Why the captured and abandoned kitten at the end?

What is the significance of Yolanda’s captured and abandoned kitten? What does she mean when she says, “There are still times I wake up at three o’clock in the morning and peer into the darkness. At that hour and in that loneliness, I hear her, a black furred thing lurking in the corners of my life, her magenta mouth opening, wailing over some violation that lies at the center of my art.”? (286) And what violation is she talking about?

Well, I skimmed through the chapters specifically about Yolanda to see if I could come up with answers to my questions…and I found some interesting correlations between Yoyo and this little forlorn kitten. Although some of the chapters offer the points of view of different family members, the majority of the book focuses on Yolanda and I think the last chapter is strategically written to provide an encoded reflection of Yolanda’s life; the way this fragile kitten is abused and trapped, parallels the ways in which Yolanda is stifled and violated throughout her life.

Yolanda doesn’t seem to find her place or fit in anywhere she goes. In the first chapter of the book, her relatives single her out as “Miss America”, and “look[ing] terrible” and they scold her when she reverts to speaking English, after having forgotten her Spanish vocabulary due to living in the States. She is also noted as the sister who (with cousin Mundin) formed the only boy/girl pair of “best friend cousins” out of her family. It is the same in America, for example in her first year of school in the States, she is the “only immigrant” in her class and is therefore given a “special seat” so that she could be tutored without disturbing other kids. Whether it’s in her homeland, or America, Yolanda is considered as “different”, therefore it is quite symbolic that the kitten that Yoyo immediately singles out, is “one who had four little white paws and a white spot between the ears, fully dressed, so it looked as opposed to the others who were careless and had lost their shoes and their caps.”

Like the kitten, Yoyo has been violated, stifled and put in a box all throughout her life. She is used by people like Rudy who only want her for sex, and stifled by people like John, who see her only under a certain light (for example: only allowing her to have Americanized nicknames). In the same way that she traps the kitten in her drum, Yolanda is trapped in a cage that is built by those around her, and is unable to escape on her own. This is evidenced when she winds up in a mental institute and relies completely on the doctor to save her. Yolanda has a drum but can’t play, just like the kitten has a life but can’t live. She is constantly tormented; constantly crying out, like the meowing kitten, but is too fragile to be able to save herself. Maybe it is because her “roots” are torn up and transplanted before she is able to develop her own sense of self and so she spends her whole life trying to figure out who she is; while being caught between two opposing worlds. In the end, she winds up wounded and lost and wailing over some violation that lies at the center of her art.