Olga Dies Dreaming

Olga’s 45-year-old brother, Prieto, is the congressman responsible for his home district in Sunset Park. Like Olga, he was raised to be a revolutionary. For much of his life, Prieto has aspired to make his mother proud. At first, it works: Blanca considered his success as a politician and his attempts to lobby for Puerto Rican interests noble. Prieto is characterized by his idealism and optimism and his belief that he can make a difference in the lives of his constituents, which is why greeting them on their way to the subway is one of his favorite parts of his job. Unlike Olga, who grew up believing that politicians are corrupt, Prieto “got all those same lessons and came out believing he could be different” (81).

However, Prieto is a closeted gay man, which allows the greedy Selby brothers to blackmail him into voting as they want him to. These pro-capitalist votes alienate Prieto from his mother. This is especially the case when it comes to PROMESA, a real-life law creating an oversight board to handle Puerto Rico’s government after it defaulted on loans during the 2008 financial crisis—but the board prioritizes the interests of large corporate stakeholders over those of regular residents of the island. His mother sees Prieto's coerced vote for PROMESA as the ultimate sellout and effectively disowns him, calling him a lombriz, or worm. From there, she cuts him off, only willing to offer him affection when his actions align with her wants.

Prieto feels shame about his sexuality, as “a description of the perfect Latino man did not include the word ‘gay’” (112). However, Prieto ultimately cuts ties with his mother when she insults him for being blackmailed for being gay, refuses to even look at a picture of his daughter, and reveals that she didn’t want children in the first place. Realizing that Blanca only sees her children as pawns in revolution, Prieto rebukes her when she tries to embrace him, symbolizing his unwillingness to be emotionally manipulated by her again.

Free of his mother’s corrosive influence, and newly connected and supported by other family members, Prieto publicly comes out about his sexuality and reveals that he is HIV-positive. Instead of devastating him, this diagnosis re-energizes his desire to fight for Puerto Rico. He is unwilling to be anything but himself.

Blanca only appears once in the novel, but she looms large in the lives of her children through letters. A cold and calculating revolutionary who never wanted to be a mother, Blanca left her children to be part of the cause. Her letters give context for readers unfamiliar with Puerto Rican history, and also show how willing Blanca is to manipulate and isolate her family members from each other (most awfully when she insists that Prieto not visit his dying father, Johnny). At the end of the novel, Blanca begins her revolution, taking the first steps to free Puerto Rico from American control.

Blanca has always had specific visions for her children’s lives, demanding that they value Puerto Rico and revolution as much as she does. She lauds Prieto for many of his accomplishments, pressures him to stay closeted, and expects him to use his political power for her ends. Her letters to Olga are more intimate, and thus actually more emotionally abusive. Blanca named Olga for an activist she admired, and she sees some of herself in her daughter—the two share the same eyes. Blanca excoriates Olga for attending an Ivy League university, where she claims that “the only thing you’re certain to lose is your sense of self” (45). Olga becomes a wedding planner to the uber-rich as a kind of rebellion, though Blanca sends her many letters decrying this profession as playing into stereotypes.

When Prieto votes for PROMESA, she stops speaking to him, making it clear that her love is conditional. Though it is difficult for her children to shake Blanca’s emotional abuse, both finally do so. For Prieto, her unwillingness to speak with him about his daughter and her confession that she didn’t want children prove to be the end of their relationship. For Olga, this comes when Blanca ignores Olga’s sexual assault by Dick because Olga is no longer useful to Blanca’s revolutionaries. In parallel, Blanca’s destructive secret-keeping ends when Tía Lola finds Blanca’s letters and reads them aloud, thus exorcising Blanca from their lives. Even when Blanca gets her revolution, Olga chooses to ignore her mother’s actions and instead concentrate on her happiness and mental well-being.