Mapping the Dominican-American Experience: Narratives by Julía Alvarez, Junot Díaz, Loida Maritza Pérez and Angie Cruz

Dominican mass-migration to the United States only started in the 1960s but Dominican Americans are now a sizable minority and in 2014 they became the largest Latino group in New York City. This thesis examines fictional works by Dominican American writers who migrated to the United States from the early 1960s to the 1990s which explore the predicament of Dominican Americans before and after the consolidation of Dominican-American communities. The novels under scrutiny here were published in English between 1991 and 2012 by Julia Alvarez (b. 1950), Loida Maritza Pérez (b. 1963), Junot Díaz (b. 1969), and Angie Cruz (b. 1972) and present us with characters whose search for a ‘home’ and for ways in which to articulate their individual and collective identity are shaped by continuous negotiations between the traditional values of their country of origin and the potentially transformative opportunities afforded by their new country. I will show how these texts powerfully challenge homogeneity, marginalisation, mainstream ideologies, nationalism, and discrimination while questioning the economic, social, religious, patriarchal, educational, and political structures of both the Dominican Republic and the United States in order to formulate diverse modalities of belonging to what Julia Alvarez has called a new “country that’s not on the map” and establish their own distinct position as Dominican American writers.