Aristotle Mendoza

"“The problem with my life was that it was someone else's idea.”"Angel Aristotle "Ari" Mendoza is the main character of Benjamin Alire Sáenz's 2012 novel, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. He is Dante Quintana's best friend and eventual boyfriend. He is the son of Santiago "Jaime" Mendoza and Liliana "Lily" Mendoza. Aristotle is more commonly known as simply Ari throughout the book, a nickname he created himself by shortening his middle name.

In October 2021, it was announced that Max Pelayo would portray Ari in the original novel's film adaptation, directed by Aitch Alberto.

Physical Appearance
Ari describes himself as having darker skin than Dante, and looking "more Mexican" than Dante, even when he looks pale from influenza[1]. The blurb on the novel's back cover also states: "Dante is fair skinned. Ari's features are much darker." Very soon after Ari's sixteenth birthday, Dante describes Ari as having long hair, being significantly more muscular, and resembling "Che Guevara without the mustache". Ari also discovered that he was "now shorter than Dante" (who was 5'11", or approximately 180 centimeters), implying that he was only taller than Dante before his temporary stay in Chicago with his parents. His exact height remains unknown[2].

In Aristotle and Dante Dive Into the Waters of the World, he is told on more than one occasion by various characters, including friends, teachers, and his mother's church friends, that he is an incredibly handsome young man who bears a strong resemblance to his father.

Personality and Cognitive Style
At the beginning of the orignial nove, Ari presents himself to the word with a tough-guy exterior, possibly because he's bitter because he perceives the world as having treated him badly. He is described as "introverted and timid" and as someone who "has a hard time with words and suffers from self-doubt". At the beginning of his story, Ari demonstrates his distaste for forming bonds with others and investing time into platonic relationships when he decides to visit the local public pool on a whim, despite the fact that he cannot swim. On his way, Ari decided to raise his middle finger three consecutive times at a pack of tween boys who lived in the neighborhood after they mocked him unprompted for his obvious lack of friends. This scene's narration clarifies these boys didn't scare him at all, that he created and maintained grudges easily, and that he had a temper.[3]

His short temper is once again on display later when he and Dante are sitting on his front porch and the two boys witness three tween boys shooting at sparrows with BB guns. When Dante confronts them, Ari steps in to back Dante up and threaten the three boys enough ("you're lucky I don't shove this up your ass") that they eventually walked away[4].

However, despite his presentation as cold, tough, and unfeeling, Aristotle actually frequently feels inferior to many people, especially because of his inability to relate to so many boys his age, and consequential lack of desire to be around any of them. When he overhears two older male lifeguards comparing a girl to a tree, Ari likens their intelligence to "a piece of dead wood infested with termites".

He also states that being a guy was something that embarrassed him, because of the words and actions coming from most other people who shared his gender, as well as saying that the feasibility of himself growing up and becoming like them depressed him. As the story unfolds and Dante's beyond-platonic love for Ari gradually makes itself known, we see this internalized hatred of men slowly morph into internalized homophobia, a form of self-oppression and denial likely stemming from toxic/fragile masculinity and, in Ari's case, his own fear of confronting his involuntary thoughts and emotions.

Biography
Ari was born Angel Aristotle Mendoza in El Paso, Texas, on August 30th, 1971. At some point, he came up with the nickname "Ari"—a shortened version of his middle name—and began going by that instead of "Angel" or "Aristotle," because he didn't like the connotations that either name carried with it. According to him, every guy named Angel that Ari had ever met "was a real asshole" and he consequently grew to hate the name. "Aristotle" was not a name he was a fan of, either, even though he knew that his parents intended no harm in giving him such a name, because he knew he was named after his grandfather, Aristotiles. Ari says that everyone expected something of him that he couldn't give them because he shared a name with the world's most famous philosopher.

As a child, he participated in and completed the Cub Scouts, and later the Boy Scouts for one year, something that he hated and eventually managed to convince his father to let him stop doing. He also played basketball at some point prior to the beginning of the story, and baseball from elementary school through the sixth grade. Ari says he also hated being a member of the baseball team and that he only played it for his father's sake. In the first grade, he met his friend Gina Navarro (and possibly also Susie Byrd) and Julian Enriquez, a boy he'd later punch in the face and send to the emergency room after Julian and his friends beat Dante up in an alley for kissing another boy. He was ten years old in the first grade, and in his journal entries, he describes it as "an excellent year," one in which he had a good teacher and everyone seemed to like him. Ari also says in his journal entries that he didn't like being eleven, or twelve, or thirteen, or fourteen, or fifteen.

Trivia

 * Ari named his wheelchair "Fidel."
 * Ari's actual first name is "Angel."
 * Ari does not like Coca-Cola.
 * Ari doesn't know any songs by "The Beatles."
 * Ari's penmanship is described, by himself, to be very bad.
 * Ari likes dogs and wants a dog throughout the novel until he finally finds and adopts Legs.
 * He claims starting every summer by arguing with his mother is a tradition.
 * He enjoys Batman, Spider-Man, and the Incredible Hulk graphic novels.

Notes & References

 * 1) ↑ Page 72 (Sparrows Falling From the Sky, Chapter Four). "I still look more Mexican than you do."
 * 2) ↑ Page 241 (Remember the Rain, Chapter Two).
 * 3) ↑ Pages 12-13 (The Different Rules of Summer, Chapter Three).
 * 4) ↑ Pages 51-52 (The Different Rules of Summer, Chapter Twelve).