the ability to navigate this new world as an adult rather than as a powerless child.
Themes
One day, Carmin and Mami brave the subway to visit Carmin’s friends in the Bronx. Mami meets Papi there. He pays attention to her and they talk about reading. He begins writing her letters, and they fall in love. Mami also falls in love with Abuelita, who’s the life of the party. Joining the family helps Mami forget that she’s an orphan. Both Papi and Abuelita are storytellers and lovers of poetry; this is the first time that Mami hears poetry recited. When Mami’s time in the WAC comes to an end, she decides she doesn’t want to go back to Puerto Rico. She and Papi marry at city hall and then they move in with Abuelita, Gallego, and several of Papi’s brothers. Mami and Papi eventually get their own place downstairs and Papi does everything he can to make it beautiful.
Meeting Papi and his family helps Mami learn that a person can create a family in all sorts of different ways—in this case, she can marry in and find a sense of belonging. It’s likely this discovery that she belongs with this family as much as anything else that helps Mami make her decision to stay in New York. While she felt alone and powerless in Puerto Rico, in New York, she’s now beginning to make a life for herself in which she has agency and support.
Themes
Papi teaches Mami to dance and gives her lavish gifts. Once, he creates a sculpture of her face to be used on a mannequin at the factory where he works. Papi received little education, but at one point, professors at the university in San Juan heard about his talent for math and offered him a scholarship. Abuelita couldn’t bear to let him go, so they stayed together until Abuelita moved the family to New York. Papi arrived in New York within days of Mami. He loves his job at the mannequin factory, and when it closes, he does bookkeeping for a radiator factory. He supports Mami through a secretarial course and then her nursing course. He’s thrilled when Sonia is born. Sonia interjects, noting that Mami only recently shared that Papi was the one who stayed up with Sonia when she wouldn’t sleep as a baby.
The explanation of why Papi never attends college in San Juan suggests that even though Mami loves the family she marries into, it’s not necessarily all positive—Abuelita’s love, though fulfilling and uplifting when directed at her grandchildren, held Papi back as a young person. Family, this suggests, isn’t always supportive in the way that Sonia suggests it should be. Despite this, though, Papi still does everything in his power to support Mami through their early married years and life as parents.
Themes
Things begin to fall apart when the mannequin factory closes and when Mami moves the family to the projects. For Papi, the projects are an exile far away from his family. He was drinking before this point—he started at 13 years old, when Gallego married Abuelita—but Mami tells Sonia that it still took time before the drinking tore them apart. However, Mami still insists that Papi always cared for his children and always worked.
To Mami, it’s less important that Papi drank and more important that he still took care of his family, even if he was drinking. Bad habits, she suggests, can sometimes be excused if a person is still able to care and support their families. What ultimately makes Papi’s life so hard is being exiled—or so it feels—from his extended family. This speaks to the power of an extended family; nuclear families, Papi’s struggles imply, cannot provide all the support a person needs.
Themes
Sonia says that Mami couldn’t have paid for Papi’s funeral if Dr. Fisher hadn’t forced Papi to take out a life insurance policy. He even offered to make the payments himself, which Sotomayor believes is proof that Dr. Fisher knew Papi wouldn’t last. Papi’s death shocked everyone except for Dr. Fisher, and it shocked Mami most of all—even though she’s a nurse. When Mami sits in her dark room, she doesn’t just mourn Papi. She mourns for her marriage and is terrified of how she’ll manage two kids alone. She also feels as though being a widow is little different than being an orphan. Now, Sonia realizes that Mami was sad and afraid, not depressed.
Dr. Fisher emerges as one of the memoir’s greatest heroes. Though it’s unclear why exactly he takes such an interest in Mami’s family, he nevertheless shows Sonia what it means to give back to one’s community. The fact that Sonia only learns about Mami and Papi’s early relationship as an adult, while writing this book, makes it clear that a person can always continue to learn about their family and the people in it.
Themes
