Mamacita is a big woman who lives across the street from Esperanza. She arrived one day with her baby boy in a yellow cab, dressed in salmon pink, and then never left the house again. Some people say she is too fat to get out of the door, or that she does not want to go down the stairs, but Esperanza believes that she stays at home because she is afraid to speak English. She sits by the window, listening to Spanish radio stations and singing songs in Spanish. Then, one day, her son started to sing the Pepsi commercial he had heard on television, and she cried because she could not understand him.