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A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir Paperback – September 8, 2015

by Daisy Hernández (Author)

4.5 297 ratings

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The PEN Literary Award–winning author “writes with honesty, intelligence, tenderness, and love” about her Colombian-Cuban heritage and queer identity in this poignant coming-of-age memoir (Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street).

In this lyrical, coming-of-age memoir, Daisy Hernández chronicles what the women in her Cuban-Colombian family taught her about love, money, and race. Her mother warns her about envidia and men who seduce you with pastries, while one tía bemoans that her niece is turning out to be “una india” instead of an American. Another auntie instructs that when two people are close, they are bound to become like uña y mugre, fingernails and dirt, and that no, Daisy’s father is not godless. He’s simply praying to a candy dish that can be traced back to Africa.

These lessons—rooted in women’s experiences of migration, colonization, y cariño—define in evocative detail what it means to grow up female in an immigrant home. In one story, Daisy sets out to defy the dictates of race and class that preoccupy her mother and tías, but dating women and transmen, and coming to identify as bisexual, leads her to unexpected questions. In another piece, NAFTA shuts local factories in her hometown on the outskirts of New York City, and she begins translating unemployment forms for her parents, moving between English and Spanish, as well as private and collective fears. In prose that is both memoir and commentary, Daisy reflects on reporting for the New York Times as the paper is rocked by the biggest plagiarism scandal in its history and plunged into debates about the role of race in the newsroom.

A heartfelt exploration of family, identity, and language, A Cup of Water Under My Bed is ultimately a daughter’s story of finding herself and her community, and of creating a new, queer life.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Warm and thoughtful, Hernández writes with cleareyed compassion about living, and redefining success, at the intersection of social, ethnic and racial difference. Personal storytelling at its most authentic and heartfelt.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Gorgeously written from start to finish.”
—Boston Globe

“Journalist, feminist, and first-time memoirist Hernández presents a coming-of-age story that dives into the complexities of language, sexuality, and class. … An accessible, honest look at the often heart-wrenching effects of intergenerational tension on family ties.”
—Booklist

“This book is a compelling glimpse into the life of a young Latina struggling to hold onto her background and make her way in a world she often finds difficult to embrace. Hernandez's use of language is often poetic, especially when intermingling Spanish and English, with the cultural tones of each.”
—Windy City Times

“By the end of this beautiful book, Daisy Hernández, a queer American Latina, has threaded Spanish and English together to create an inimitable new language in a brave and brilliant negotiation of a multilingual world.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“With wit and respectful grace, Hernández shares stories of love for family, of strong (despite herself) roots, and of assimilation and claiming who you are without losing who you were.”
—Dallas Voice

“During a time in history when so much is said about women of color, working-class folks, immigrants, Latinas, poor people, and los depreciados but seldom from them, Hernández writes with honesty, intelligence, tenderness, and love. I bow deeply in admiration and gratitude.”
—Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street

“A striking and illuminating memoir of stark beauty that challenges our notions of identity and feminine power; absolutely riveting and unforgettable.”
—Patricia Engel, author of It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris

“Hernández writes with grace and clarity about the singular joys and unique pains of growing up in two worlds. … A marriage of power and poetry.”
—Laila Lalami, author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits

“Hernández is a stone-cold truth teller, and her talent is eclipsed only by her fearlessness. If this debut is a sign of what’s to come, plan to have your heart and head broken wide open. Again and again.”
—John Murillo, author of Up Jump the Boogie

About the Author

Daisy Hernández is the coeditor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism and the former editor of ColorLines magazine. She speaks at colleges and conferences about feminism, race, and media representations, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Ms. magazine, CultureStrike, In These Times, Bellingham Review, Fourth Genre, and Hunger Mountain, and on NPR’s All Things Considered. In 2022, she won the PEN Literary Award for The Kissing Bug (Tin House).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Before Love, Memory

They come for me in a station wagon. My mother already has me dressed in a navy-blue plaid jumper and a white blouse. She has yanked my dark hair into pigtails and now makes the sign of the cross on my forehead before turning me over to a skinny lady, who ushers me into the backseat of the station wagon. I join a small group of children, mostly Cuban, all of us dressed alike, our eyes bright and nervous.

The station wagon lady drops us off at the steps of a gloomy castle in Union City, New Jersey: Holy Family Catholic School. The yard is hemmed in with black iron bars and the front doors are made of steel. Women in dress pants roam the cement grounds like fat hens with their wings clipped, their beaks pointing and gesturing. I huddle with the other children in packs of three and five like scared chicks.

Miss Reynolds is the kindergarten teacher. She has glasses that make her eyes look like oversized buttons on her face, and she speaks the funny language that comes out of the television set at home when we are not watching telenovelas or the noticias, which is to say that she talks like the cartoon character Mighty
Mouse. It is English, a language that sounds like marbles in the mouth. It is fun to hear, but mostly because the mouse on the TV screen is flying.

Sitting in the classroom, I wait for Miss Reynolds to start talking like my mother. In Spanish. Surely it won’t be long now. An hour passes. Two hours. An entire day it feels, and still it is all Mighty Mouse.

I am familiar with the language. I even speak a few words of it. But I have never heard so much of it all at once. It’s like being forced to watch the same cartoon all day long.

I don’t know if this is what actually happened on my first day of kindergarten, but it is what I remember of my first two years in school. A few memories can be confirmed by research and on-site inspection: Mighty Mouse on television, the school’s black iron bars. My mother verifies the station wagon lady and the ethnicity of the other children, and school photographs offer details of the
uniform and my teacher’s face.

There are, however, missteps in memory, places where emotion has distorted people, sights, even cuerpos. In a school photograph, for example, my teacher is a skinny, androgynous white woman with thick glasses. But I remember her as a fat hen, a flying mouse, and kindergarten as the beginning of the end.

A teacher comes for us one day. Just two of us. Me and my friend, a thin, pixie-faced girl.

I don’t know why we are being taken from class, but in the darkened hallway as we find ourselves farther from our classroom, my friend starts crying, and hers are not baby tears. They are full blast, llorona wails. She roots herself to the ground and refuses to take one more step. The teacher begins dragging her by the arm, but the harder the woman pulls, the more my friend yells and twists, and for an instant, it looks as if her left arm is threatening to rip from her body, as if she will choose self-mutilation over what is to come at the hands of white women. As for myself, I don’t fight. I follow.

In an empty classroom, the white woman pulls out a deck of cards with pictures and words. She spreads the cards on a broad table, one by one. The sun is pouring through the window and coating us in a yellow liquid, but I can decipher the cards. Each one holds a picture and a word: dog, cat, house. I am to repeat each word after the teacher.

In Spanish, we have cartas. Tía Rosa’s husband uses them to talk with the spirit world. The cards tell us about jobs that are about to arrive, ancestors who are unhappy, a case pending with immigration. The cards are paper doors only special people can open.

I look at the white woman’s cards and listen to her bold English words—dog, cat, house—and there is all the evidence of what is to come in my life. I am not to go the way of the two people I long for in the thick terror of the night. The first man I love and the first woman I adore, my father and my mother with their Spanish words, are not in these cards. The road before me is English and the next part too awful to ask aloud or even silently: What is so wrong with my parents that I am not to mimic their hands, their needs, not even their words?

Before language, there is love. Before love, memory.

What I know of the world before kindergarten is the uneven sidewalks of Union City, New Jersey. The shop with its fat chickens hollering at us and nipping at the wire cages. The sharp smell of chicken blood when the little beasts are killed in back and brought in white plastic bags to my mother. The fabric store with its bins carrying spools of thread like a Cubana holding up the ends of her apron. The buses that snake up and down Bergenline Avenue. The store jammed with cigars and wrinkled men and women
folding the ends of the thick brown leaves.

Our national language is Spanish and there are many kinds. Mostly it is the firecracker Spanish of my Cuban father and his friends. It smacks the air and the back of my head and the inside of my ears. There is also the Spanish of the Puertorriqueño Tía Rosa has married. His words mimic popcorn when it first begins popping. Finally, there is Colombian Spanish. My mother’s language does not crack or bounce. It stays close to the earth, to thick hands and the smooth sides of stones.

English has a place here. It is the language of minorities, and you hear it every now and then, mostly from Mighty Mouse on television or the older kids on the block. English is a game of marbles. The words shoot after each other. They bump and plod and leave tracks on the ground, and it is a decent game, English that is, but everything real happens in Spanish: the way women complain about the fábricas where they work, how they yell at you to not play in the street, how they drag you into the house when the sky turns a velvet black, lying to you: “Ahorita sales otra vez.”

Terrible things happen in Spanish.

My father and his friend get drunk, slur their words, and turn into screeching birds. Rage is an awful habit in any language, I suppose, but on our street, in our home, in Spanish, it takes on awful proportions, and the mothers complain to each other in shorthand: “Qué se va ‘cer?” The reply is always the same: Así son los hombres.
Women are different.

Union City is filled with virgins. La Caridad, La Altagracia, La Virgen de Chiquinquirá. They come from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Colombia. Like us, they are a matter of multiplicity.
There is never one of anything in this world. There are many virgins, many women, many sounds in Spanish.

Dollars, though, are a constant. In the kitchen, my mother folds aluminum foil over dollar bills and packs them into envelopes. The dollars are to be mailed with letters to her mother in Colombia.
We send dollars because of the wars. It is the eighties and there are two wars. The one in Colombia is about land and poor people. The other one, the Cold War, means my mother and I cannot travel to Cuba. “It isn’t safe,” my father says in between puffs of his thick cigar.

We travel instead to Hialeah, Florida, and Mami and I go together by plane to Bogotá and Boyacá, and by train to Queens and Manhattan. By the time I start kindergarten, I feel these places and New Jersey are part of the same country. Everyone lives within its borders, speaks Spanish, and eats a lot of fried pork.

In the evening, my mother turns on the television for the noticias. The stories arrive from Latin America. Women with missing teeth cry into microphones. Men with brown faces scream. Los niños carry younger children. Sometimes, it is only the image of men’s feet in their shoes and the white sheets covering the rest of their bodies. The women wail behind the reporter, who talks about the number of dead and those left behind.

“Ay, los pobres,” my mother whispers, before turning her eyes and her pregnant belly away from the television screen.

But I don’t look away. I want to see what it is all about, because my mother comes from that place in the television set and so does my father. Those places where the floor is a thick brown soil and men’s bodies disappear save for their shoes.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Beacon Press; Reprint edition (September 8, 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 200 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0807062928
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0807062920
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.4 x 0.4 x 8.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #213,492 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #100 in Emigrants & Immigrants Biographies
- #101 in Hispanic & Latin Biographies
- #7,028 in Memoirs (Books)

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4.5 297 ratings

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Daisy Hernandez

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Daisy Hernández is a former reporter for The New York Times and has been writing about the intersections of race, immigration, class, and sexuality for almost two decades. She has written for National Geographic, NPR's All Things Considered and CodeSwitch, The Atlantic, Slate, and Guernica, and she's the former editor of Colorlines, a newsmagazine on race and politics. Daisy is the author of the award-winning memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed and co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism. She is an associate professor at Miami University in Ohio.

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Deborah Germosen

I truly enjoyed the vivid vignettes Hernández's provided throughout the book

Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2018

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“Generally speaking, gay people come out of the closet, straight people walk around the closet, and bisexuals have to be told to look for the closet. We are too preoccupied with shifting.”
Daisy Hernández, A Cup of Water Under My Bed

A Cup of Water Under My Bed was chosen by my book club at work (lovingly named El Barrio Book Club). The memoir was heartfelt, witty, honest and full of sentiment. I truly enjoyed the vivid vignettes Hernández's provided throughout the book. I found myself reminiscing quite a lot. As a first-generation Dominican-American, I appreciate and cherish being part of two cultures. I love the United States and I love the Dominican Republic (DR) . . . However, my traditions are pretty much all Dominican (with a es-prinkle of American) because of my parents -- especially my mom. This woman did not play around and meant business! I was born in the US, but Spanish was my first language. Once I learned English, I was not allowed to speak it at home until I was around thirteen years old. Also, every year until the age of nine, I traveled to DR with my abuela (Mama). Some of my fondest childhood memories are from those amazing summer trips. Many of Hernández's anecdotes reminded me of my childhood. I too had to translate and interpret for family members (grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbors, and my dad). Interestingly, my parents worked at a glass factory for many years until it closed. I appreciated Hernández's candid writing especially on common taboo subjects in Latino households. I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir and highly recommend it. Hernández gives readers a front row seat to her childhood and early experiences as a queer and feminist Latina.

7 people found this helpful

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J. Stewart

I highly recommend this book to any reader who loves memoir and ...

Reviewed in the United States on October 17, 2014

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This is an incredibly insightful and interesting memoir by a young Latina writer. Hernandez, the child of a Columbian mother and Cuban father, both of whom work in factories in New Jersey, describes her upbringing and coming-of-age. Her understanding of her family deepens and changes as she grows into adulthood. A lot of difficult memories and topics (religion, sexuality, alcoholism to name a few) are discussed head-on, and with emotional honesty. A Cup of Water Under My Bed opened a window into a world of experiences very different from my own, which made for fascinating reading.

What I found most interesting was how well Hernandez describes the emotions of growing up and growing apart from her family, even as they influenced her profoundly and helped shape her worldview. Hernandez's narrative is not entirely linear, so those who expect that in a memoir may find it a little confusing. But I found the more spiral style interesting and just a different way to tell a story. The chapter about her mother's storytelling was a bit hard for me to follow, as the vignettes were short and kind of disconnected from each other. Still, this gave her mother a distinctly different voice from Hernandez herself, and made for an interesting contrast.

I highly recommend this book to any reader who loves memoir and is looking for an interesting story and unique voice.

10 people found this helpful

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Sabrina Chambers

Good story

Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2020

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I enjoyed reading this book. I found it quite interesting to follow Daisy through her childhood that was different than mine, but was still able to relate. The author does bounce around a bit, which would cause some momentary confusion, but overall I enjoyed the book.

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Smarti

Daisy’s voice is unique enough that you get a sense of what it’s like to be a first generation Latina growing up in ...

Reviewed in the United States on September 13, 2014

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Reading "A Cup of Water Under My Bed", I could not help but recognize myself in the pages of this book. Daisy Hernandez writes from a place that’s familiar to me and this is not something I have readily found in other memoirs. I think for a general audience, Daisy’s voice is unique enough that you get a sense of what it’s like to be a first generation Latina growing up in the United States navigating between the English and the Spanish, between those who work with their hands and those who don’t. Daisy writes in a beautifully creative voice that makes you engaged in the conflicts she writes about, makes you feel the tension between moving between the two worlds. I’m glad she has shared her voice and look forward to reading more of her amazing words. This is a must read for any Latina navigating in the in-between...

4 people found this helpful

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Mary L. Jonilonis

A Latina look at life in NY.

Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2017

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A difficult book for me to rate. Many times the writing was wonderful. I understood the whole focus of the book except the author's need to discuss her sexuality. To other readers this may have been pertinent but to me I felt it subtracted from the story. The was much richness in this book but not all of the book entertained or enlightened. It is an interesting insight into this lati na woman' s life and thoughts.

One person found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

5 Stars for Daisy Hernandez

Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2019

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A Cup of Water Under My Bed was an insightful memoir that focuses on the many challenges a young girl faces while growing up and finding her voice. This book was so impactful and her vivid imagery and scenes made me feel as if I was right there with her. I couldn't put the book down and would recommend to every girl out there. It is such an important read because it welcomes readers back into their own past, while inviting them into worlds they may not have known.

Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2017

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This memoir appeals to a vast audience as it includes Hispanic and Latino/a culture, LGBT issues, Jersey living, and Girl Power, to name a few.
Hernandez does an excellent job of presenting details of her flashbacks from a child's unknowing perspective. It isn't easy to recount one's childhood and adolescent thoughts while living in an adult mindset. Yet, Hernandez excels at it. As a fellow Jersey Girl, I also feel home state pride in this exemplary memoir. There are some anecdotes here, as well.

This is a MUST-READ.

4 people found this helpful

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No thank you

Beautiful prose and a look at intersectionality

Reviewed in the United States on April 14, 2016

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I love books that take an intersectional approach to identity. Not only does this memoir do just that, it also has some of the most beautiful prose I've read in a long time. This is by far my favorite book I've read this year. I've read it a few times and have bought it as a gift for several of my friends.

2 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

skeeter

Remarkable main character

Reviewed in Canada on December 3, 2020

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Awesome read’ I will read this author again

rudy thewis

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 7, 2018

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perfect, thank you very much, five stars

oui

Touching and thought provoking

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 3, 2020

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I really fell in love with the parents and their journey, like so many others. I wanted to read more of their lives.

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