Abstract
As exemplified by Junot Díaz in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Angie Cruz in Let It Rain Coffee, Dominican diaspora authors grapple with the question of what happens when a central part of a people’s lived experience and embodiment is suppressed by hegemonic national discourses. I argue that in their novels they show that, when blackness is removed from Dominican national discourse and representation, what is left is not whiteness or mestizaje, but a “deracialized consciousness.” These authors subvert racial discourse by using the family-nation allegory in foundational romances in unintended ways, emptying the discourse of its rhetorical value, and make way for “rayano consciousness” and a queer futurity of dominicanidad.
Resumen
Tal como ejemplifican Junot Díaz en The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao y Angie Cruz en Let It Rain Coffee, los escritores de la diáspora dominicana luchan con la cuestión de lo que ocurre cuando los discursos nacionales hegemónicos suprimen una parte fundamental de la experiencia vivida y ejemplificada por un pueblo. Argumento que sus novelas muestran que cuando se elimina la negritud del discurso y la representación nacional dominicana, lo que queda no es blancura o mestizaje, sino una “conciencia desracializada”. Estos autores trastocan el discurso racial de formas no intencionadas, utilizando la alegoría de familia y nación en romances fundacionales, restando valor retórico al discurso, y abriendo camino a una “consciencia rayana” y un futuro queer de dominicanidad.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Safran proposed six characteristics to consider a group of people as part of a diaspora: among these are dispersed from the homeland, “they retain a collective memory, vision, or myth about their original homeland,” and “they continue to relate, personally or vicariously, to that homeland in one way or another, and their ethnocommunal consciousness and solidarity are importantly defined by the existence of such a relationship” (1991, pp. 83–84).
In Cecilia Valdés, the title character is the light-skinned illegitimate daughter of a rich white man, who unknowingly falls in love and has a child with her own father’s legitimate son, Leonardo. He leaves her to marry a rich white woman of his own social class. Cecilia convinces one of her suitors to kill Leonardo on his wedding day. She is thrown in jail after the assassination when it is discovered that it was her doing. The incestuous relationship between brother and sister is meant to reinforce the impossibility of a Black woman, regardless of how light-skinned she is, to be the foundational mother of Cuba.
Rodríguez chooses this name to refer to the Trujillato’s ideology, referencing the fact that Trujillo changed the name of Santo Domingo, the nation’s capital, to Ciudad Trujillo in 1936 (2005, p. 26). After a hurricane destroyed part of the city of Santo Domingo in 1930, Trujillo took that as an opportunity to rebuild the city, rename it after himself, and use the new city as a symbol of the “Era de Trujillo,” as he liked to call his regime (Rodríguez 2005, p. 27). According to Ciudad Trujillista ideology, dominicanidad first became vulnerable with the Haitian occupation of 1822 and continued to be threatened in the twentieth century by Haitian immigration to the Dominican Republic (Rodríguez 2005).
Dallas was an American television show that aired from 1978 to 1991. It followed the extravagant lives of the Ewings, “a wealthy family in the oil business” (About the Show: Introduction to the TV Series Dallas nd). Pamela Barnes was one of the main characters, who grew up poor but goes on to live a life of luxury, when by chance she meets, falls in love with, and marries Bobby Ewing, the youngest son of the patriarch of the Ewing family (Character Biographies: Pamela Ewing nd).
“In contrast to most European immigrants, Caribbean immigrants maintain constant contact with their original cultures. The restless circulation of people between the Caribbean and New York City has engendered many transnational communities” (Duany 2008, p. 61).
Literary scholar Elena Machado Sáez also engages Sommer’s conceptualization of foundational fiction and applies it to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, arguing that it functions as a foundational romance for the Dominican diaspora in the United States, with Yunior and Oscar as the foundational couple. She posits that, although traditionally seen as distinct, the diaspora cannot escape the constraints of “the code of nationalist belonging” (2011, p. 526).
Literary critic Weese highlights how Yunior is rendered “Oscar’s double” in multiple ways: Yunior, as Oscar, is severely beaten up, is a “‘closet’ nerd” and knows all the sci-fi/fantasy references Oscar mentions, and is parallel to Oscar in the “‘unmanly’ act of crying” (2014, p. 93).
References
About the Show: Introduction to the TV Series Dallas. nd. Dallas: The Official Site for the Hit Television Series. http://www.ultimatedallas.com/bigd/. Accessed March 21, 2019.
Al Shalabi, R. 2015. The Shared History of the United States and the Dominican Republic in Angie Cruz’s Let It Rain Coffee. Label Me Latina/o. http://labelmelatin.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Shared-History-of-the-United-States-and-the-Dominican-Republic-in-Angie-Cruz-Let-It-Rain-Coffee.pdf. Accessed 4 August 2017.
Character Biographies: Pamela Ewing. nd. Dallas: The Official Site for the Hit Television Series. http://www.ultimatedallas.com/characters/pamelabio.htm. Accessed 21 March 2019.
Chen, E.W.-C. 2008. “You Are Like Us, You Eat Plátanos”: Chinese Dominicans, Race, Ethnicity, and Identity. Afro-Hispanic Review 27 (1): 23–40.
Chetty, R., and A. Rodríguez. 2015. The Challenge and Promise of Dominican Black Studies. Black Scholar 45 (2): 1–9.
Cruz, A. 2005. Let It Rain Coffee. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Díaz, J. 2007. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books.
Duany, J. 2008. Quisqueya on the Hudson: The Transnational Identity of Dominicans in Washington Heights, 2nd ed., CUNY Dominican Studies Institute Dominican Research Monograph Series New York: CUNY Dominican Studies Institute.
García Peña, L. 2016. The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Horn, M. 2014. Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Machado Sáez, E. 2011. Dictating Desire, Dictating Diaspora: Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as Foundational Romance. Contemporary Literature 52 (3): 522–555.
Maillo-Pozo, S. 2018. Nuevas subjetividades: contracultura y bachata en tres cuentos de Aurora Arias. Chasqui 47 (1): 84–99.
Méndez, D. 2012. La bachata del Gay volador: El desafío a la (homo)sexualidad y la identidad dominicana en la música de Andy Peña y en Bachata del ángel caído de Pedro Antonio Valdez. In El sonido de la música en la narrativa dominicana: ensayos sobre identidad, nación y performance, 195–215. Santo Domingo: Instituto de Estudios Caribeños.
Moreno, M. 2008. Dominican Dreams: Diasporic Identity in Angie Cruz’s Let It Rain Coffee. Sargasso, Quisqueya: La República Extended II: 101116.
Muñoz, J.E. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press.
Ramírez, D. 2018. Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present. New York: New York University Press.
Rodríguez, N.E. 2005. Escrituras de desencuentro en la República Dominicana. Mexico, D.F.: Siglo Veintiuno Editores.
Safran, W. 1991. Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1 (1): 83–99.
Sommer, D. 1990. Irresistible Romance: The Foundational Fictions of Latin America. In Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha, 71–98. London: Routledge.
Sommer, D. 1991. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sullivan, N. 2003. A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. New York: New York University Press.
Torres-Saillant, S. 1998. The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity. Latin American Perspectives 25 (3): 126–146.
Weese, K. 2014. ‘Tú no eres nada de dominicano’: Unnatural Narration and De-Naturalizing Gender Constructs in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Journal of Men’s Studies 22 (2): 89–104.
Wright, M. 2015. An Epidemic of Negrophobia: Blackness and the Legacy of the US Occupation of the Dominican Republic. Black Scholar 45 (2): 21–33.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Arreola, V. Literal allegories: Queering the family-nation in contemporary Dominican diaspora fiction. Lat Stud 17, 323–337 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-019-00193-z
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-019-00193-z