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What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez
Abstract
Set during the recession in 2008, after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and the election of Barack Obama, What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez is a novel following two working-class Puerto Rican sisters Nina and Jessica Ramirez from Staten Island, New York, as they set out to find their sister Ruthy, who disappeared in 1997 when she was thirteen years old. Eleven years later, Ruthy’s sisters and their mother, Dolores, spot a woman named Ruby, on a late-night, raunchy reality TV show called Catfight who they suspect is actually their sister, all grown up. On this show, a group of six diverse young women bitterly fight with one another while living in the same home for three months, as they compete to prove who is the “baddest” woman in the house. Told through the rotating points of view of Ruthy, her two sisters, and their mother, this novel explores intergenerational violence, race, colonialism, and silence, as the Ramirez family, haunted by Ruthy’s disappearance, searches for their lost loved one.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature
Recommended Citation
Jiménez, Claire, "What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez" (2022). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI29165851.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI29165851