Narratives of Migration and Displacement in Dominican Literature

This book visits Dominican and Dominican-American writers that negotiate their transcultural status against the ideological norms of assimilation in their host country, highlighting the symbolic interplay between emotions, cognitions, and displacement in the narratives. Méndez visits writers including Pedro Henríquez Ureña, José Luis González, Junot Díaz, Josefina Báez, and Loida Maritza Pérez in order to examine the cultural production of Dominicans in transnational settings such as New York City, New Jersey, and Puerto Rico. These writers illustrate how the nature of the diaspora is built on a double register of experience: the internal history of the Dominican Republic, and the experiences of Dominicans in the United States and Puerto Rico. The study illustrates the numerous ways in which Dominicans’ subjective interpretation of their experiences of migration and incorporation into U.S. society, seen through the filter of multiple creolizations of the past, are woven into their written works as a series of variations on Americanness and Dominicanness. Through the testimony of the visited writers, Méndez maps some of the psychological constraints impinging on the symbolic world of immigrant populations who are engaged in negotiating their cultural and identity images in their host countries.

Establishing an interdisciplinary connection between Migration Studies, Post-Colonial Studies and Affect Theory, Méndez analyzes the symbolic interplay between emotions, cognitions, and displacement in the narratives written by and about Dominican and Dominican-Americans in the United States and Puerto Rico. He argues that given the historic place of creolization as a marker of national, cultural, and social development in the Caribbean and particularly the Dominican Republic, this cultural process is not magically annulled in Caribbean immigrations to the U.S. Instead, this book illustrates the numerous ways in which Dominicans’ subjective interpretation of their experiences of migration and incorporation into U.S. society, seen through the filter of multiple creolizations of the past, are woven into their written works as a series of variations on Americanness and Dominicanness. Through close readings of selected writings by Pedro Henríquez Ureña, José Luis González, Junot Díaz, Josefina Báez, Loida Maritza Pérez among others, Méndez argues that emotional creolizations operate as a psychological parameter on immigrant populations as they negotiate their transcultural status against the ideological norms of assimilation in their new host country. Consequently, he proposes that this emotional creolization is dialectical — that is, it not only affects diasporic populations, but also changes the norms and terms of assimilation as well.