Last Night in Brooklyn

Alicia’s fascination with the handwriting on La Garza’s invitation reveals her own deep-seated conflict over class and identity. She recognizes the “loose and bulbous cursive” as the “penmanship equivalent of a Brooklyn accent” (65), a telltale sign of the identity hiding underneath the one La Garza requires for her ascent into elite environments. This minor observation exposes the core of Alicia’s internal division because it mirrors her own aspirations; she navigates the world as two different people, keeping her life with her fiancé, James, separate from her Brooklyn life because she is “unsure which version to be” (70). In this way, her admiration on La Garza stems from the designer’s apparent success at transcending this very conflict: she is unapologetically from the neighborhood, yet commands respect in the highest echelons of fashion and finance. Alicia is drawn to La Garza because she embodies a resolution to the class-based code-switching that defines Alicia’s own life. In deciding to lie to James and help La Garza, Alicia is choosing to explore a version of herself that she has long suppressed.

Looking at the characters through this lens, the legendary party at La Garza’s studio is a carefully orchestrated performance designed to solidify her brand and announce her arrival to the New York elite. The mystique of her events, which “manifested like mirages in the Brooklyn night” (66), is a deliberate part of her strategy, creating an aura of spontaneity and cultural cachet. However, the spectacular, multi-level affair is revealed to be a “Trojan-horsed” corporate event, with the dramatic IPO announcement as its climax. This strategic blurring of the personal and professional demonstrates how La Garza’s primary asset is her own curated persona. As Matteo warns, she is “not a creature of wasted movements” (74); every detail, from the themed floors to the climactic drumline, is an element in the construction of her own legend. This performance is an important component of her pursuit of The Illusion of the American Dream, as she understands that for a woman of color from the projects, projecting an image of inevitable, spectacular success is a prerequisite for being taken seriously by the financial world she aims to conquer.

This theme of strategic performance extends from the party to La Garza’s fundamental approach to business, which she frames as a form of seduction. She is brutally pragmatic about how she must operate in a male-dominated world, arguing that men open doors for women only when they “feel intrigued by the glimmer of possibility on the other side” (121). Her plan to win over Devon is likewise a performance, in which her cooking, her appearance, and her professional pitch are all tools in a complex charm offensive. This influence impacts Alicia, who quickly becomes a student of La Garza’s methods. She graduates from lying to her fiancé to faking a sick day at work to playing an ignorant go-between for La Garza and Devon. Her increasing comfort with deception marks her transformation from a peripheral admirer to a trusted accomplice. She learns from La Garza that ambition can require a degree of moral compromise and self-estrangement, forcing her to act “like a stranger to myself” in the pursuit of a more exciting and volatile future (70).

An impromptu pub crawl through historic Brooklyn bars highlights the central tension between authentic neighborhood identity and the forces of gentrification. Fleeing the polished world of business and high-value transactions, La Garza and Alicia seek refuge in old-school establishments like Hank’s Saloon and Freddy’s. This journey through endangered local landmarks becomes Xochitl Gonzalez’s way of immersing the reader in an authentic version of the Brooklyn the characters live in, a place populated by old-timers and activists, rather than the “replacements” who see Brooklyn as a trendy commodity. This pilgrimage directly engages with the theme of The Erasure of Working-Class Spaces, as the two women bond over their shared status as “real Brooklyn babies” in a city that is rapidly being remade without them (78). A deep irony emphasizes their celebration: They are toasting the success of a deal to launch an IPO, a financial instrument that fuels the very corporate development and displacement they lament. They are at once mourning the loss of their Brooklyn and leveraging its cultural capital for their own advancement.

The reunion between La Garza and Devon is staged around a symbolic custom suit-fitting, which becomes a vehicle for both intimacy and manipulation. The ice-blue jacket La Garza has crafted for Devon is a tactical deployment of their shared history, demonstrating an intimate knowledge of his tastes and vulnerabilities. The act of fitting the suit likewise becomes a scene of charged physical and emotional proximity, where professional ambition and unresolved personal history are deliberately entangled. The embroidered initials “HBTY” function as a private code, a secret key that unlocks a past he has tried to bury. While this act is a form of Finding Authentic Connection Through Art and Culture, it is weaponized to achieve a business goal. This manipulation is further complicated by the dubious financial ethics underpinning the IPO, as revealed when La Garza offers Alicia a role in Augusts’s insider trading scheme. Devon’s mental health crisis, in which he feels “like twenty-three and lost all over again” (133), proves the efficacy of La Garza’s strategy, revealing how the armor of his corporate success is easily pierced by the power of a shared past.