Bronx Masquerade

Bronx Masquerade is one of the most frustrating books I have ever read.  

Nikki Grimes preaches acceptance and urges people to fight against stereotypes, yet in her writing, only plays into stereotypes or bases entire characters off them. In having such a large number of characters, all defined solely by whatever stereotype they are fighting against, Grimes succeeds in taking them out of the box they were put into, only to put them into another one. Since each character––other than Tyrone––gets only one, maybe two, chapters, the only way to remember them when they are brought back up in other characters’ chapters is to remember their stereotype: Gloria is the teen mom, Sterling is the religious kid, Raynard is the dyslexic kid, etc.. This is because these stereotypes are the ONLY things we learn about the characters, since they only get two or three pages to complain about not liking being stereotyped. The fact that there are so many characters only plays into this complete blundering of the whole point of the book, since even writing out the characters, I had to flip through the book to find out their names, I only had remembered what their assigned stereotype was (which was a problem a lot of other people had in class on Monday).  

Even in this sort of metatextual hypocrisy, Grimes completely plays into other stereotypes that she DOESN’T make even an attempt to fight against. The most obvious and, in my opinion, abhorrent of these is the persistent characterisation of the Hispanic characters all speaking in some form of Spanglish, rather than in English. This is a trope that almost every non-Hispanic writer writing about Hispanic characters falls into. For some reason, authors feel the need to make their Hispanic characters throw in a random Spanish word every other sentence, perhaps in some underestimating of their audience––thinking the reader will somehow forget that a character is Hispanic if their being Hispanic is not mentioned at least every other word, which ultimately serves as a complete heightening of how regular Latin people exist and making that character into a caricature of their culture––or perhaps in the mistaken notion that this is actually how Hispanic people interact with the Anglophone world, as if we are not acutely aware of our linguistic difference and don’t shape our way of speaking around that. Either way, this mode of writing forces almost all Hispanic representation to exist solely in the mode of not being able to speak English, an extremely harmful stereotype which the community faces and fights against every day. Sprinkling in Spanish words every few sentences serves as a way to make Hispanic modes of being more palatable for Anglophone audiences: there’s just enough Spanish to other the characters and make them out to be a separate group from the non-Spanish speaking reader and the rest of the class, but enough English so as to make whatever word is in Spanish easy translatable with minimal effort for the reader through context clues, making the character foreign, but not foreign enough to ostracise the Anglophone audience or make them actually work to understand what the character is saying. What makes this stereotyping even more egregious is the fact that a lot of the Spanish in the book isn’t even correct. It’s written as if Grimes put a few words into google translate or used whatever minimal Spanish background she may have instead of actually consulting a Hispanic person to ask if this representation is correct or if it’s harmful or if the Spanish is right. The ones that stuck out to me the most (sorry that I don’t have page numbers I don’t want to read through all this again) was one of the characters saying his friends call him “loco en la cabeza,” which might win an award for being the first time those words have ever been thought in that order. This is not a Spanish phrase in the slightest, nor would it be intelligible to a Spanish speaker, because it is a direct translation of the American phrase “crazy in the head,” which in and of itself doesn’t make too much sense either. Another of these errors was in Lupe’s poem “El Noche,” which, disregarding the fact that this is an incorrect way of titling a poem in Spanish (Spanish poem names are all lowercase other than the first word), misgenders the night, which should be “la noche.”  

  Grimes also makes the mistake of including Tyrone being upset that people misspell his name (122), while simultaneously misspelling the name Raúl throughout the entirety of the book. Perhaps including accent marks was crossing the line into being too Hispanic for Grimes, or she just didn't want to put in the work to hit option+e every time Raúl's name came up, but either way the hypocrisy here is astounding to me and furthers my anger and frustration at the harmful, stereotypical Hispanic representation in this book.