Previous
26. Exhaustion
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in With the Fire on High, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Coming of Age and Teen Parenthood
Creativity vs. Professional Norms
Food and Connection
Caregiving, Independence, and Identity
Support, Community, and Mentorship
Summary
Analysis
Emoni’s Philadelphia neighborhood, Fairhill, reminds her of Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities. Most residents are Puerto Rican, though the neighborhoods look nothing like Puerto Rico. Outsiders call the area “the Badlands” because there’s such a high crime rate, but there’s more good in the area than bad. There are gang fights, but there are also dance performances, a great rec center, and a barbershop that leaves a cooler of water on the sidewalk in the summer. People are afraid to come here because it’s supposedly dangerous—but when outsiders move in, good things like farmers’ markets and regular trash pickup happen. Recently, Emoni has noticed more sold signs on houses and white people on public transit. The neighborhood is both sweet and sour, and a person has to get to know Fairhill to get to know Emoni.
Emoni has a love-hate relationship with gentrification, or the process of typically white, wealthy folks moving into her neighborhood. Gentrification brings about good things like farmers’ markets, as she notes. But gentrification also tends to displace a neighborhood’s original residents, in this case Puerto Rican people. In general, though, Emoni proposes that people misjudge her neighborhood in the same way they misjudge her. They see what they expect to see—a Black and Puerto Rican teen mom, or a supposedly scary neighborhood—and ignore all the good things, like Emoni’s passion for cooking and the kindness and community spirit that exists in Fairhill.
Themes
