Racial Identity

As Cruz has stated in interviews, she sees herself primarily as telling the stories of Puerto Rican women. Almost all the narrators of Telling Tales, and most of the people who populate their worlds, are Latino. The families in these monologues—with the exception of the family in "Sky"—are of Puerto Rican descent. Their stories are part of the history and poverty of the South Bronx: Tati who suffers from lead poisoning, as is more likely among lower-income children; the immigrants who catch rats with their bare hands for $20; the midget wrestlers. Cruz's stories are the history of the violence of the South Bronx: the man who rapes and kills a child, ripping her "open with his teeth"; the sixth-grade girls who stabs a classmate to pay her back for preventing them from stealing a friend's bus pass; the prostitute who is gang raped by a...