As most Brunonians know, Ben Affleck wasn’t the only celebrity to receive an honorary doctorate in Brown’s latest Commencement ceremony. Among those recognized, author Junot Diaz also stands out for his contribution to the arts. That he was chosen for a degree is not surprising, as Diaz right off the bat looks like the type of scholar Brown’s community loves to praise. A youthful Dominican-American author, immigration activist, and professor of writing at MIT with a truckload of immigration stories from his own upbringing, the man could have been custom-made to lead a Third World Center panel. More importantly, Diaz has made quite a name of himself through his writing, with the Brown degree being just the most recent of a series of honors he has received. Lauded often as “one of the most acclaimed Latino writers of his generation”, Diaz has generated a considerable amount of buzz in the literary world, becoming a mainstream minority voice in contemporary American literature. Unlike other minority writers in the American literary stratosphere, what makes Diaz extraordinary is his capacity to craft statements about his Dominican immigrant identity into universally appealing stories. His work gains meaning by also reflecting a deeper collective Latino immigrant identity, one that is redefining many aspects of American culture. In his writings, Diaz doesn’t come up with a narrative out of the blue, but crafts one out of the components that shaped his life and then feeds the story back into the vibrant ongoing history of the Dominican Diaspora and the greater Latino community.
Diaz’s dedication to his roots and community makes his storytelling political in several ways. The first is its remarkably in-your-face representation of the darker side of Dominican history, one that a great deal of Americans know too little about. This is most obvious in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Diaz’s most acclaimed novel, in which history plays a pivotal role in the story’s development. This book chronicles the rise and fall of the fictional Cabral family, from a position of privilege under the island’s dictatorship to a lower-class lifestyle in a New Jersey ghetto. While the novel is primarily about Oscar , a tragically obese and socially-inept “ghetto nerd” living in Paterson, NJ, the bad fortunes that befell the Cabrals – fukú in Dominican parlance – are a causal motive of the misfortunes in Oscar’s own life story. As Diaz develops the fictional story of the Cabrals, he also peppers the book with footnotes referencing the Trujillato – the reign of the (nonfictional) Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, possibly the worst Latin American autocrat in history. These inform the reader about the two American invasions of Santo Domingo in the 20th century (“Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq”), Trujillo’s brutal U.S.-backed anti-communist agenda, the racist genocide of Haitian immigrants, the government’s merciless secret intelligence network, and the general delirium of living life as usual in a Latin American right-wing dictatorship.
While the sheer amount of information Diaz delivers on the island’s politics is impressive on its own, a more important message is found on how this turbulent past affects those who left the island and went north. Some of the characters in Oscar Wao are first-generation immigrants to the U.S., and as such they provide many insights into the roots of the immigration experience. Through these fictional individuals, Diaz conveys the very real shock of adjusting to a new country, as well as the powerful urge to maintain a semblance of the lifestyle that is left behind. The conservatism, pragmatism and even racism that Oscar’s immigrant mother imposes on the household could be found in many immigrant families, which struggle to maintain the cultural norms of the homeland (in this case those of the Trujillato) while attempting to fit into U.S. society.
In explaining the events that led many to leave the island during and immediately after Trujillo’s rule, Diaz demonstrates the importance of remembering that immigrants have a past. The stories these men and women bring to the American table, so to speak, are essential in determining their contribution to the larger American story they have become a part of, and therefore deserve to be recognized. As an activist and immigrant himself, Junot Diaz uses his books to create a sense of solidarity between the reader and the characters in an effort to make his audience understand the incredible baggage with which immigrants and their families must often bear. However, the author’s contributions to the Latino immigrant community are not found only in his literary work. Throughout his professional life, Diaz has given much back to the community that shaped him. For example, when the Georgia legislature passed a law in 2011 that barred undocumented immigrants from the five most competitive state schools, Diaz became a member of the board of advisers of Freedom University, a nonprofit program created by five UGA professors in order to provide affected students with college level education. In interviews, panels and keynote speeches, Diaz constantly reiterates his commitment to the cause of racialized minorities and his support for comprehensive immigration reform. It’s fair to say that the author perfectly paraphrased the liberal opinion on immigration during an interview in the Colbert Report, stating that “Every single immigrant we have, documented or undocumented is a future American.”
As one dives deeper into Diaz’s books, it becomes clear that they also serve a political purpose in their unapologetic affirmation of a strong and growing Latino subculture within modern U.S. society. Oscar, Lola and Yunior – the second-generation Dominican characters in Oscar Wao – are all a product of a quixotic mixing of national identities, a process that has undoubtedly created an alternate “third space” between the two countries’ cultures. This is the area populated by the millions of Dominican-Americans living throughout the States – a space not easily understood by those who have not experienced immigrant life in some way. Diaz’s witty use of Spanglish, which combines Dominican idioms and American nerd-speak, serves as a secret lingo for those of his readers “in the know.” This leaves his white American fans out-of-the-loop, making them empathize with Dominicans’ linguistic struggles when first arriving in the States. At the same time, the myriad references to comic book culture and high-fantasy lore (comparing Trujillo to Marvel supervillains and his lackeys to Wraiths and Morguls) concede a high level of acclimatization to North American culture. It is here, in between the Spanish and English that the author explores the hybrid identities of his characters, and that of the Dominican-American community.
Ultimately, Diaz deserves to be praised not just for his storytelling skills, but also for the way he takes advantage of his position to send a much-needed message. In this particular case, the message is that Dominicans are here, they have been tied to the U.S. for a very long time, and they have a right to define their own Americanism like everybody else. These days it would be hard to deny that Dominicans and Latinos in general, are redefining the country’s image in more ways than one. Latinos are now America’s largest minority, representing 16.4% of the population. They are also a quintessential factor in the nation’s growth, with the rise in Latino population making up for more than half of the nation’s total population increase in the last decade. One of the fastest growing national-origin groups within Latinidad, the Dominican population in the U.S. exceeds 1.5 million. 57% of these are foreign-born immigrants, making immigration a key issue for the community, and an experience that many of them personally remember. In Rhode Island, the Providence Dominican community has become one of the largest ones in the country, and the election of Providence Mayor Angel Taveras – a son of Dominican immigrants and the city’s first Latino mayor – put this group at the forefront of the city’s politics and emphasized its importance within the national Latino community.
Beyond the realm of politics, Dominican celebrities like Diaz (Julia Alvarez, Alex Rodriguez, and Kat DeLuna come to mind) are contributing to American culture in their own unique way, further constructing and shaping the interpersonal space that bridges the gap between the D.R. and the U.S.
The reason Diaz was chosen for an honorary doctorate is because he doesn’t merely observe this ongoing process, but constantly adds to it through his literature, his activism and his teaching. Likewise, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is his most notable book because it is a symbol of what it means to become an American, which is to add to your identity and not subtract from it. In an interview with Bill Moyers, Diaz talks about the importance of “the small megaphones” – the voices of regular folks who personally experience the changing reality of U.S. culture on a day-to-day basis – in American public discourse. In many ways, Junot Diaz has become a spokesperson for a whole community of small voices, and has now integrated himself as a part of the dialogue that is changing the definition of “American.” The things that voices like his contribute to how the nation understands itself are worth more than any book prize or honorary degree.
this didn’t age well