In this collection of short stories, Junot Díaz provides highly-detailed, slice-of-life portraits of various characters who occupy the cultural, economic, and social milieu of Dominican immigrants in America during the 1970s and 1980s, with the exception of the character Ysrael, who is a Dominican adolescent who never comes to America.

Through these stories, often told in vignettes or fragmented timelines, Díaz depicts the everyday lives and struggles of Dominican-American immigrants, as they grapple with familial dysfunction, substance abuse, struggles with gender and sexuality, poverty, romantic love, classism, and the unspoken but deeply-felt white supremacist strains of the American Dream. They also find moments of joy, intimacy, beauty, and connection, rounding out their plotlines and characterizations into full depictions of their humanity.

A pronounced area of concern is the dissection of masculine identity. Every narrator in this collection of short stories is male, and they range from children to adults. Every narrator is, in his own distinct way, struggling to claim and articulate a masculine identity while being caught between two worlds—his native culture and that of Anglo-centric America. Some of the younger characters, however, occupy only a hybrid Dominican-American world, full of its own cultural signifiers and distinct material and psychological realities.

The young man named Yunior (who is a stand-in for Díaz himself), his older brother Rafa, his father Ramón, his mother Virta, and, tangentially, his baby sister Madai, are recurring characters in the collection. Their family is the nexus of the collection, although there are other unnamed male protagonists scattered throughout it. It is also important to note that though these characters recur, their biographical details do not necessarily remain consistent from story to story, meaning that each story articulates one particular iteration of the characters. This disrupted continuity, in tandem with the often-fragmented timelines inherent to Díaz’s method of storytelling, effectively produces an effect of disruption and confusion that bespeaks the internal dynamics of an overarching struggle with identity that is a hallmark of the immigrant experience.