As a child she's not too excited about sex, but she gets over the fear of cooties pretty quick when her cousins Berto and Raúl start coming around. She's obsessed with love, hearts, and cupid arrows. A True RomanticĪll of the girls have romantic feelings and fall in love at some point or another in the novel, but Mate is a bit love-crazy. When she's overwhelmed by the jail conditions, Mate calls out to her mother she becomes a child again, in need of comfort and care. I started to shake and moan, and call out to Mamá to take me home. Uddenly the walls were closing in, and I got this panicked feeling that I would never ever get out of here. When she gets older, though, and breaks down in prison, she reverts back to that baby in need of her mother: "Oh diary, how I hate when she forgets I'm already eighteen." (2.7.94-95)Įven though she is growing up, Mate's mother (and probably her sisters) still see her as the "baby." This is hard on Mate, because no one sees her for herself they see her for her position in the family. "Just my baby left now," she says, smiling at me. Minerva is the last one to go, and her marriage to Manolo leaves Mate alone with their mother: It also has some pitfalls, though.Īs the youngest, Mate's the only one left in the house when her sisters have all married. Mate's position as the youngest in the family gives her some advantages she has learned a lot from her older sisters. I knew how to read before I even started school! (1.3.20-22) I think it's because I have three older sisters, and so I've grown up quick. I don't know if you realize how advanced I am for my age? She doesn't recognize that she's young at the time, though (and who does when they're young, really?). She is worried about what shoes to wear to church and crying over the other girls' teasing her. Mate is really a baby when the book opens. Buckle up: Mate's journey is a bumpy ride. And we also get to watch her grow up from a fairly frivolous child into a serious revolutionary. We get to know her through her journal entries, from when she's a little girl all the way up into her young adulthood. María Teresa, also known as Mate (pronounced MA-tay) for short, is the youngest of the Mirabal sisters, "butterfly" number three.
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