As a character, Esmeralda is on multiple journeys. During the course of the book, she moves from city to city and out of childhood into something closer to adulthood, maturing not simply through aging but also through experience. She moves from a low-income neighborhood into abject poverty and then back before moving to New York and a much more affluent situation. Her early romantic fantasies are sullied by experiences with inappropriate, exploitative men who cast shadows on her ideas about love, and her move to New York brings her face-to-face with ethnic, racial, and linguistic prejudice. The book thus explores how forces like poverty, xenophobia, and misogyny complicate the transition to adulthood, ultimately forcing Esmeralda to grow up prematurely. 

Part of the pressure to mature quickly stems from the family’s financial circumstances. For instance, when Esmeralda’s mother goes to work, Esmerelda has to take charge of her siblings, placing her in a quasi-parental role when she is only a child herself. The struggle to survive in New York compounds the situation. Esmeralda’s English may be limited at first, but she is more fluent than her mother and therefore serves as her translator in places like the welfare office. These scenes speak to the burden that the children of first-generation immigrants sometimes face, their language skills making them their parents’ representatives in official interactions in ways that flip traditional parent-child dynamics.

However, it is in Esmeralda’s experiences of sex—and sexual violence—that the theme is most apparent. Esmeralda is sexualized from a young age by both boys and men. Moreover, this sexualization is normalized; the book’s female characters repeatedly discuss men who ostensibly cannot control themselves around women, but rather than attributing their predatory actions to patriarchal conditioning, the women attribute it to sexually provocative behavior by other women. Consequently, when Esmeralda is at her window and a man starts masturbating after waving to her, she does not blame him but rather assumes that she did something to encourage him. She does not have a framework for understanding sexual harassment. The result of treating women as responsible for men’s sexuality is that the girls in the memoir learn early that they must police their body, appearance, and behavior in an effort to avoid attracting male attention.

Ultimately, Esmeralda thrives despite these experiences. Her early exposure to sexual harassment, for example, does not prevent her from settling into a romantic relationship as the book closes. There is even some suggestion that Esmeralda’s experiences force her to become more confident and assertive, as when she speaks out against her mother’s abuse. Nevertheless, the book mourns what Esmeralda has to endure even as it celebrates who she becomes.