Afro-Dominican American Women Writers: Gender and Race in Angie Cruz’s Soledad and Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints

Year 2015, Issue: 42, 203 - 219, 01.10.2015

Juanita Heredia

Abstract

In the novels by Afro-Dominican American female authors, Angie Cruz’s Soledad 2001 and Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints 2002 , I argue that gender and race intervene in the representation of the Dominican diaspora in the United States through transnational migratory experiences. I suggest that Cruz and Rosario employ a matriarchal lineage to recuperate women’s agency in their novels of the Dominican diaspora, Soledad and Song of the Water Saints, to offer an alternative perspective of transnational experiences. They develop female characters, be it in the Dominican countryside or in Latino urban spaces of New York City, that are often marginalized, exoticized, or forgotten in the official discourse of the history of Hispaniola

Keywords

Dominican Republic, transnationalism, race, gender, diaspora

References

• Candelario, Ginetta E.B. “Voices from Hispaniola: A Meridians Roundtable with Edwidge Danticat, Loida Maritza Pérez, Myriam J. A. Chancy, and Nelly Rosario.” Meridians. 5.1 (2004): 68-91. Print.
• Chevalier, Victoria A. “Alternative Visions and the Souvenir Collectible in Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints.” Contemporary US Latino/a Literary Criticism. Ed. Lyn di Orio Sandin and Richard Pérez. 35-59. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. Print.
• Cruz, Angie. “In Conversation with Nelly Rosario.” Callalo 30.3 (Fall 2007): 743-753. Print.
• ------. Soledad. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001. Print.
• Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones. New York: Soho, 1998. Print.
• ------. “1937.” Krik?Krak! New York: Soho, 1996. Print.
• Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Harcourt, 2007. Print.
• Heredia, Juanita. “Angie Cruz’s Let It Rain Coffee (2005): A Diasporic Response to Multiracial Dominican Migrations.” Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century: The Politics of Gender, Race and Migrations. 85-108. New York: Palgrave, 2009. Print.
• ------. “The Dominican Diaspora Strikes Back: Cultural Archive and Race in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Literature of Displacement (New Concepts in Latino American Culture). Ed. Vanessa Pérez Rosario. 207-21. New York: Palgrave, 2010. Print.
• Ricourt, Milagros. Dominicans in New York: Power from the Margins. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.
• Roorda, Eric. The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930-1945. Durham: Duke UP., 1998. Print.
• Rosario, Nelly. “On Becoming.” A Companion to Latina/o Studies. (Blackwell Companions in Cultural Studies). Eds. Juan Flores and Renato Rosaldo. 151-6. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. Print.
• ------. Song of the Water Saints. New York: Pantheon, 2002. Print.
• Sagás, Ernesto. Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic. Gainesville: UP. of Florida, 2000. Print.
• Suárez, Lucia. Tears of Hispaniola: Haitian and Dominican Diaspora Memory. Gainesville: UP. of Florida, 2006. Print.
• Torres-Saillant, Silvio. “The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity.” Callaloo 23.3 (2000): 1086-1111. Print.
• ------. “Writing has to be Generous: An Interview with Angie Cruz.” Calabash 2.2 (Summer/ Fall 2003): 108-127. Print.
• Wucker, Michele. Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians and the Struggle for Hispaniola. New York: Hill and Wang, 1999. Print.