My Beloved World: Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis

Sonia attends high school at Cardinal Spellman, an hour’s commute from home. The school divides boys and girls for most things except lunch and a few classes. One exception is freshman Spanish. The native Spanish speakers are put in a class together with a nun from Spain, who plans to teach three years of Spanish in one year and then teach literature. The class revolts. Within a week, the students beg for Sonia to set the nun straight: as Puerto Rican kids raised in the Bronx, they’ve never had formal instruction in Spanish and have read, at most, a newspaper article in Spanish. The nun gently apologizes and proposes a new plan for the class, which teaches Sonia that teachers aren’t the enemy.

During high school, Sonia and Miriam sign up to be maritime cadets. The point is to chaperone Nelson, who plays in the marching band. He’s now a handsome girl magnet and wants to be a musician, and he’s already struggling at Bronx Science. The issue isn’t his intelligence; it’s that his parents are divorcing. Sonia tries hard not to listen to family gossip about the divorce and feels as though Nelson is slowly drifting away.

The summer between freshman and sophomore years, Sonia discovers Lord of the Flies. It’s haunting. She wants to think about it, but doesn’t just want to sit and think. She decides to get a job and announces this to Mami and Titi Carmen. Titi Carmen offers to ask her boss about a job for Sonia and later, Mami shares with Sonia how she sewed handkerchiefs as a girl and says she resented it. This surprises Sonia; she wants to work so she’s not bored, not for the money. She begins to understand how hard Mami’s life has been. Titi Carmen’s boss agrees to hire Sonia for less than minimum wage and pay her under the table, since she’s too young to work legally. She works at a women’s clothing store and often catches junkies stealing. The store never makes a scene, and Sonia understands that shame is punishment enough.

On Saturday nights, two patrol officers walk Sonia and Titi Carmen home. The neighborhood is rough, so Sonia is glad for this. She spends every Saturday night talking late with Miriam at Titi Carmen’s. Nelson is never home. One night, Sonia falls asleep thinking about Lord of the Flies and thinks that the junkies in the neighborhood are like the boys in the novel. In the morning, she stops at a fruit cart to buy a banana. She watches a police car pull up and the officer arrange to take two bags of fruit. The cop reaches for his wallet, but it doesn’t seem genuine and the vendor waves him off. When the cop is gone, Sonia asks the vendor about it. He says that he can’t sell fruit if he doesn’t give some to the cops. Sonia is very upset. She knows her community needs cops and thinks that cops should be held to a higher standard.

However, Sonia remembers how, in Lord of the Flies, the boys started off with law and order—but it breaks down when some become self-indulgent. She wonders which side the cops are on and remembers how when she was much younger, she’d go with Titi Aurora to her job as a seamstress. Sonia tried to be helpful, even though she was too little to do much. She knows that all those women were breaking the law, but they weren’t criminals—they were just working to support their families. At that point, Sonia begins to understand how hard Titi Aurora’s life has been. Titi Aurora is honest to a fault, but she breaks the law every day at work.

One evening, Sonia listens to her adult coworkers prank call people, telling women their husbands are cheating on them. Titi Carmen insists it’s just a joke, but Sonia sees that Titi Carmen’s “joke” is cruel in the same way that the officer stealing fruit was cruel. She realizes, at age 15, that some people can’t think of another person’s point of view.