Making It Home: A New Ethics of Immigration in Dominican Literature

Despite the media omnipresence of celebrities of Hispanic descent such as Reggaeton star Daddy Yankee, entertainer Jennifer Lopez, actress America Ferrera, and athlete Sammy Sosa, the ordinary people whom Spanish Caribbean writers depict remain a marginalized portion of U.S. society. This essay discusses how the contemporary immigration narratives of Dominic an American writer Junot Díaz are distinct not only from modernist European immigrant literatures that privilege acculturation but also from Spanish Caribbean exile narratives that privilege nostalgia. Díaz’s fiction theorizes Dominican migration and the migrants’ experiences of poverty, disillusion, and non-belonging in Latina/o America