ninican Literature
1igrant enclave in a
tdentity as a depen-
111 the problematic
1 the historical tra-
. We have seen that
political and social
,erate to create the
1 of nationhood is
ther, as in the case
tee can become its
tt makes it easy to
io, but that in the
·ategist whose self-
They may also be
:urs under the sign
em6n Sagredo Jr.,
an contingency-
out this chapter I
ibal as types that
the stances they
Rico as a mixture
arate reality, with
es-Gonzalez in
t' of Puerto Rico,
nd poses an emo-
:hat makes home,
ers, I describe the
mmigrants to the
3 A How-To Guide to Building a Boy
Dominican Diasporic Subjectivities in
Junot Dfaz's Drown
To write is to become. Not to become a writer (or poet), but to
ecome, intransitively. Not when writing adopts established keynotes
or policy, but when it traces for itself lines of evasion. 1
-Trinh T. Minh-ha
For me it's more like anti-nostalgic. 2
-Junot Diaz
As we have seen in the careers of two intellectuals, Pedro Henriquez Urena
and Jose Luis Gonzalez, and in our analyses of fictional constructions of
the Dominican migrant in the stories of Lydia Vega and Magali Garcia
Ramis, the diasporic subject emerges in zones of contact with an alienated
sense of his or her place in the symbolic sphere; some contacts reactivate
certain latent zones of contact that have historically layered the "home-
land," and that remain as differences lurking under the homogeneous glaze
of the country; other contacts are shocks to the coding system of identi-
ty-for instance, importantly, race; and all of these contacts are subsumed
under the category of the "stranger." For the diasporic subject, as I have
een emphasizing, there are two moments in which the 'stranger' image
frames the affectivity of the diasporic subject: the moment of displacement
and the moment of return. As we will see in this chapter, the relationship
etween identity and the collective codes of identity are tested in both of
these moments, which destructure essentialist assumptions to which the
affective organization of the subject is normatively bound.
In distinction from the writers and the possibilities of diasporic posi-
tioning that we have been dealing with so far, this chapter takes up the
question of diasporic identity in the post-Trujillo era in the United States,
which occurs as the melting pot model in the United States-the model of
assimilation to a white American norm-is
eaking down.
This chapter takes up the politics of diaspora and asks whether it is pos-
sible to think of power relations beyond-or perhaps before-collective
identities. Can we understand how power in particular zones of contact
plays itself out on the level of individual perceptions? How docs one become,
to take the example we have been pursuing in this book, a Dominican
•·· .. ~:··.· •
118 Na
atives of Migration and Displacement in Dominican Literature
diasporic subject? Is it a form of induction into a larger na
ative one has
no part in creating? Do the te
itorial borders defining diasporic neighbor-
hoods and homes independently shape the new social realities one faces
in the diaspora, or are these te
itorial borders themselves established as
the unconscious prolongation of the regime of repressed emotions that was
formed elsewhere, back in the supposed place of origin? And does origin
always stretch backwards into myth? Nietzsche, in the Uses and Disad-
vantages of History for Life,1 codified a rebellion against the nineteenth-
century orthodoxies of memory and history by asking whether history
is not, indeed, the institutional co
elate of a disease or wound-of the
scars that mark the body and, by extension, mark off te
itories. Foucault,
interpreting this essay in "Nietzsche, Genealogy and History," writes that
Nietzsche saw as a sort of illness the compulsion, within Western culture,
to return again and again to a "suprahistorical perspective: a history whose
function is to compose the finally reduced diversity of time into a totality
fully closed upon itself; a history that always encourages subjective recogni-
tions and attributes a form of reconciliation to all the displacements of the
past."4 From this perspective, the boundaries that divide and link are not
merely the neutral epiphenomena of two cultures or te
itories in contact:
they possess an interior life, replicated in the subject.
The identities constructed as a result of these border crossings are ones
that are acquired in movement; as the fate of the subject is unfolded, the
norm of a stability that would make the subject predictable and identifiable
is felt as something false, or at least contingent, to the border crosser. In
proportion as the crossing of the border is existentially important, identi-
ties become nomadic in the sense that they are not fixed and are in a con-
stant state of mutability. I call this form of identity in-movement nomadic
following Rosi Braidotti's idea that "nomadic identity" is " ... a theoreti-
cal option ... that for me translates into a style of thinking."' I am going
to argue, in this chapter, that this nomadic style of thinking and being
emerged as the dominant cultural signifier within the Dominican immi-
grant experience in the United States from the 1960s to the present and can
e seen in the diasporic Dominican literature. One of the clearest expres-
sions of the nomadic style of thinking is the stories that make up Drown
(1996)," by the Dominican-born and New Jersey-raised Pulitzer Prize-
winning author Junot Dfaz. The critical attention Dfaz's Drown acquired
ight from the start continues with the publication of his novel The Brief
and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008), for which he earns the Pulitzer
Prize and in which he continues some of the themes and concerns he had
initially played with in his short stories. It would not be exaggerating to
call Dfaz's work canonical-earning this status through the fact that it is
constantly refe
ed to over the past decade of criticism on Dominican lit- ·
erature written in English in the United States. It works, in that literature,
in opposition to a certain more cele
atory strain that can be found in the .
works of other important Dominican-American literary figures such as, in
A How-To Guide to Building a Boy 1~
particular, Julia Alvarez. Marisel Moreno suggested this very circumstance
with regard to· the positioning of Dfaz's work within the corpus of U.S.
Latino/a literature when she noted a few years ago that "The recognition of
Dfaz as part of the U.S. literary landscape ... constitutes a significant step
towards the integration of Dominican literature into both the American
mainstream and the U.S. Latino literature canons." 7 Following the critical
attention directed at Diaz's Pulitzer-winning novel, we can perhaps state
that Dominican literature written in English can no longer be categorized
absolutely as a "marginal literature"; Moreno is right to suggest that Diaz's
work
ings a new level of visibility to these na
atives while also articulat-
ing an understanding of what immigration means to many Dominicans,
who even in their places of origin often confronted an official discourse that
excluded them. Like Alvarez, Diaz's writing reflects the generational dif-
ferences and concerns of Dominican immigrants residing in u
an spaces
in the United States who face different challenges in the era of identity as
they attempt to find some niche in their new su
oundings. But there are
major differences between these two canonical authors and they relate to
the "type" of immigration experiences they depict and the type of identities
their characters assume as a result of these because "they each represent a
distinct type of Dominican exile, political and economic, respectively."x In
Diaz's stories particular emphasis is placed on the multiple-layered experi-
ences ha
ored in the notion of immigration. However, what is critically
interesting from my point of view is the muting of the nomad in Alvarez's
work, the lack of an emphasis on traveling through realms of alternate
experiences simply by existing as a Dominican. Alvarez's works in poetry,
short stories, and novels have gravitated to the effects of the Trujillo dic-
tatorship on a certain subgroup of middle- and upper-class Dominicans,
which haunts the immigration experiences and acculturation processes her
characters undergo in the United States and shapes their nostalgia for a
lost socioeconomic status.9 In contrast, the immigrant motivations of Junot
Diaz's characters are uniformly triggered by the larger economic effect of
Trujillo and post-Trujillo policies in the Dominican Republic. Diaz's char-
acters come from families who are well acquainted with poverty, and they
move to the United States ca
ying with them issues of race, sexuality, and
gender that formed part of a complex back in the Dominican Republic and
form one in the United States as well. These are the conditions that affect
their daily life in the communities they craft while in New York City and
New Jersey.
As a demographic fact, the Dominican diaspora has mainly clustered
in u
an areas in the United States even if the background of many of the
immigrants goes back to rural areas in the Dominican Republic. This is
another of the violent ruptures that immigration has
ought as migrants
navigate oppressive political situations (legacies of U.S. imperialism and
the Trujillo regime) and attempt to find the co
ect mix of 'authentic'
and assimilative attitudes within the United States. As a result, the usual
118 Na
atives of Migration and Displacement in Dominican Literature
diasporic subject? Is it a form of induction into a larger na
ative one has
no part in creating? Do the te
itorial borders defining diasporic neighbor-
hoods and homes independently shape the new social realities one faces
in the diaspora, or are these te
itorial borders themselves established as
the unconscious prolongation of the regime of repressed emotions that was
formed elsewhere, back in the supposed place of origin? And does origin
always stretch backwards into myth? Nietzsche, in the Uses and Disad-
vantages of History for Life,1 codified a rebellion against the nineteenth-
century orthodoxies of memory and history by asking whether history
is not, indeed, the institutional co
elate of a disease or wound-of the
scars that mark the body and, by extension, mark off te
itories. Foucault,
interpreting this essay in "Nietzsche, Genealogy and History," writes that
Nietzsche saw as a sort of illness the compulsion, within Western culture,
to return again and again to a "suprahistorical perspective: