What Papi does not provide for the family is stability. It’s through him that Díaz learns about the island’s troubled past, and her family’s African ancestry: “In my father’s books, and in my father’s own stories, I would find our history.” “perico”) on the street and cheating on Díaz’s mother. Papi is a complicated man: A lover of books and women, he went from being an activist - he “spent his college days writing protest poems and studying literature and the work of independentistas” - to selling cocaine (a.k.a. Told in four parts, the story opens in 1985 in Puerto Rico, where Díaz, her older brother and their baby sister are being raised in the impoverished household of a drug-dealing father and an erratic mother. There’s nothing ordinary about Jaquira Díaz’s debut memoir, “Ordinary Girls.”
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