Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The City We Became, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Cities and Gentrification
Community, Diversity, and Prejudice
Ethics and Nature
Beliefs, Concepts, and Stereotypes
Art
Abuse
Summary
Analysis
A man (later called Manny) is preparing to exit his train at Penn Station, gathering his luggage. He worries when he only sees one suitcase but then remembers sending his other things ahead to his new apartment. He and his roommate are entering the same graduate program. Strangely, he’s forgotten the school he’ll attend. He’s also forgotten his own name but hasn’t noticed yet. Manny hears passengers murmuring about a bridge and a possible terrorist attack. He wonders whether he made a mistake moving to New York. Yet despite disapproval from coworkers and family—whose names he can’t remember—he believes New York is his “future.”
That Manny has forgotten his own name and the school he’s supposed to attend when he arrives at Penn Station, a massive railway station in New York City, hints that the city is somehow incompatible with or hostile to Manny’s individual identity. His loved ones’ disapproval of New York City and his own romantic belief that it’s his “future,” meanwhile, illustrate how people develop and believe in myths about cities they may not even have visited before.
Themes
Manny makes his way out of the train and up the escalator when, suddenly, he feels intense vertigo, hears millions of voices screaming, and focuses in on a particular voice yelling at someone that they don’t belong and need to leave. Utterly disoriented, Manny wonders whether the voice is yelling at him.
Manny’s fear that the voice is yelling at him—that he is the one who doesn’t belong—reveals his nervousness that the city’s community won’t accept him.
Themes
Manny comes back to reality on his knees in Penn Station, with a woman and a man checking up on him. The man tells Manny that he keeled over; the man and woman pulled him out of the crowd’s way. Manny tells them he’s fine and murmurs that he feels “new.” The woman asks whether he is new to the city. He agrees, looks around for his luggage, and realizes that his helpers have protected it as well: “He feels alone in the city. He is seen and cared for in the city.”
Feeling “new” as a person is not the same thing as being new to a place—but the woman’s misunderstanding of Manny seems appropriate: for Manny, having just arrived in New York City and now suffering from amnesia, the city really does offer an opportunity to make himself an entirely “new” person. His helpers, who make him feel “cared for,” reveal that despite stereotypes about unfriendly New Yorkers, people in the city do help each other.
Themes
Manny is reassuring the man and woman that he’ll seek medical attention when he has a vision of the station, emptied of people, collapsing. When he comes to, they’re staring at him. They both suggest he eat something. He thanks them, noting that New Yorkers have a reputation for being rude. The woman tells him New Yorkers are “only assholes to people who are assholes first.” Then she leaves.
Manny’s mysterious vision may lead the reader to wonder what caused his amnesia and what kind of danger the city is in. The woman’s claim that New Yorkers are “only assholes to people who are assholes first,” meanwhile, both refutes a stereotype about rude New Yorkers and suggests a (controversial) ethical principle: that if someone is hurtful to you, it is fine to retaliate in kind.
Themes
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The man asks Manny whether he wants the man to get him food. Manny declines, finds a Starbucks carry-cup in his luggage, drinks from it—and realizes he cannot remember where he filled it, where he’s going to school, or his own name. The man tells Manny to get “real coffee” and “home food” from a “Boricua shop.” Then he asks Manny’s name. Manny looks around and blurts that his name is “Manny.”
Starbucks is a ubiquitous global brand associated with gentrification. Notably, because it’s so ubiquitous, it can’t help Manny determine where he’s from or who he really is. In implicit contrast, the man helping Manny advises him to get his coffee and food from a “Boricua shop”—that is, a local Puerto Rican place. The man’s phrasing both suggests that he thinks Manny is Puerto Rican like him and that local shops can tie people to a particular communal identity in a way that global brands like Starbucks can’t. In stark contrast with his helper’s Boricua/Puerto Rican identity, however, Manny has to make up his own name.
Themes
The man introduces himself as Douglas Acevedo and offers to help Manny any way he can. When Manny expresses surprise at Douglas’s generosity, Douglas tells Manny he looks like Douglas’s son. Manny, having a strong intuition that Douglas’s son is dead, thanks him again. In Spanish, Douglas tells Manny not to worry about it. Manny realizes Douglas assumes he’s Puerto Rican. He looks up and notices where he found his new name: a sign reading Manhattan. Manny identifies intensely with this name.
Though the passage doesn’t explicitly state that Manny is not Puerto Rican, his surprise that Douglas thought he was suggests that he isn’t. His intense identification with his new name, “Manhattan,” meanwhile, suggests that despite his amnesia, he has found a new individual and communal identity: Manhattanite.
Themes
In the Penn Station men’s room, Manny examines his own face. He recognizes that he might resemble Douglas’s son but intuits that he’s not actually Puerto Rican. He dresses “preppy” and appears to be in his late 20s, with a handsome yet “nondescript” face. Manny thinks his nondescriptness is handy—a thought he doesn’t understand and finds disturbing.
Despite maybe resembling Douglas’s son, Manny believes he’s not Puerto Rican—which suggests that he knows or remembers some things about his identity, amnesia notwithstanding. That Manny’s face is “nondescript” thematically reinforces his forgotten past: he’s someone apparently without a definite physical or psychological identity. The reader is left to wonder both why Manny might find being “nondescript” useful and why he finds the recognition of that usefulness disturbing.
Themes
Exiting Penn Station, Manny feels a phantom pain in his thigh. Suddenly he sees two different versions of New York: the ordinary city full of people and an empty, stormy New York, dilapidated yet beautiful. Manny has an intuition that he needs to do something or both versions of the city will be destroyed.
Manny’s vision of multiple New York Cities hints that, in the novel, multiple realities may really exist. It also reinforces the novel’s figurative or metaphorical point that cities are built out of multiple, conflicting myths and beliefs that people have about them.
Themes
Manny intuitively knows that he needs to go east and asks a man renting bicycles—whom he thinks of as Bike Guy—what’s in that direction. Bike Guy replies obscenely. Another woman, also renting bicycles, intervenes. Manny asks her how he can walk to FDR Drive. When the woman asks what kind of tourist walks to FDR Drive, Bike Guy denies Manny is a tourist. The woman tells Manny to take a taxi.
Manny’s intuitions about the city suggest that he belongs to it even though he just arrived. The bike rental workers’ disagreement about whether he's a tourist, meanwhile, again suggests that people have difficulty deciding who Manny is.
Themes
Manny looks around and finds that the sight of chain stores are “irritants” but that small stores, billboards, traffic, and foul odors ease his pain. Without knowing how he’s received the information, he tells the bicycle woman that he has a ride. Suddenly an old-timey Checker cab stops in the street right in front of him. Manny tries the door. When he finds it locked, he thinks that he needs it to open, and it opens for him.
An ”irritant” can mean something that annoys—but since the novel has repeatedly compared the city to a living organism, in this context “irritant” more likely means a foreign substance that causes physical discomfort or inflammation. The word choice suggests that chain stores—stores not unique to New York City—are bad for the city as an organism in a way that “small stores”—presumably local—and other physical phenomena characteristic of New York are not. That Manny can open doors with his thoughts, meanwhile, illustrates how thoughts and beliefs control reality in this science-fictional universe.
Themes
When Manny climbs into the Checker, the driver (Madison), a young white woman, tells him the Checker isn’t a working taxi but an “antique” rented for special occasions. Manny asks her to take him to FDR Drive. Sensing the “ritual of getting-in-a-cab” gives him power, he offers her a 100-dollar bill. She assumes it’s fake. He offers to pay her in 20s, but he senses 20s have more power because they circulate more—he doesn’t want to use them because he doesn’t want to “force” her. She says she’ll drive him for 200. He pays her. As she drives, Manny ponders that in New York, money has “talismanic power.”
In this passage, Manny is realizing that rituals and objects associated with New York City—occupying a taxi, large bills—give him power. In imbuing New York concepts with power, the novel is literalizing the idea that human beings’ thoughts, perceptions, beliefs, and myths shape the world they experience. As a “talisman” is a magical object, Manny is suggesting that having money essentially gives you magical powers in New York City.
Themes
As the driver (Madison) takes Manny toward FDR Drive, he sees a car pass with “feathery white tendrils” coming out of its wheels. Manny intuits that the tendrils exist in multiple dimensions, like his vision of ordinary New York and the strange, empty New York. He also sees the tendril seem to react to his presence. The driver asks Manny whether he sees the tendrils too. When he admits he does, she asks why no one else can. He says he doesn’t know but promises he’ll destroy the thing that caused it if she takes him to FDR. He tries not to think too hard about what he’s saying, because he needs to believe in himself to maintain his mysterious power.
Although Manny doesn’t even know what the tendrils are, he instinctively promises to destroy them. Given that Manny already loves New York City and believes it’s in danger, his promise to destroy the tendrils implies he believes they pose a threat to the city—and that he’s willing to destroy things he believes are threats. Interestingly, Manny has to suppress his own thoughts in order to access the conceptual power the city offers him—which again hints at a tension between Manny’s individual identity and his connection to the city.
Themes
When the Checker reaches FDR Drive, Manny sees more cars infected by white tendrils and then a 20- to 30-foot tendril growth coming out of the fast lane. Although most drivers can’t see the growth, they are instinctively avoiding it, causing a traffic jam. Manny exits the cab and asks the driver (Madison) whether she has an emergency car kit. She says yes and tells him to act fast—the police will arrive soon and “they’re not gonna help much.” Intuitively, Manny asks her whether she’s a city native. She tells him she grew up in Chelsea with two moms. Manny senses the New Yorkers around him are his “allies.” He introduces himself as Manny and asks her name; she tells him she’s named Madison because the IVF clinic her mothers used was near Madison Avenue.
It's Madison’s distrust of the police that prompts Manny to guess, correctly, that she’s a native New Yorker. Once again, the novel is suggesting that although the police claim to protect and serve the city, they are not truly part of the city’s community but are in fact a threat to it. That Madison’s mothers named her after New York City’s geography underlines that she belongs in the city. Her fear of the tendrils and her willingness to help Manny thus further suggests that the threatening tendrils don’t “belong” in New York—but Manny does.
Themes
Manny proposes a plan to Madison. She helps him use her emergency kit materials to divert cars around the tendril growth. As the growth gets bigger, Manny notes it smells like ocean—specifically, like “trimethylamine oxide.” After telling Madison that he has to hit the growth, Manny asks an Indian woman in a nearby stopped car for her umbrella. The woman threatens to pepper-spray him, but when he tells her he can use the umbrella to end the traffic jam, she gives it to him.
Trimethylamine oxide is a compound found in deep-water animals; it helps them survive at high water pressures. As the Enemy attacked New York City with a huge tentacle—as if it were a giant squid or octopus—the tendril growth’s smell suggests that it’s related to the Enemy. Manny’s ability to smooth-talk a woman who initially wants to pepper-spray him, meanwhile, demonstrates both his charm and New Yorkers’ subconscious understanding that he is fighting for them.
Themes
Manny climbs on top of the cab, holding the umbrella. He senses he needs the umbrella, but he’s not sure what for. With Manny clinging to the roof, Madison drives at the tendril growth. Manny opens the umbrella, but that use of it is somehow “still wrong.” Manny observes that the growth is beautiful but hostile to the city. He muses that “some new things become part of a city, helping it grow and strengthen—while some new things can tear it apart.”
That Manny isn’t sure how to use the umbrella shows that while he knows concepts have power, he doesn’t always intuitively know how to use them. By noting the tendrils’ beauty, Manny hints that the tendrils may not be inherently disgusting or harmful—just bad for the environment. His thoughts about which “new things” are good for the city and which are not foreshadow the importance that questions of belonging, gentrification, and invasion will have later on in the novel.
Themes
As the cab gets closer to the tendril growth, Manny holds the umbrella over his head. Somehow this gesture causes an energy “sheath” to appear around the umbrella, Manny, and the cab. Manny realizes that unlike the growth, he is not an “interloper” because he has chosen to live in New York, whereas the growth is an “invasive tourist.” The energy sheath allows the cab to burn through the growth.
In using the concepts of true resident versus “tourist” to power his attack on the tendril growth, Manny partially answers the question of which new things (or people) are good for the city: new residents are good, implicitly because they are invested in the city’s long-term wellbeing, whereas tourists are bad, implicitly because they only want to use the city for entertainment.
Themes
On the growth’s other side, Madison slams on the brakes to keep the cab from hitting stopped cars ahead. Looking backward, Manny sees the fiery hole their passage made in the growth, which burns through the remaining tendrils. His energy sheath dissipates, burning up tendrils attached to cars as it does so. Manny realizes that this energy is New York City somehow, and that it “driv[es] out anything unnecessary to make room for itself”—including his memories. Manny whispers, “I am Manhattan.”
That Manny can destroy the tendril growth completely by invoking the concept of “tourist” makes clear that the tendrils are an outside force, alien to New York City. His realization that the city destroyed his memories to “make room for itself”—to make Manny into Manhattan—again hints that Manny’s previous identity does not gel with his new identity as a protector of New York.
Themes
