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
Bronca bursts into a bathroom and calls out “Becky.” At the mirror, Yijing demands Bronca call her by her actual name. Bronca accuses Yijing of submitting a grant application Bronca mostly wrote without putting Bronca’s name on it. Yijing admits she did but says Bronca isn’t doing any new work. When Bronca gestures to a mural on the wall signed “Da Bronca,” Yijing clarifies that Bronca isn’t exhibiting new work at Manhattan galleries. She describes Bronca’s work as too Bronx-centric and not “relevant enough.” Stung, Bronca accuses Yijing of sleeping with the grant committee chair. Yijing starts swearing at Bronca in Mandarin—at which point Bronca starts swearing at Yijing in Munsee.
“Becky” is a slang term for an obnoxious or racist white woman. Bronca is using the term against Yijing, whose name and ability to curse in Mandarin suggest she’s Chinese American. By calling her Asian coworker a negatively connoted slang term for a white woman, Bronca is suggesting there’s something stereotypically “white” about Yijing taking credit for Bronca’s work on the grant application. In retaliation, Yijing tells Bronca her art isn’t “relevant enough”—a claim controversially presupposing that art, to matter, has to speak to a broader audience than its artist’s local community. At the end of this passage, Bronca starts swearing in Munsee, one of the languages of the Lenape, the Native American people whose ancestral lands include the territory now occupied by New York City. Bronca’s ability to speak Munsee reveals that she is likely Lenape.
Themes
Bronca and Yijing’s coworker Jess comes into the bathroom to tell them everyone can hear them. Once Yijing leaves, Jess scolds Bronca for sulking even though she’s about 60. Keeping to herself that she’s closer to 70, Bronca denies sulking. Jess then scolds Bronca for “slut-shaming” Yijing. Though Bronca realizes and regrets that she slut-shamed Yijing, she doubles down and claims, “Bitch has bad taste.” Jess scolds her for using the word “bitch” and points out that Bronca dislikes men in general. Bronca replies that she likes her own son “okay”—which is an inside joke she knows Jess teed up for her to calm her down.
“Slut-shaming” is a term referring to sexist criticism of women’s sexual behavior. By saying that Bronca was “slut-shaming” Yijing, Jess chastises Bronca for bringing up Yijing’s sex life during their fight. Bronca internally agrees with Jess’s criticism but externally ignores it and calls Yijing a “bitch,” a sexist slur. Bronca’s behavior here reveals that while she recognizes and disapproves of sexist stereotypes and behaviors, she still employs sexist stereotypes against other women if she’s angry with them.
Themes
Jess tells Bronca she needs help. She explains that artists linked to a potential donor want to show their art at the gallery but trails off rather than describe the art. When Bronca points out the gallery sometimes exhibits bad art, Jess claims this art is “worse.”
When Bronca says the gallery sometimes exhibits bad art, she seems to mean art that is not technically proficient. When Jess replies that the art she’s talking about is “worse” than bad, she seems to be implying that it’s bad in a different way—that it’s offensive and perhaps ethically bad. Thus, this passage introduces the idea that art should be judged by at least two criteria: its technical execution and its ethical content.
Themes
After Jess leaves, Bronca hears a voice (the Woman in White) say, “‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre’” and laugh. Realizing someone in a stall heard her and Yijing, Bronca apologizes. The Woman says Yijing should respect her elders. Bronca asks whether she and the Woman know each other. Instead of answering, the Woman says: “So often, ‘the falcon cannot hear the falconer.’” Annoyed, Bronca points out that she’s capable of quoting Yeats too and recites from the next two lines of the poem. The Woman takes up the recitation, but when she gets to the line, “The ceremony of innocence is drowned,” she breaks off to tell Bronca that it’s her favorite part, because it shows how vapid innocence is. The Woman thinks it’s bizarre that humans think ignorance is a virtue and expresses surprise that the species has managed to progress.
The Woman in White and Bronca are quoting the 1920 poem “The Second Coming” by Irish poet W.B. Yeats (1865 – 1939). The poem uses the religious concept of the Second Coming—the belief that Jesus Christ will return to earth, after which some humans will be eternally damned and others eternally saved—as a governing metaphor to describe the apocalyptic effects of World War I. By choosing to recite this particular poem, the Woman in White is hinting that a war or apocalypse is coming. That she chooses a poem to communicate with Bronca, meanwhile, shows both that the Woman is well-educated in human culture despite her alienness and that art is an important tool for communication. Finally, the Woman’s disgust that human beings think innocence is a virtue suggests that she has—or thinks she has—a very different value system than most or all humans.
Themes
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Bronca now suspects that the Woman in White is threatening her. One stall door opens, and no one is inside. The Woman tells Bronca she has a “foothold” on Staten Island, the city, and maybe Bronca herself, whom she calls “sweet thing.” Bronca asks whether the Woman is into “old ladies.” Another stall opens, revealing no one. The Woman tells Bronca the city is full of people so sweet she wants to eat them. Looking at the last closed stall, Bronca realizes she can only see “blank whiteness” in the gaps around the door.
When the Woman in White calls Bronca “sweet,” Bronca interprets it as a kind of threatening flirtation—until the Woman changes the meaning of “sweet” from figurative to literal by talking about wanting to eat people. This exchange shows that Bronca and the Woman have fundamentally different concepts of humanity: Bronca sees other people as potential equal partners in activities like sex, whereas the Woman sees them as prey. That Bronca can only see “blank whiteness” when she tries to peek at the Woman tightens the association between the Woman and racial whiteness; it also associates the Woman with homogeneity as opposed to diversity—of color or anything else.
Themes
Bronca dares the Woman in White to say what she means. The Woman says she likes humans, but they’re dangerous and not “likely to volunteer for genocide.” She offers to let Bronca, her son, her unborn grandchild, and her exes die last when she destroys everything. When Bronca tells the Woman to come out of the stall, the Woman laughs, says she’s resting from using “this shape,” and suggests Bronca wouldn’t want to see her. Bronca says she doesn’t like the Woman threatening her and her family from the toilet. The Woman tells Bronca she’s not threatening but advising and warns her to remember, when everyone’s dying, that the Woman offered to help.
Earlier, the Woman in White told Aislyn she was a menace. Now, the Woman tells Bronca that humans are dangerous and implies that the only way to respond to the danger effectively is to commit “genocide” against humanity. These comments make clear that the Woman views humanity—and perhaps cities in particular—as a terrible threat, but she doesn’t hint at why. Her throwaway comment that she’s resting from her human “shape,” meanwhile, reminds the reader that although the Woman can appear as a white woman to exploit human prejudice and white privilege, her original form is something alien and perhaps terrifying.
Themes
The Woman in White launches into a description of Bronca’s grandchild’s impending death. Suddenly Bronca feels herself transform. She remembers a day when she was 11, wearing her father’s steel-toed boots while trying to avoid a group of men who were sexually harassing her. One of the men ambushed her in a brickyard. Feeling suddenly “bigger,” she kicked his knee. He ended up in the hospital. Bronca also remembers kicking the knee of “a police informant at Stonewall.” She compares the sensations she felt at these times to the sensations she feels now: “Bigger. As big as the whole goddamn borough.”
When the Woman tried to scare Aislyn, Aislyn wanted to escape. By contrast, Bronca remembers fighting back against people who abused her due to her gender or sexuality—an adult man who harassed her when she was 11 and a police informant at Stonewall, famous pro-LGBT protests in 1969 precipitated by a police raid at a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. Getting righteously angry against gender- and sexuality-based abuse makes Bronca feel “bigger”—not literally bigger, but conceptually bigger, because she’s fighting as a representative of a whole identity group. This moment parallels the previous moments Bronca has fought back against abusers because now she is fighting on behalf of a “whole goddamn borough.”
Themes
The Woman in White groans, “Oh, not you too.” Bronca charges the stall. It begins to open. Through it Bronca spies a white room, larger than it should be given the size of the Bronx Art Center bathroom. Before the door can open wide, Bronca kicks it in. The Woman screams and the space behind the door becomes an ordinary stall again. Suddenly, Bronca, as the eldest borough, gains “a hundred thousand years or so of knowledge.” Though she knows she’s supposed to team up with the other boroughs, she thinks of her long life of fighting and her unborn grandchild and decides not to participate: “The Bronx has always been on its own; let them learn what that felt like.” Bronca leaves the bathroom. When she’s gone, a tendril hidden behind the toilet writhes.
The Woman’s exclamation “Oh, not you too” seems to betray that the Woman knew Aislyn and Bronca would become or had become embodied boroughs before either woman was fully aware of her powers—but that both Aislyn and Bronca acclimated too fast to being boroughs for the Woman in White to infect them or immediately bully them into helping her. The Woman’s apparent ability to manipulate space—to make the bathroom stall bigger on the inside—again emphasizes her alienness and hints that she possesses advanced technology or superhuman powers. Bronca’s decision not to help the other boroughs precisely because “the Bronx has always been on its own,” meanwhile, illustrates that conforming to stereotypes about their boroughs doesn’t always simply make the boroughs’ avatars more powerful—sometimes, as with Aislyn and Bronca, it may make them feel ambivalent or even resentful about the rest of the city community to which they belong. Since the tendrils represent an outside force manipulating a community to divide and conquer it, the continued presence of a tendril in Bronca’s workplace suggests that her decision to go it alone, without the other boroughs, makes her vulnerable to ongoing attacks by the Woman.
Themes
