The afro latin experience in contemporary american literature and culture

Richardson, The Afro-Latin@ Experience in Contemporary American Literature and Culture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31921-6_1 The Afro-Latin @ Experience in Contemporary American Literature

Jill Toliver Richardson

EXPERIENCE IN

CONTEMPORARY

AMERICAN LITERATURE

AND CULTURE

Engaging Blackness

ative writing on the African diasporic experience in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States The Series includes books which address all aspects of Afro-Latin@ life and cultural expression throughout the hemisphere, with a strong focus on Afro-Latin@s in the United States This Series is the fi rst-of-its-kind to combine such a broad range of topics, including religion, race, transnational identity, history, literature, music and the arts, social and cultural theory, biography, class and economic relations, gender, sexuality, sociology, politics, and migration.

More information about this series at

The Afro-Latin@ Experience in

Contemporary

American Literature

and Culture

Engaging Blackness

Afro-Latin@ Diasporas

ISBN 978-3-319-31920-9 ISBN 978-3-319-31921-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31921-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016952793

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author (s) 2016

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Department of English

Borough of Manhattan Community College

Brooklyn , New York , USA

I would like to thank the late Juan Flores for all of his inspiration and guidance over the years Miriam Jiménez Román and Natasha Gordon- Chipembere for taking a chance on my work Barbara Webb for doing

so much over the years including calling me when I was absent for too long David Kazanjian for being so generous with his time Robert Reid-Pharr for always believing in my capabilities Thank you to the following for reading chapters and supporting me in a variety of necessary ways: James Ford, Michelle Wright, Candice Jenkins, Kathryn Quinn-Sanchez, Richard Perez, Christa Baiada, Mariposa, Racquel Goodison, Ivelisse Rodriguez, Jan Stahl, Jonathan Gray, Phil Stone, and Joyce Harte To my girls Mariama Covington Boone, Naima Wong, Ericka Ligon, Svetlana Bochman, Lisa Torre, Natalye Kennedy, Hollie Harper, Elizabeth Vilarino, Reggie Katagiri, Caitlin Lang, and Kibi Anderson for taking me out, organizing playdates, and listening I would also like to acknowledge the UNCF/Mellon Mays Fellowship Program, Cynthia Spence, and the late Rudolph Byrd for starting me on this journey and the Mellon Mays Fellowship Program family for helping to keep me going all of these years Also, thank you to the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship and the CUNY Scholar Incentive Award for providing me with the crucial time and fi nancial support needed to complete this project

1 Introduction 1

Notes 26

2 Enduring the Curse: The Legacy of Intergenerational

Trauma in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life

Notes 48

3 Haunting Legacies: Forging Afro- Dominican Women’s

Identity in Loida Maritza Pérez’s Geographies of Home 49

Notes 72

4 “Boricua, Moreno”: Laying Claim to Blackness

in the Post-Civil Rights Era 73

Notes 97

5 Afro-Latin Magical Realism, Historical Memory,

Identity, and Space in Angie Cruz’s Soledad

and Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints 99

Notes 119

6 Memory and the Afro-Cuban Missing Link

in H.G. Carrillo ’ s Loosing My Espanish 121

© The Author (s) 2016

J.T Richardson, The Afro-Latin@ Experience in Contemporary

American Literature and Culture,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31921-6_1

The Afro-Latin @ Experience in Contemporary American Literature and

Culture : Engaging Blackness examines contemporary fi ction and poetry

by US-based Afro-Latino/a writers originating from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean This study interrogates the complex notion of Afro-Latino/a identity as it relates to the concept of “triple consciousness” posited by Juan Flores as the multifaceted identity encompassing the separate iden-tifi cations of Americans and the often-confl icting identities of black and Latino/a people (“Triple Consciousness” 80–85) As Afro-Latinos/as are commonly unacknowledged within the larger Latino/a community, not accepted within the African-American community, and invisible citizens within the American national imagination, I concentrate on the writ-ers’ interpretations of the Afro-Latino/a predicament and the confl icted nature of the Afro-Latino/a experience

Miriam Román and Juan Flores defi ne Afro-Latinos/as as “people of African descent in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Spanish- speaking Caribbean, and by extension those of African descent in the United States where origins are in Latin America and the Caribbean” (1) For the purpose of this study I include fi ction and poetry written by Latino/a writ-ers who either immigrated to or were born in the US Furthermore, they acknowledge their own African heritage and self-identify as Afro-Latino/a,

or black, and interrogate the complexity of racial and national identity when confronted with the American system of bipolar racial categorization

Introduction

There is a small but growing canon of Afro-Latino/a writers who eate their experiences within the US and abroad in their fi ction, memoirs,

delin-and poetry Some of the foundational texts include Jesus Colon’s A Puerto

Rican in New  York , And Other Sketches (1961), Evelio Grillo’s Black Cuban , Black American : A Memoir (2000), and Puerto Rican/Cuban-

American Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets (1967) Additionally,

there is a long tradition of Afro-Puerto Rican performance poets who also published and were part of the Nuyorican Literary Movement of the 1960s and 1970s including Felipe Luciano, Tato Laviera, Pedro Pietri, Miguel Algarín, and Sandra María Esteves All of these writers and others are inspiring literary models for the latest generation of Afro-Latino/a writers writing and publishing today

Multiple literary critics have theorized concepts of Afro-Latino/a erature and, interestingly, have proposed varied interpretations of the genre, the themes, and the writers who should be included Rather than proposing a defi nition of Afro-Latino/a literature, Theresa Delgadillo delineates the common ideas and themes incorporated into Latino/a lit-erature, which demonstrate the Latino/a connection to the African dias-pora These include:

the recollection of history and racial formation in the Americas, the tion of African American culture as an aspect of Latino/a life, the incorpora- tion of African American expressions and forms of expressions in Latino/a literature, the representation of skin color and phenotype in ethnic and national subjectivities, the exploration of the shared conditions of discrimi- nation and marginalization between African Americans and Latino/as, and the discussion of the contrasts between experiences of racial formation for Latino/as and African Americans (384)

Delgadillo does not limit her observations to darker-skinned or typically black Latinos/as Rather, she acknowledges the presence of the African Diaspora in the culture of all Latinos/as Additionally, she high-lights the relationship and shared experiences with the African-American community as a defi ning feature of literature that engages the African Diaspora Additionally, she posits that the depiction of shared political, social, and cultural experiences with African-Americans refl ects a shared African ancestry

In her earlier examination of Afro-Latino/a literature, critic Fiona Mills includes both African-American and Latino/a texts She suggests that writing from both groups that acknowledges a shared relationship,

ideology, or affi nity with the other should be included within this genre Mills contends that even though:

the [African-American and Latino/a] writers I am working with all edge the existence of cultural traits and traditions unique to each ethnora- cial community, they also insist upon the creation of inter-ethnic alliances, such as I am terming ‘Afro-Latino/a,’ on the basis of shared experiences of oppression, a working-class ideology, emphasis on speaking from and for

acknowl-‘the people’ … a desire to offer cultural alternatives to assimilation, and to express anger and outrage at the existence of oppressive ideologies (116)

Again, within another formulation of literature that interrogates the Afro-Latino/a experience, engagement with the African-American com-munity takes precedence Although Mills’ defi nition of Afro-Latino/a literature has not become the primary model adopted and furthered by other literary critics in this emerging fi eld, her insistence on a shared dis-course between African-American and Latino/a communities is one that contemporary Afro-Latino/a writers recognize and examine in their texts Similarly to Delgadillo, literary critic William Luis recognizes that other Latino/a writers, beyond those typically categorized as Afro-Latino/a, engage the African Diaspora in their work He extends his defi nition of Afro-Latino/a to include these writers as well:

It should be clear by now that while this study underscores an Afro-Latino literature and identity fostered by Afro-Latino writers, it also accentuates

a literature written by Latinos Latino writers such as Esmeralda Santiago, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Cristina Garcia in a broad sense are also Afro- Latinas; they draw on what they perceive to be the strengths of blackness that includes the African component of Caribbean identity This is also the case of writers such as Julia Alvarez, whose presence in the United States allowed her to understand the linguistic and racial isolation experienced by Afro-Latinos, at home and in her parents’ country of origin (42)

Through his formulation of Afro-Latino/a literature, Luis develops a theory of an Afro-Latino/a consciousness that encompasses writers who may be designated as white Latinos/as These writers express an under-standing of the African component to their Caribbean identity and/or depict the jarring encounter that Afro-Latinos/as experience with racial discrimination in the US and the Caribbean homeland While I do not defi ne this group of writers as Afro-Latino/a in my project, I do acknowl-edge the profound infl uence of their writing and interrogation of race on contemporary Afro-Latino/a literature

This study examines post-Civil Rights era literary works by Afro- Latino/a writers originating from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Cuba Since the 1990s, the latest generation of Dominican-American writers has fl ourished and generated a large body of fi ction exploring the current transnational experience of Afro-Dominicans in the dias-pora In addition, while the latest group of Puerto Rican writers of the post- Nuyorican Literary Movement of the 1960s and 1970s has made a substantial foray into fi ction rendering the crack-cocaine-infused urban climate of the post-Civil Rights era, 1 Afro-Puerto Rican writers have pro-duced a substantial body of poetry written both for the page and as perfor-mance art inspired by the original group of performance poets associated with the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City

The writers in this study are all products of the post-Civil Rights era, the coinciding post-industrial urban environment, and hip hop culture of the late 1970s through the early twenty-fi rst century Their texts showcase the urban settings of New York and New Jersey and the environments cre-ated by the crack-cocaine era of the 1980s through the early 1990s that transformed the American landscape in part precipitating a rapid increase

in youth and gang violence, the escalation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the destabilization of urban families, and the largest wave of imprisonment

in American history I posit that in the post-Civil Rights era of the US, the latest generation of Afro-Latino/a writers portrays the promises of racial integration as unfulfi lled in the integrated US. Beyond the façade of suc-cess that is in actuality only achieved by an elite group of black Americans and Latinos/as, the writers depict their Afro-Latino/a characters as hav-ing found little or no upward mobility in the US. Paralleling the black/African-American experience, the Afro-Latino/a characters face stagna-tion and constant hurdles blocking them from attaining the American Dream of material success and a feeling of belonging in the American national community However, I argue that their ability to stay connected transnationally to a Caribbean homeland or to create an alternative home

to the American national framework is what ultimately provides them with the mobility necessary in the US to transgress boundaries, gain upward mobility, and succeed in navigating the American landscape

Stuart Hall’s essay “Minimal Selves” is at the root of the theoretical questions that initiated my examination of contemporary Afro-Latino/a literature In “Minimal Selves” Hall expresses his admiration for young black people in London and his confusion over the confi dence they exude

in comparison to the generations of black migrants preceding them:

I’ve been puzzled by the fact that young black people in London today are marginalized, fragmented, unenfranchized, disadvantaged, and dispersed And yet, they look as if they own the territory Somehow, they too, in spite

of everything, are centered, in place: without much material support, it’s true, but nevertheless, they occupy a new kind of space at the center (114)

Hall concludes that these young people have become centered, despite their marginalization, by affi rming themselves as part of the new black ethnicity composed of the colonized subjects of the African Diaspora who migrated to England Similarly to post-modern identity, which Hall paral-lels to migrant identity, this alternative framework for black identity holds

at its core “the notion of displacement as a place of ‘identity’” (116) Despite their detachment from a notion of England and Englishness that has little to do with them, these young black Britons found a way to locate themselves in England, beyond a national framework, which allows them

to feel “at home” in a less than welcoming land

How, I wondered, did Hall’s observations on black British young ple compare to the musings of young Afro-Latino/a writers in the US?

peo-Do their writings refl ect this same feeling of centeredness and comfort with their surroundings? Are they able to make a claim to their territory and share in a feeling of ownership despite their oppositional placement

to American culture? And how similar are their imaginings of selfhood as immigrants, migrants, and fi rst-generation Americans to that of the mem-bers of the mainstream American national community?

In England, Hall discovered that the label “black” had been structed as an ethnic identity for immigrants of the African Diaspora that gave young people a feeling of belonging despite their marginalized posi-tions within the English national community However, in Afro-Latino/a literature, the label “black” remains a contested terrain for Latino Caribbean immigrants who understand the politically charged nature of the term within its American context and the historical inequities of race within the US

A transnational and diasporic identity, which is founded on the ise that an individual identifi es with more than one national or territorial home, serves as an alternative to American national identity that provides some of the Afro-Latino/a characters in these narratives a location of iden-tity However, the sense of centeredness and confi dence that Hall detects among the black British youth in London is only present in Afro-Latino/a literature when a profound connection to one’s original homeland remains

prem-strong or an alternative home is fashioned Rootlessness, homelessness, and displacement are as commonly experienced as Hall’s notion of “cen-teredness.” Silvio Torres-Saillant warns against the popularity of scholar-ship in the fi eld of transnationalism that emphasizes the destabilization

of nation, home, and national identity by jolting his readers with an all too real scenario of the transnational experience for many migrants whom

“that kind of mobility spells out a drama of displacement, destitution, and ultimate homelessness” (“Diasporic Disquisitions” 36) Several of the texts examined in this study echo these sentiments by depicting characters who have lost their footing during the migratory experience

Transnational and diaspora frameworks offer Afro-Latinos/as a form

of resistance to the hegemonic discourse of American nationalism that

is similar to Hall’s proposal that the colonized subject can use a “new conception of ethnicity as a kind of counter to the old discourses of nationalism or national identity” (118) Furthermore, transnational and immigrant literature relates to the postcolonial experience by deconstruct-ing the dominant narrative of the nation and national identity Rosemary Marangoly George explores the connection between immigrant literature and postcolonialism:

Distinct from other postcolonial literary writing and even from the ture of exile, it is closely related to the two For the immigrant genre, like the social phenomenon from which it takes its name, is born of a history of global colonialism and is therefore a participant in decolonizing discourses (171)

As an integral aspect of the postcolonial condition, immigration forces the power dynamics between the “mother country” and the home-land by acting as the medium that brings colonized subjects to European and American imperial nations Immigrant literature examines the condi-tion of being an immigrant, the forces that shape immigrant identity, and the power dynamics that create the need to leave one’s home

The immigrant genre fl ourished as many of these colonized subjects arrived in North America and Europe and began writing narratives depict-ing the immigrant experience Hall describes the way that he became aware

of his new identity as a Jamaican immigrant to England as a realization that he was one of the immigrants that his mother referred so callously

to, “I mean the notion of displacement as a place of ‘identity’ is a concept you learn to live with … Living with, living through difference” (116)

The act of living with and through difference is itself an act of resistance because an immigrant’s or migrant’s way of life is represented as opposi-tional to normative culture Afro-Latino/a literature explores the “notion

of displacement as a place of ‘identity’” and it challenges the national rative by employing several methods of resistance to it

The “third wave” of immigration to the US, initiated by the Hart- Cellar Immigration Act of 1965, permanently altered the racial makeup, culture, and identity of the American people For the fi rst time, large pop-ulations of non-European immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean settled in the US. Contrary to the fi rst two waves of European immigrants’ achievement of full incorporation into American culture, the majority of the post-1965 immigrants found themselves barred from assimilating in the same fashion Unlike the two previous waves, racial dif-ference was the main factor used to assign the new comers to subnational groups The search for belonging for the post-1965 arrivals sometimes necessitates crossing boundaries into other racial and ethnic communi-ties However, many of them fi nd themselves trapped by existing power structures on the periphery of American society and lacking inclusion into the center They learn that the added complication of race excludes them from the mainstream imaginings of the nation Their arrival continues to serve as a gauge measuring the extent to which all people are capable of assimilating into mainstream American society and of fi nding a place of belonging

While much of immigrant literature highlights the experiences and lenges of assimilating into the narrowly conceptualized American national identity, some of it also emphasizes other strategies for identity develop-ment and locating a place of belonging within the US.  Louis Mendoza and S.  Shankar identify what they believe to be the main characteristics

chal-of immigrant literature written during the third wave chal-of immigration (1965–present):

In all its variety, these works are united and made into what we call a new erature of immigration by the following: an engagement in however explicit

lit-or subtle a manner with the idea of ‘America’; and an experience of a ing, of a journeying, across a legally and otherwise policed line to that fateful encounter with America (xxiv)

Mendoza and Shankar further distinguish between immigrant stories related to crossing the geographical border into America, remembering

the experience of transgressing this boundary, refl ecting on America after arrival, and becoming American As the editors imply, analysis of immi-grant literature mainly focuses on the US and what occurs there

However, due to the technological advancements in transportation, communication, and media, it is now easier for immigrants to maintain connections to their original homelands Arjun Appadurai illustrates the signifi cance of technology and mass media on the daily lives of immigrants around the world:

The story of mass migrations (voluntary and forced) is hardly a new ture of human history But when it is juxtaposed with the rapid fl ow of mass-mediated images, scripts, and sensations, we have a new order of insta- bility in the production of modern subjectivities As Turkish guest work- ers in Germany watch Turkish fi lms in their German fl ats, as Koreans in Philadelphia watch the 1988 Olympics in Seoul through satellite feeds from Korea, and as Pakistani cabdrivers in Chicago listen to cassettes of sermons recorded in mosques in Pakistan or Iran, we see moving images meet deter- ritorialized viewers These create diasporic public spheres, phenomena that confound theories that depend on the continued salience of the nation-state

fea-as the key arbiter of important social changes (4)

Appadurai describes the impact of global networks and mass media on our current imaginings of nationhood He questions the utility of main-taining the perspective that nations have a monopoly on instituting cul-tural and social change when clearly other avenues in global contexts exist for disseminating information and creating collective forms of agency Afro-Latinos/as are now more easily able to sustain transnational networks with their homelands, which has a direct infl uence on their imaginings of home and identity Within the fi elds of immigrant and

fi rst-generation American literature, how do we account for the rapidly growing infl uence of the Caribbean homeland on identity development, community formation, and relationship to the US? Transnational and diaspora frameworks provide alternative theoretical frameworks for ana-lyzing literature about the immigrant and fi rst-generation experience 2

Evaluating immigrant literature by focusing on transnational and pora relationships allows us to view both the US and the Caribbean homeland in a critical context This lens enables a focus on the relation-ship between the Caribbean and America and its impact on immigrant literature rather than solely concentrating our attention on the experi-ence in America

Examining literature through the lens of transnational and diaspora frameworks reveals other areas of analysis Angie Chabram Dernersesian explores the alternative avenues of exploration that are created through the use of transnational paradigms:

If it is true that the differences among and between Chicanas/os and Latinas/os are commonly factored out of predominant multicultural para- digms, it is also true that within these paradigms, the different subordinated social and ethnic groups are often cut off from the transnational context so that crucial relations between competing nation states are factored out of the social panorama … Forging the connections outside of the proscribed limits of national culture (at home and abroad) offers the possibility of apprehending viable transnational and multicultural linkages that have gen- erally gone unexplored (279)

Dernersesian acutely observes that analysis of American ethnic ties within a multicultural framework continually overlooks the larger con-text of the power relations between the homeland and the US. Examining the transnational connection in literature brings into focus the political and economic infl uence of North America and of their homelands in the lives and imaginations of transnational and diaspora subjects

The infl uence of their homelands is vital to a transnational and diaspora subjects’ understanding of home and of his position in the US. Appadurai adopts the term “transnation” to identify how diaspora frameworks pro-duce local communities in the US. Appadurai explains that distant and no longer vulnerable to the:

depredations of their home states, diasporic communities become doubly loyal to their nations of origin and thus ambivalent about their loyalties to America … For every nation-state that has exported signifi cant numbers of its populations to the United States as refugees, tourists, or students, there is now

a delocalized transnation , which retains a special ideological link to a putative

place of origin but is otherwise a thoroughly diasporic collectivity (172)

The strengthened loyalties of the members of these diasporic munities impact, as Appadurai observes, their loyalties to America and encourages their resistance to an American identity or even of accepting the US as their home

The transnation, or translocal community, provides a place of belonging for those that are marginalized and excluded from dominant perceptions

of American national identity Latino Caribbean transnations are homes for immigrants and migrants living outside their country of origin that often replicate cultural elements from the Caribbean homeland and map them onto an American landscape They imagine their community as an alternative home to the US where their original homeland’s language, reli-gion, music, food, and other cultural elements remain intact and resilient

to mainstream American culture A transient mentality is a characteristic

of those who identify with a transnation and are loyal to their original homeland while remaining ambivalent about their relationship to the US The transnational relationship between the Dominican Republic and the Dominican-American community in the US is a prime example of this national loyalty Within the Dominican-American community in New York City extreme measures are taken to ensure the solidity of the ties to the Dominican Republic Dual citizenship, voting privileges in the island’s elections, and immigrant enclaves in New  York City help main-tain a translocal community (Itzigsohn 330) In the Dominican-authored narratives in this project, the writers clearly capture the strength of the relationship between the Dominican Republic and Dominican immigrants

in the US. Their characters struggle with accepting American racial and national identifi cations and commonly reject them altogether

This study interrogates how Afro-Latino/a literature challenges national boundaries and the traditionally homogeneous American iden-tity emphasized within the US.  As refl ected in their narratives, Afro-Puerto Rican and Afro-Dominican writers identify as both American and Latino/a The Dominican-American novels are commonly set among more than one nation and their characters physically move in and out

of these boundaries However, in the Puerto Rican poetry, the diaspora connection is more often maintained through cultural practices and ide-ology All of the literary works demonstrate an alternative model to the homogeneous nation that requires its inhabitants to fully assimilate These diaspora frameworks and the ensuing transnational identities created by maintaining ties with a diaspora community is an alternative discourse to the national framework

Several theorists have formulated alternative models to the nation that resist the fi xed, national concept of Benedict Anderson’s “imagined com-munity.” Benedict Anderson defi nes nation as a modern notion conceived

as “an imagined political community” (6) He contends that the nation is imagined as sovereign as well as limited by territorial boundaries regardless

of the scope of its mainland and protectorates Its inhabitants imagine the nation as a community despite the fact that they will never all know each other In addition, notwithstanding the actual inequalities that exist, its members imagine the nation as “a deep, horizontal comradeship” (7) According to Anderson, in order to have a national identity, an individual must imagine himself as a part of a community of people, most of whom will never know each other It is through the community’s shared history, language, and culture that individuals imagine that they are connected

to others This concept of national identity emphasizes homogeneity as the force that unifi es individuals through language, history, culture, and religion

Juan Flores reconceptualizes Anderson’s idea of nation to refl ect the current experiences of Latinos/as:

The idea of ‘imagined communities’ lends itself well to the conceptual minology of Latino Studies today because it helps to describe the ‘national’ experience of Latino diasporas in all its ambiguity The sense of belonging and not belonging to the nation—driven home to Nuyoricans and Chicanos when they ‘return’ to their ‘native’ lands—confi rms that nationality can not only be imagined but actually created as a social reality by the force of the

ter-imagination ( From Bomba to Hip Hop 213)

It is the “belonging and not belonging” to the nation and not feeling

at home in one’s adopted country or country of birth that leads Afro- Latino/a writers to search for alternative homes and other frameworks

to replace the national concept The writers are searching for alternate models to nation that are not formulated with the same characteristics as Anderson’s conceptualization of national identity They do not imagine national identity to be limited by geographical boundaries but as tran-scending territories to identify those individuals of similar heritage that are scattered in multiple locations

Stuart Hall envisions a new conception of diaspora that is not cated on the premise of a fi nal return to an original homeland, or the essentialist notion of one shared culture, identity, and experience Rather

predi-he proposes a new defi nition of diaspora that emphasizes tpredi-he hybridity of people and cultural identities He situates America as the “beginning of diaspora” because it is the location where this mixing of cultural elements began He explains that the:

‘New World’ presence—America, Terra Incognita—is therefore itself the beginning of diaspora, of diversity, of hybridity and difference, what makes Afro-Caribbean people already people of a diaspora I use this term here metaphorically, not literally: diaspora does not refer us to those scat- tered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred

homeland to which they must at all costs return (“ Cultural Identity and

Diaspora ” 401)

Hall’s concepts of diaspora and diasporic identity privilege ity, heterogeneity, and diversity above an essentialist identity fi xed in one historical moment Hall explains that, “Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves

hybrid-anew, through transformation and difference” (“ Cultural Identity and

Diaspora ” 402)

Carole Boyce Davies proposes alternative identities specifi cally for African and African Diaspora women writers that are not based on a national framework Davies argues that the concept of diaspora challenges the notion of the nation altogether Embedded in the diaspora formula-tion is “the need to understand transnationally the various resistances to Eurocentric domination and to create an ‘elsewhere’” (13) She explores how the writing of black women across geographical boundaries works to redefi ne their identities She maintains that the “re-negotiating of identi-ties is fundamental to migration as it is fundamental to Black women’s writing in cross-cultural contexts It is the convergence of multiple places and cultures that re-negotiates the terms of Black women’s experience that in turn negotiates and re-negotiates their identities” (3) She rejects the marginalization of a singular identity associated with only one location and time and acknowledges the migratory experience as a process that transforms identity

Afro-Latino/a literature illustrates alternative formulations of home, nation, community, and identity that transgress national boundaries to include all members of a “diasporic collectivity.” The multiplicity of homes presented in these narratives aid the writers in discovering new defi nitions

of home that more closely resemble their realities Davies articulates the importance of writing about home:

Writing home means communicating with home But it also means fi nding ways to express the confl icted meaning of home in the experience of the formerly colonized It also demands a continual rewriting of the boundaries

of what constitutes home (129)

The “continual rewriting” of the concept of home occurs in Afro- Latino/a literature through various interpretations of what home means With each new depiction of home, the signifi cance of home shifts in the narratives The “confl icted meaning of home” arises when several compet-ing notions of home are presented in the same text or when one home is portrayed as having several contradictory meanings

Generally, I defi ne home as either a place of origin or a place one belongs

to The multiple variations on the concept of home that Afro-Latino/a writers depict in their narratives serve as another form of resistance to the idea of the fi xed and stable nation and as a way to resist an American identity The writers employ three concepts of home that they imagine in

a variety of ways that all challenge the hegemonic discourse of the nation The fi rst concept is the Caribbean homeland/original homeland, which

is an immigrant’s nation 3 of origin and may be a location where he/she returns to live after several years abroad; an immigrant may also take cycli-cal trips to their original homeland while living abroad In these scenar-ios, it is possible to maintain a strong connection with the land, culture, people, family, and politics despite the vast distance to the homeland In contrast, an individual may only be able to maintain a faint connection

to the Caribbean homeland because of economic, political, or personal obstacles In this situation, the original homeland may only be present through memory, which places the immigrant in the position of idealizing his/her old home as an imagined homeland Individuals in this position, who are able to make a return trip, may learn that the land that they

“remembered” is not the reality that they fi nd

The concept of the Caribbean homeland is most often portrayed as a nostalgic memory imagined by characters who magnify elements of their homeland to the point that it is no longer recognizable to others For example, in Piri Thomas’ seminal autobiographical novel, Down These Mean Streets , the protagonist never has the opportunity to visit Puerto

Rico, yet his mother’s positive interpretations of the country’s poverty and never-ending desire to return keep his connection to the island strong The second concept of home is the North American home For Afro- Latino/a immigrants and fi rst-generation Americans, home is not always

a place of belonging Often in these narratives, there is a constant, less search for acceptance in a North American home Attaining a North American home, which implies a feeling of acceptance by mainstream America, is usually not an option unless the individual is able to assimi-late Feeling “at home” connotes belonging to a nation and identifying

fruit-as a member of that nation In order for Afro-Latinos/fruit-as in the US to claim a North American home, they must feel as though they are a part

of a national community and included in its inhabitants’ collective ception of who they are The North American home is most commonly associated with non-belonging as the protagonists search for welcom-ing homes in the US.  Afro-Latino/a protagonists experience this non-belonging through their engagement with American racism and begin to understand this as a shared experience with the African-American commu-

per-nity For example, in the novel Soledad , Angie Cruz’s light-complexioned

Dominican- American protagonist is incapable of masking the ethnic ference that precludes her from gaining entrance into New  York City’s upper-class art community and Loida Maritza Pérez’s character, Marina,

dif-in Geographies of Home is unable to fi nd willdif-ing white romantic partners

within corporate America

Afro-Latino/a writers present the key to survival in the post-Civil Rights era US as maintaining a solid connection to the Caribbean home-

land as is the case in Pérez’s Geographies of Home , Cruz’s Soledad , and Junot Diaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao However, when

no connection to the original homeland is in place, the third concept

of home, an alternative home imagined as oppositional to the American national community, must exist for the protagonists to thrive or to at least survive

For example, in the Afro-Puerto Rican poet, María (Mariposa) Fernández’s poem “Ode to the DiaspoRican”, she contends that a trans-national consciousness exists for Puerto Ricans in the US that is predi-cated on a “state of mind” as an alternative home to the American or

Puerto Rican nations In Soledad and Geographies of Home , Cruz and

Pérez depict alternative homes that exist in the New  York City homes

of their characters Gorda and Rebecca, respectively In Cruz’s narrative, Gorda’s status as a spiritual healer coupled with her care for her sister during her mysterious illness elevates Gorda’s apartment to the level of

a sacred space—a nexus for communication between the living and the dead Pérez portrays Rebecca’s surreal-like Brooklyn house as interweav-ing remnants of a Dominican pastoral life long forgotten with the reality

of an abused and neglected home and family By crossing boundaries and mapping Caribbean geography onto an American landscape, these writ-ers create their own defi nitions of home and resist identifi cation with the American nation Afro-Latino/a writers often create alternative homes within a diasporic framework to counter the futility of searching for a

North American home Alternative concepts of home are used as a form of resistance to accepting an American identity or the non-belonging associ-ated with Afro-Latino/a identity in the US

In addition to the multiple imaginings of home depicted in their texts, the authors also employ the concepts of homesickness and homelessness

to emphasize the instability or rootlessness of their characters’ locations

As George explains, the search for a place to belong generates a feeling of homesickness George elucidates that the:

sentiment accompanying the absence of home—homesickness—can cut two ways: it could be a yearning for the authentic home (situated in the past or in the future) or it could be the recognition of the inauthenticity or the created aura of all homes (175)

Both defi nitions of homesickness emphasize the lack of a place, in the present, to identify as home Her defi nitions also signify the imagined nature of home as being a construction, either authentic or inauthentic,

of the mind Homelessness is another concept that is created by the lessness ensuing from the displacement experienced by a member of a diaspora The instability of the meaning of home that results from cross-ing multiple geographic borders encourages this feeling of detachment George observes that the, “immigrant genre is often marked by a detached and unsentimental reading of the experience of ‘homelessness’—which has … often been read as indicative of the apolitical stance adopted by immigrants” (175) The apolitical approach that George detects is appar-ent in the attitudes of those characters who do not feel rooted to their Caribbean homeland or to the US

The search for home in the migratory experience is directly correlated

to negotiating identity Davies interjects that, “[m]igration and exile are fundamental to human experience And each movement demands another defi nition and redefi nition of one’s identity” (128) Multiple forms of home inform the identities of the characters in these narratives because identity is constructed in part by location and place of origin Each move

to a new location adds to and changes the individual’s identity Davies refers to the evolution of new identities in the work of black women writ-ers as the journeys or migrations between identities She explains that the

“migrations between identities, or the articulations of a variety of ties, are central to our understandings of the ways in which these writers express notions of home in their works” (116) Home and identity are

identi-necessarily connected to the concepts of nation and national identity In an effort to fi nd and develop new concepts of home and identity that refl ect the experiences of Afro-Latino/a writers and their characters, they must resist or accept identifi cation with a nation In many of these narratives, the search for home is represented as the search for a nation to belong to and to identify with

Diasporas are a necessary foundation for the development of tional communities and identities Those who are members of a diaspora, meaning those who belong to a dispersed community that shares a com-mon lineage and a homeland, create the elements of transnationalism by maintaining connections with other members of their diasporic commu-nity While there are numerous recognized Diasporas, the African, Puerto Rican, Cuban and Dominican Diasporas are the frameworks that I employ

transna-in my project Coltransna-in Palmer offers a general defi nition of diaspora:

Diasporic communities, generally speaking, possess a number of tics Regardless of their location, members of a diaspora share an emotional attachment to their ancestral land, are cognizant of their dispersal and, if conditions warrant, of their oppression and alienation in the countries in which they reside Members of diasporic communities also tend to possess

characteris-a sense of ‘rcharacteris-acicharacteris-al,’ ethnic, or religious identity thcharacteris-at trcharacteris-anscends geogrcharacteris-aphic boundaries, to share broad cultural similarities, and sometimes to articulate

a desire to return to their original homeland No diasporic community ifests all of these characteristics or shares with the same intensity an identity with its scattered ancestral kin (29)

While the realization of a return to the original homeland is not a sary component in Palmer’s diaspora framework, a longing for or remem-brance of that lost home is commonly emphasized Nostalgia, memory, and a desire to return often create a mythical imagined homeland for char-acters who always view the Caribbean as home

While in some Afro-Latino/a literary works, the transnational nent is maintained through frequent trips to the Caribbean homeland, in others a return is never realized Although some characters in the texts never make that return trip home, in others it is quite common for family members to travel home for “vacation,” retirement, or as a way to recon-nect spiritually with family and country When there is no physical return to the country of origin, the transnational elements are present in the reten-tion of the home country’s culture and values in the new American com-munity New  York City’s countless botanicas (spiritual/religious stores),

compo-calling card shops, and overseas shipping centers are real examples of the ties that are maintained without ever returning to the Caribbean

The desire to return to a distant homeland is a theme that pervades many Afro-Latino/a literary works and serves as a psychological connec-tion that reinforces the transnational relationship Return to the home-land is particularly relevant to female characters and is depicted in several

texts In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , Soledad , and Song of the

Water Saints , the return to the original homeland recurs as a crucial force

for repairing and reconnecting the mother-daughter relationship A vivid

passage in Soledad describes a return trip to the Dominican Republic for

the protagonist and her mother as the conduit that repairs their ship and saves Soledad from losing her Dominican identity Interestingly

relation-in Geographies of Home the protagonist, Iliana, never makes the physical

return home to the Dominican Republic; however, her mother’s natural powers connect Iliana to memories of their homeland that her mother telepathically shares with her This fi gurative return to the home-land nurtures Iliana’s connection to the Dominican Republic and to her mother

The utilization of return for the purpose of healing from trauma

attrib-uted to historical violence is depicted in Soledad and The Brief Wondrous

Life In Soledad , Cruz depicts the sexual exploitation of her protagonist’s

mother as a result of the ravaging of the Dominican Republic by the American government Soledad and her mother return in part to heal from the wounds festering from their homeland’s victimization Similarly

in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao a legacy of sexual violation and

historical violence propels the protagonist, Oscar, to search for a cure to his family’s inheritance of trauma

In the literary works examined in this project, migration as part of a diasporic and transnational experience frames the way that black identity

is engaged in the US. The Dominican poet Chiqui Vicioso’s oft- quoted observation is most telling about the signifi cant role of migration on a black racial consciousness for Afro-Latinos/as, “Until I came to New York,

I didn’t know I was black” (qtd in Roth) Vicioso’s revelation speaks to one of the most salient factors impacting identity formation among Afro-Latinos/as in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and Latin America—the denial of African heritage as an integral feature of the national imagination

It is this denial of blackness that distinguishes the Afro-Latino/a ence in literature as markedly different from that of African-Americans and which can render the dilemma of triple consciousness to be a perplexing,

experi-if not traumatic experience For Afro-Latinos/as who are used to a more

fl uid approach to racial identity, the US’s “two- tiered division between whites and non-whites deriving from the principle of hypodescent—the assignment of the offspring of mixed races to the subordinate group”

(Duany Puerto Rican Nation 237) can be jarring and disruptive to

iden-tity formation

In the Dominican Republic, where 90% of the population is estimated

to have African heritage, “Dominicans have for the most part, denied their blackness” (Torres-Saillant “Tribulations of Blackness” 126) While there are numerous historical factors that have played a part in the denial of blackness in the Dominican Republic including colonization, slavery, and the Haitian occupation/unifi cation of the island of Hispaniola in the nine-teenth century, it was during President Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina’s dictatorship (1930–1961) that the modern conceptualization of the Dominican national imagination came to exclude blackness Offi cially, the

Trujillo regime appropriated the term, Indio , which referenced the nearly

extinct indigenous Taino population, as a racial designation for the try’s mixed African and European racial heritage Torres-Saillant empha-sizes that “the Trujillo regime preferred it primarily because it was devoid

coun-of any semantic allusion to the African heritage and would therefore accord with their negrophobic defi nition of Dominicanness” (Tribulations

of Blackness 139) Trujillo’s deliberate action was part of the larger goal of whitening the Dominican national imagination

The aim to whiten the racial consciousness of Latino/as is another inent factor that infl uences the identity development of Afro-Latinos/as and haunts their literature Darity Jr., Dietrich, and Hamilton contend that this “fl ight toward whiteness” (488) and away from blackness is a characteristic of the Puerto Rican national imagination and has resulted

prom-in the “collective passprom-ing” of the Puerto Rican people (490) The

ideol-ogy of whitening, adelantar la raza , or improving the race, is a deliberate

practice among many Puerto Ricans to marry a lighter-complexioned son that has psychological ramifi cations for Afro-Latinos/as In an essay exploring the dilemma of the Afro-Puerto Rican woman, Angela Jorge explains the resulting guilt and shame for black Puerto Rican women as a

per-result of the failure to adelantar la raza :

The one overriding feeling generated by the ambiguity of the Puerto Rican community about color is that of guilt at having disgraced fi rst the family and then the community by simply being black or darker than other members of

the family The popular dictum adelantar la raza … tends only to reinforce

this feeling of guilt (270)

Duany outlines that adelantar la raza is only one part of the larger

stigma affecting the life chances and psychological well-being of Afro-

Latinos/as in Puerto Rico ( Puerto Rican Nation 243) The denial of

blackness coupled with the goal of whitening the race inevitably leads to unacknowledged racism in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean

In the literature, migration to the US proves to be a bewildering rience for characters who are often met with overt racism by Americans who perceive them to be black or African-American These kinds of jar-ring experiences are common in the literature and lead to a diasporic black racial consciousness for characters who experience racism because of their African heritage In many instances, an African-American character serves as the guide to an Afro-Latino/a character’s understanding of the

expe-American racial landscape For instance, in Down These Mean Streets the

protagonist’s African-American friend, Brew, introduces him to a concept

of black identity based on a diasporic consciousness Brew’s ing of a black diasporic consciousness based on a shared African heritage

understand-as well understand-as the shared experience of oppression is echoed in other literary works including the Young Lords founder Pablo Guzmán’s essay, “Before People Called Me a Spic, They Called Me a Nigger” and in David Lamb’s

novel Do Plátanos Go wit ’ Collard Greens ? In Lamb’s story the African-

American father explains to his son that Afro-Latinos/as must also tend with American racism and therefore share a diasporic black identity:

The beautiful thing about America is—we’re all in the same boat, White folks don’t care if you’re one-thirty-second African or one hundred percent; for them, a nigger is a nigger So let your girlfriend’s mother protest all she wants, the forces of society dictate that the younger ones will increasingly

be drawn to see their connection with us, and all of our connections with Africa (409)

In all three texts, “nigger” implies subjugation to the larger power structure as well as being a member of the African diaspora It is partly the shared experience of oppression that extends diasporic black consciousness beyond heritage to the lived experience of being black

In addition to serving as guides to navigating American racial identity and racism, African-Americans hold other signifi cant roles in Afro- Latino/a

literature African-Americans often serve as the barometer for Afro-Latinos/

as to defi ne their selves racially In some texts, Afro-Latino/a characters position their selves in opposition to African-Americans in order to avoid being perceived as black or to reject the internalization of a black iden-tity Contrastingly, an alliance can develop between African- Americans and Afro-Latinos/as based on the shared experience of racism

In contemporary works of Afro-Latino/a literature, the engagement

or confrontation with a black identity is depicted in several ways and is represented symbolically using multiple tropes In some instances black-ness is represented as a threat to the national imagination in the Caribbean and the US and an individual may be ostracized for not looking white enough to advance the nation’s imagined whiteness This reaction is often combined with a class consciousness that reinforces the white elite’s desire

to remain racially pure and not to be “tainted” by a black body Often

in the literature, an Afro-Latino/a character’s confrontation with a black identity in the United States results in their own alienation from the com-munities he/she resides within or desires access to This alienation results

in an outsider status for individuals who must fi nd a location of identity within an alternative community or remain as outsiders

Another common theme in the literature is the initial recognition of one’s own black self as a traumatic experience that manifests bodily as the marked body or as the means for engaging or contesting blackness In some narratives, it is only through contact with an American who identi-

fi es the character to be black that he begins to recognize himself as a black person This kind of engagement with blackness is an upsetting experience for some who imagine African ancestry as an impurity that has tainted or infected their body Some characters challenge an undesired black identity

by attempting to control the perception of their bodies as black bodies

In Afro-Latino/a literature women are more commonly portrayed as contesting the black body by controlling their physical appearance The straightening of hair is one common metaphor for the attempt to sup-press a black identity that the poet María Teresa Fernández illustrates in her poem, “For My Grifa Rican Sistah, Broken Ends, Broken Promises.” Cleansing the body is another symbol for attempting to erase one’s black-

ness that is movingly rendered in Loida Maritza Pérez’s novel Geographies

of Home Physical appearance is especially valuable for women as a

com-modity in a patriarchal society, and possessing African features such as a wide nose, full lips, dark skin, or kinky hair creates feelings of guilt and shame among Afro-Latinas as Angela Jorge explains:

At fi rst, it is diffi cult to understand why her hair and lips can bring forth such anger [from family] Later on, she understands that she is living proof that the family failed to contribute meaningfully to the dictum adelantar la raza She also becomes the living proof of the guilt the family feels, and fi nally, the receiver of the family’s efforts to transfer that guilty feeling to her (273)

Similarly to African-American literature, the theme of controlling the black body reoccurs in numerous contemporary Afro-Latino/a narratives After migration to the US, the various methods of contesting the black body underscore the diffi culty of accepting a black identity and being per-ceived as black for many Afro-Latinos/as

In some of the texts, the black female body is also connected to an generational inheritance of a matrilineal legacy of Afro-Caribbean spiritual-ity or to a historical legacy of sexual violation The Afro-Caribbean spiritual legacy marks the body to represent the power of the one who is able to wield

inter-it This legacy is also capable of keeping its female inheritors connected to their family and Caribbean homeland In contrast, the traumatic legacy of sexual violation is able to weaken its inheritors’ connection to the Caribbean homeland through a traumatic rupture Sexual violation is also commonly used to render a female character’s perilous engagement with the US and the obstacles that create an inability to navigate the American landscape For male characters, the initial recognition of one’s self as black is often due to being mistaken as an African-American man In the post-Civil Rights era, the African-American male is perceived as a criminal, an outlaw, and as

an outsider The black male body is located on the periphery of mainstream American society and represents a threat to its existence Every movement made by the black male body outside of the circumscribed boundaries of black inhabited enclaves is considered trespassing Afro-Latino/a literature holds this representation in common with hip hop culture Imani Perry proposes that outlaw identity is adopted by hip hop culture as an opposi-tional stance to mainstream culture She explores the embrace of an outlaw identity by mostly black male practitioners of hip hop culture:

The outlawry present in hip hop is multifaceted At times, it is literal … but

it is also present in the sense of opposition to norms that unfairly punish black communities or discount the complexity of choices faced by those black and poor in the United States, and it presents itself in the creation

of alternative values, norms, and ideals in contrast to those as an individual assertion or as a collective sensibility, either in the form of an archetype …

or in a celebration of outlaw community (103)

Building on Piri Thomas’ autobiographical narrative Down These Mean

Streets , Willie Perdomo and Tony Medina depict the representation of the

black male body in mainstream American culture in their poetry Perdomo and Medina use hip hop and depict the outlawed black male body in their poetry to render a revolutionary spirit and camaraderie with poor and urban communities

As a narrative device, hip hop has found a place in contemporary Afro- Latino/a literature used to defi ne an urban setting, claim membership to

an alternative community that counters the American national nity, or to incite the rebellion of the underclass Román and Flores observe among the latest generation of Afro-Latinos/as that “the cultural tenor that has accompanied the rise of Afro-Latinos/as as a group reality and designation has been set by hip hop” (11) In the post-Civil Rights era, hip hop serves Afro-Latino/a writers as a tool to disrupt offi cial national narratives and to assert their own perspectives Hip hop also aligns Afro- Latinos/as and African-Americans by acknowledging their shared histo-ries and shared experiences

The future development of contemporary Afro-Latino/a literature will expand on the recurring themes of marginality, boundary crossings, root-lessness, and the representation of a multiplicity of homes On the horizon

is a multilayered level of boundary crossing that mixes languages, blurs territorial lines, and meshes the past with the present, memory with the future The latest writers are continuing in the tradition of their predeces-sors while developing new trends for their narratives Among the most prominent literary techniques for recent and future texts is the continued interweaving of multiple languages and cultural elements into the stories Another foray in Afro-Latino/a literature of the Caribbean is tran-scending spatial and temporal boundaries in order to revisit historical sights of trauma enacted during or as a result of colonization Several writ-ers delve into the horrors of the past in order to analyze their affect on their characters’ present circumstances Often, revisiting traumatic events immortalized by memory is the only way that the protagonist is able to heal and thrive in the US.  In a discussion about the representation of trauma in literature rendering the Haitian Massacre of 1937 and the era

of Trujillo, Mónica G. Ayuso asserts, “trauma is the active repression of an event that must be remembered, narrated, and witnessed in order for it to lose its traumatizing power” (50) The examination of historical violence and its resulting trauma leads to another prominent theme, the rewrit-ing of offi cial histories and the excavation of repressed memories This

unearthing of repressed memories is often conjoined with the experience

of intergenerational trauma—where the memories of historical trauma are transferred to each generation of a family or is experienced collectively by the national community

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , Díaz traces the infl uence of

centuries of European colonization, slavery, genocide, and the subsequent tyranny of a Dominican tyrant on the lives of his characters Footnoting his narrative with Dominican history, Díaz presents a protagonist that as one critic notes “became the colonized Latin America/indigenous peoples all rolled up into one fat nerd” (Ruiz 1) By recounting the trials encoun-tered by Dominicans throughout history, Díaz is able to allow for an open acknowledgment and confrontation of the traumatic events informing the Dominican experience through the generations in the Caribbean and the

US. Interestingly, Díaz focuses much of the story on the plight of Oscar’s mother, Belicia, who was brutally beaten and betrayed by her lover, one

of Trujillo’s henchmen Pregnant at 14, Belicia retreats to New Jersey where she raises two children who continue living their family’s accursed fate The resulting ills of colonialism coalesce to harm a woman, betrayed

by countrymen following in the footsteps of their country’s conquerors

In the case of female-centered narratives, historical violence is often represented as sexual violence and exploitation Angie Cruz and Nelly Rosario depict female characters victimized at the hands of European and American men searching to experience the exotic in their Caribbean play land Cruz’s protagonist, Soledad, uncovers her mother’s secret past as

a 15-year-old girl driven by a life of poverty and limited possibility into prostitution With no other prospects for a better future, a man, who becomes her abusive husband, buys Olivia and brings her to New  York City Soledad and her mother must return to the Dominican Republic to a sacred lagoon in order to heal from her mother’s traumatic past

Not nearly as hopeful is Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints , which

fol-lows Graciela and her family’s lives through four generations As a woman during the American occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1916, Graciela has no legitimate means to fulfi ll her wanderlust She eventually becomes the mistress of a cruel European traveler whose objective is to sexually exploit her and who infects her with a fatal case of the European imperial byproduct, syphilis Her tragic fate is similarly bestowed upon her equally adventurous but vulnerable great, great granddaughter who is brutally raped in New York City at the book’s end Less conventional and tidily conclusive than Cruz’s narrative, the reader is left with an eerie sense

that Graciela’s demise is shared by her descendant because of a historical fate that binds them to a life of limitation Observing the intergenerational trauma depicted in the novel, Ayuso contends that this narrative dem-onstrates “that trauma does not happen once Trauma unfolds between generations; its aftermath is experienced by the survivors” (58)

The following chapter, “Enduring the Curse: The Legacy of Inter-

generational Trauma in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar

Wao ” examines the trauma experienced by each generation of Oscar’s

family ensuing from violence enacted during postcolonial and neocolonial events Díaz portrays the ramifi cations of colonialism including slavery, sexual violence, tyrannical governance, and diaspora as being so traumatic that the resulting trauma is inherited by each generation of the Dominican people Díaz explains this phenomenon as a curse, or fukú, that is passed down intergenerationally and manifested bodily and psychically as relived memories of that traumatic past Moreover, this chapter explores Evelyn Hawthorne’s theory that the latest generation of Caribbean-American writers depicts return to the homeland as a means to confront the victim-izers and trauma occurring during the aftermath of colonization I propose that although Díaz names his novel after the male protagonist, the curse must ultimately be broken by a daughter of the succeeding generation of female relatives who directly inherits the traumatic lineage of sexual viola-tion experienced by her predecessors Additionally, this chapter analyzes Díaz’s treatment of the family’s African heritage as a defi ning factor in the characters’ lives while living in the Dominican Republic and in the US The third chapter, “Haunting Legacies: Forging Afro-Dominican

Women’s Identity in Loida Maritza Pérez’s Geographies of Home ”

pro-poses the existence of a gender-specifi c migratory experience for the female characters in Pérez’s novel She reveals the alternative forms of self- empowerment that her Dominican-American female characters employ to heal and manage the effects of violation, abuse, and the daily forms of humiliation and struggle endured as Afro-Latina immigrants in New  York City I argue that Pérez renders the marked body, divergent sexuality, and a multishifting perspective on reality as manifestations of her female characters’ challenges with navigating the American landscape and negotiating ties to their homeland In addition, this chapter inter-rogates how the characters’ Afro-Latina identity complicates their migra-tory experience in the US and the ways in which the added complexity

of race factors into Pérez’s representation of the body and sexuality Furthermore, this chapter examines Pérez’s formulation of a distinctly

Afro-Dominican women’s identity, which counters the offi cial narrative

of Dominican national identity

The fourth chapter, “‘Boricua, Moreno’: Laying Claim to Blackness in the Post-Civil Rights Era” interrogates the work of contemporary Puerto Rican poets María Teresa Fernández (Mariposa), Willie Perdomo, and Tony Medina These poets illustrate the post-Civil Rights American landscape from the perspective of young Afro-Puerto Ricans contending with their displacement in the US. I propose that the poems in this chapter acknowl-edge the unfulfi lled promises of the Civil Rights Movement that have left young black Americans and Latinos/as faltering in an American society claiming to have achieved racial integration and equal opportunity but which has in actuality left many of them disenfranchised and marginalized within the US. This chapter parallels the experiences of Afro- Puerto Ricans depicted in the poems to those of African-American youth and explores their shared experiences of racial discrimination The writers incorporate hip hop culture as a means of demonstrating the Afro-Puerto Rican connection

to the African-American community Additionally, I examine hip hop ture as an arena where Afro-Latinos/as are accepted and acknowledged as

cul-a distinct Africcul-an Dicul-asporic group of blcul-ack people I propose thcul-at while the writers acknowledge the lack of upward mobility for Afro-Puerto Ricans in the US, they render membership within an alternative community aligned with African-Americans as another means of attaining mobility

The fi fth chapter, “Afro-Latin Magical Realism, Historical Memory,

Identity and Space in Angie Cruz’s Soledad and Nelly Rosario’s Song of the

Water Saints ,” explores the incorporation of a magical realist literary

tradi-tion tinged with Afro-Caribbean spirituality in Angie Cruz’s novel Soledad and Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints This chapter contends that

the Afro-Dominican women writers 4 use magical realism as a narrative strategy to create alternate means to investigate the events of historical vio-lence and the legacy of trauma resulting from these experiences Magical realism allows Cruz and Rosario to expand their stories beyond the real, which permits them to express the ways in which the legacy of colonialism haunts and damages the human spirit, the body, the psyche, and the family Furthermore, magical realism demonstrates the profound affect of migra-tion on those in the Dominican diaspora Framed within the tradition of Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices, families are haunted, sometimes liter-ally, throughout the Dominican diaspora and by the legacy of the Trujillato and the trauma of historical violence Cruz and Rosario’s merging of Afro-Caribbean spiritual faiths with magical realism locates their characters’

identities within an African cultural tradition Consequently, this African identifi ed space provides a form of resistance against the harsh realities of American racism, sexism, and discrimination Their female spiritual guides, healers, and mediums aid the youngest generation of characters in their attempts to navigate a hostile American landscape

The sixth chapter, “Memory and the Afro-Cuban Missing Link in

H.G. Carrillo’s Loosing My Espanish ,” addresses the lack of contemporary

literature by Afro-Cuban American writers and examines the role of

mem-ory in the Afro-Cuban writer H.G. Carrillo’s novel Loosing My Espanish

Carrillo structures the narrative to resemble the mind of his protagonist’s mother, which fl uidly shifts between present events and past memories due to her developing Alzheimer’s I examine Carrillo’s juxtaposition of past and present events and how they provide a framework for preserving and reimaging Afro-Cuban identity In the novel, Carrillo employs three kinds of engagements with memory to conceptualize Afro-Cuban iden-tity: the incorporation of memory into offi cial historical narratives, myth making, and the return to the past

The conclusion considers the future directions of Afro-Latino/a erature and examines varied conceptualizations of Afro-Latinidad In par-ticular, I examine the growing commitment of Afro-Latino/a writers to excavate historical silences and to reimagine offi cial national narratives by inserting the traditionally repressed voices of Afro-Latinos/as I also high-light the writers’ reimagining of memory, magical realism, and language as defi ning features of contemporary Afro-Latino/a literature

NOTES

1 The list includes: Ernesto Quiñonez’s Bodega Dreams (2000) and

Chango’s Fire (2005) and Abraham Rodriguez’s Spidertown (1994) and The Boy Without a Flag (1999)

2 See B.V. Olguin for an examination of transnational themes in Latino/a immigrant literature

3 I employ Jorge Duany’s conceptualization of Puerto Rico as a nation,

“not as a well-bounded sovereign state but as a translocal community based on a collective consciousness of a shared history, language, and

culture” ( Puerto Rican Nation on the Move 4)

4 In an interview with Nelly Rosario, Angie Cruz discusses her self- identifi cation as black/Afro-Dominican and the problematic categori-zation of Dominican literature within the publishing industry

© The Author (s) 2016

J.T Richardson, The Afro-Latin@ Experience in Contemporary

American Literature and Culture,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31921-6_2

Curiously blurred in history books, silenced, and unnamed in the day lives of people still struggling with the ramifi cations of colonization and slavery in the Caribbean, the trauma of historical violence continues

every-to haunt the descendants of those victimized and oppressed by

imperi-alism In his fi rst novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007),

Díaz pointedly identifi es the colonization of the island of Hispaniola as the original event that produced a series of traumatic events including the tyrannical rule of President Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (1930–1961) that would leave both Dominicans and Haitians feeling as though they were cursed, constantly reliving variations of the island’s and people’s original violation 1 David J. Vázquez identifi es the curse of historical trauma as “a shared emotional and psychological injury that is the result of catastrophic events Historical trauma accrues over the span of an individual life and across generations” (136) Vázquez notes the intergenerational transfer-ence of trauma that is signifi cant in Díaz’s writing Díaz suggests that the historical trauma of slavery, sexual violence, tyrannical governance, and diaspora is so damaging that it is inherited by each generation of the Dominican people He renders this phenomenon as a curse, or fukú, that

is passed down intergenerationally and manifested bodily and psychically

as the relived experience of that traumatic past

Díaz relocates the marginalized and silenced histories of the Dominican Republic into the larger discourse of colonialism and its aftermath He

Enduring the Curse: The Legacy of Intergenerational Trauma in Junot Díaz’s

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

writes with the specifi c purpose of reimagining the nation’s offi cial torical narrative in order to insert the untold stories of the victims of colonization and to document the traumatic aftereffects of the colonial experience Monica Hanna addresses Díaz’s aim to document the history

his-of those whose stories are silenced in her observation that the “question his-of the ‘nameless lives’ of fi gures traditionally not considered in histories of the nation and their relationship to fi gures of power is central to the novel … there is indeed a high stakes battle at play in the narration of this novel over how to represent Dominican history” (499) By fi guring his character, Yunior, as the story’s narrator and researcher, Díaz reconstructs Dominican national history by foregrounding the often-neglected histo-ries of the victims of historical violence In an effort to revert the usual role

of the dictator novel, Díaz focuses “on the traditionally dispossessed acters of the dictator novel, who historically have lacked political power

char-or authchar-ority” (Flchar-ores-Rodriguez 6) The Brief Wondrous Life aims to retell

those stories from the past that have been silenced and provide testimony

to a long-suppressed legacy of historical violence

In his novel, Díaz foregrounds the women’s stories as the defi ning narrative of historical violence, most often depicted as sexual violation Caroline Rody addresses the signifi cance of recentering historical narra-tives around the experiences of women:

Clearly, to tell history in a vocabulary derived solely from female experiences

is to claim the past as a female realm, owned and made meaningful by the women who lived it Historical fi ctions of this kind foreground that which has been most excluded from male-centered histories, considered least ‘his- torical’ (because most ‘natural’): the female body (7)

As Rody suggests, Díaz chooses to focus his novel on the black female acters to reframe the historical narrative and to highlight the experiences

char-of those who are traditionally most marginalized and silenced The curse will ultimately be challenged by a daughter of the succeeding generation

of female relatives who inherits a legacy of gendered violence and sexual violation enacted against women by patriarchal and hegemonic structures Although the title of Díaz’s novel pays homage to the protagonist, Oscar, it is the interwoven stories of Oscar’s mother, Belicia, and sister, Lola, that haunt the novel and demonstrate the long-lasting impact of vio-lence enacted against the Dominican people In order to tell Oscar’s story, Yunior must tell the intertwined histories of Lola and Belicia to explain the magnitude of the forces that have shaped their lives

Díaz situates sexual violation, as a form of political violence, as a defi ing narrative of the female characters’ lives In addition to the history of rape committed during slavery in the Caribbean and the American mili-tary’s sex crimes abroad, sexual coercion and rape loom as a feared terror tactic of the Trujillo regime Vázquez highlights that among the variety

n-of “Trujillo’s well-known torture techniques to the sexual depredations that became … one of the regimes signature tactics, the Trujillato was characterized by inconceivable abuses of power” (139) Díaz invokes the martyred Mirabal sisters as representative of the extremity in which gen-dered violence was used to terrorize the Dominican people and explains their fate in a footnote:

The Mirabal sisters were the Great Martyrs of that period Patría Mercedes, Minerva Argentina, and Antonia María—three beautiful sisters from Salcedo who resisted Trujillo and were murdered for it … Their murders and the subsequent public outcry are believed by many to have signaled the offi cial beginning of the end of the Trujillato, the ‘tipping point,’ when folks fi nally decided enough was enough (83)

Díaz redefi nes the victimization of women and their resistance to rany and sexual violation as pivotal to the nation’s narrative of resistance Moreover, he positions women’s bodies and sexuality as integral to the power dynamics at play during the Trujillato Díaz confl ates the Mirabal sisters and Oscar’s family by writing them into this same resistance nar-

tyr-rative The Brief Wondrous Life frames sexual violation as the initial act

that begins the epic nature of the Cabral family’s curse starting with the story of Oscar’s grandfather, Abelard, and his tragic attempt to protect his eldest daughter from the impending threat of rape by President Trujillo Yunior acknowledges Abelard’s resistance to the government, through his protection of his daughter and his rumored anti-Trujillo writings, as the action that places a major fukú, or curse, on the family

As a counternarrative to the Mirabal sisters’ fate, the youngest of the three Cabral sisters, Belicia, is the only one to survive her family’s tragic end and experience an alternative outcome after attempting to fi ght against the Trujillato In contrast to the belief that dark skin is an “ill-omen,” Belicia’s blackness marks her as a survivor of the Trujillo regime Her dark skin exposes the carefully suppressed African heritage of the upper-class, light-skinned Cabrals and symbolizes her different fate Although she is never able to escape the curse, her visible African ancestry is a marker of her resilience to a lifetime of brutality and victimization In addition, her