A Cup of Water Under My Bed

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2014

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface and Part 1

Part 2

Part 3 and Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Santería

Santería (“Way of the Saints”) is a polytheistic, syncretistic Afro-Caribbean religion that blends the beliefs of West African Yoruban people with Roman Catholicism. Beginning in the 16th century, enslaved people on Cuban sugar plantations covertly preserved their religion in the Spanish colony and incorporated aspects of Roman Catholicism, the only religion permitted in the colonies. Santería worship practices involve deities or spirits known as orishas, who often have parallel Catholic saints, because orishas were often hidden behind images of Catholic saints to camouflage the preservation of West African religious practices. For example, Hernández’s father venerates the deity Elegguá, who is equated to the Catholic Saint Lazarus, also honored in her family. Believers like Hernández’s father leave offerings to these deities in various forms, including the candy in the dish the author encounters under her parents’ bed and later in her father’s shed. Practices may involve rituals of healing, like the one Hernández takes part in alongside her father, divination, and making offerings. Initiates may also be active Roman Catholics, and Santería appears in diasporic Afro-Cubano communities throughout the United States.

Flashback

Hernández’s memoir is composed in a non-linear fashion and organized thematically around ethnicity, language and culture; gender and sexuality; and work and class. Within chapters, the author often uses flashbacks to recount memoirs from her childhood or youth that she interweaves with more recent narratives from her young adult life or the lives of others, such as Gwen Araujo. For example, Hernández draws on her investigative journalism into Gwen’s murder to make connections to her own story about her liminality as a queer woman of multiple identities. Likewise, she uses flashbacks to draw conclusions about the nature of work, class, and race while recounting her employment at the New York Times, where she was subjected to racist microaggressions on a regular basis in an environment that inherently privileged white men. Flashing back to her teenage years working at McDonald’s, Hernández recalls verbal abuse from a white customer, showing that racism in the workplace crosses class lines.

Code-switching

Code-switching refers to the practice of alternating between languages within one conversation or narrative. This is a technique Hernández primarily employs in the first part of the book, which centers her relationship with her family and her struggle to come to terms with her ethnicity as a Latina and her American identity. In a 2014 interview with The Rumpus, Hernández said, “I grew up speaking Spanish at home, but I went to school in the early ’80s in New Jersey when the educational policy was full immersion in English. I learned very quickly that some languages have more power than others.” In her book, she harnesses the power of the Spanish language, a language she once rejected, to create a sense of familiarity and to highlight the distinctions between her private, family life and her public, American life. The former is intimately linked to Spanish, while the latter takes place in English. Code-switching is a communicative strategy that multilingual writers and speakers use for many reasons, including to emphasize a particular word or phrase, to quote another speaker, to capture an idea that does not have an equivalent in their other language(s), and to express an identity. Her use of code-switching underscores the liminality that is central to her memoir.