Culture as food and music
There is a deep longing for Rosa (in the title story, Now We Will Be Happy) and for the narrator of the opening stories to discover some important connection to their cultural and ethnic identities. Both are of African and Hispanic descent with ties to Puerto Rico, and both discover that their ambient desires for more connection to their culture actually have tangible solutions: to enjoy the music and food of one's culture.
Death and darkness
The problem of death begins early in the stories, because the protagonist's grandmother dies, leaving her with the fond, haunting memory of her love and support. Her last memory of her grandmother is during a visit to see the grandmother who had already fallen ill. The illness, the death, the sacred quest for identity, and the darkness of later stories of violence and abuse—together they form a thematic portrait of the true difficulties of human life, which are death and suffering.
Family and identity
Love is depicted in this novel as a method through which important identity crises can be explored and even answered. For instance, a mortal question plagues the young narrator—about her role in society as a pariah (because she is mixed raced). Her grandmother's love is big enough to make those issues relatively small. Through the intimacy of that trust, her grandmother was able to heal her granddaughter in a way by giving her a root for her identity that is more valid and authentic than the approval of others could ever have been.
