How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)

The full story is framed as a parody (imitating a genre with deliberate exaggeration) of a courtship tale: It provides instruction on courtship, dating, and navigating the intricate pitfalls of social interactions among an array of cultures. In reality, the story is a satiric take on the thought processes of a person seeking to assimilate. The humor is provided by the exaggerated examples of how to converse with girls, deal with the environment, and even in some cases interact with parents of the girls are on display.

There are several allusions—references to events or people from the past—in the text. These allusions are reflections of the narrator’s reluctance to embrace his roots as an immigrant. One includes a story about his mother recognizing a neighborhood tear gas explosion because of the smell; she has memories of the smell from one of the military interventions of the United States into the affairs of the Dominican Republic. This allusion reinforces the tensions between Dominican culture and US culture. The allusion makes it clear that the more the narrator changes to meet the expectations of