How we cite our quotes: (Act.Chapter.Section.Paragraph), (Act.Special Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest. (1.1.2.3)
Díaz points out the oddness (and originality) of Oscar's character. Usually white kids are nerdy; white kids like comic books and fantasy novels. But Oscar is a kid of color who likes this nerdy stuff. So he doesn't really belong anywhere, the poor guy.
Quote #5
A punk chick. That's what I became. A Siouxsie and the Banshees-loving punk chick. The puertorican kids on the block couldn't stop laughing when they saw my hair, they called me Blacula, and the morenos, they didn't know what to say: they just called me devil-b****. Yo, devil-b****, yo, yo! (1.2.1.13)
Just like Oscar, Lola has a complicated identity. She's a punk chick who listens to Siouxsie and the Banshees. But she's also Dominican. What's a Dominican kid doing listening to British punk rock? The Puerto Rican kids don't know what to do with her; neither do the morenos—the dark-skinned Dominicans.
Quote #6
So much has changed these last months, in my head, my heart. Rosío has me dressing up like a "real Dominican girl." She's the one who fixed my hair and who helps me with my makeup, and sometimes when I see myself in mirrors I don't even know who I am anymore. (1.2.1.89)
Wao is, in some ways, a novel about change. Characters shift national identities, from Dominican to Dominican-American. They also shift life stages, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. Here, Lola copes with these two kinds of shifts in identity at the same time. She rediscovers her Dominican roots in Santo Domingo, while also beginning to see herself as a woman. Heavy.