09 February 2009
New Immigrant Tales
Junot Díaz and Afro-Latino Fiction
By Glenda Carpio
Glenda R. Carpio is the author of Laughing Fit To Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (2008) and is currently working on a book about black and Latino fiction in the Americas. She is associate professor of African and African-American Studies and English at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Junot Díaz, who in 2008 won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), was recently interviewed by satirical talk show host Stephen Colbert. Colbert teasingly asked the author, who came to the United States from the Dominican Republic when he was seven, if by winning the prize he had not robbed an American of the possibility of earning a Pulitzer. Quick on the draw, Díaz responded that since Pulitzer himself had been an immigrant, he would have been happy to know that the prize had gone to him. The exchange jokingly echoes some of the alarm with which Latinos have been identified as America’s fastest-growing minority, the group whose numbers have exceeded that of African Americans. Underlying this alarm, of course, are both the fear of a non-white majority and the fear that Latinos will be a non-black majority who will compete unfairly with African Americans for jobs and so forth.
But who and what are Latinos? The term Latino elides huge differences in class, gender, race, regional origins, and colonial histories. Even the other competitive term, Hispanic, is deceptive, given the many Latinos who do not speak Spanish. Latino and Hispanic are provisional terms at best since they loosely suggest a complex set of experiences — at once multinational and uniquely American — shared by a large and diverse number of immigrants and descendants of immigrants in the contemporary U.S. landscape. The question of how this group defines itself and is defined from the outside is thus complex. Yet in American popular media, the term Latino (I also prefer to use this term) has been almost entirely stripped of its complexity. In particular, what popular representations have tended to erase is the racial diversity of Latinos. Many Latinos are black, especially according to the codes operative in the United States. They are also very often Native American (from the diverse number of indigenous cultures in the Americas), but this fact also gets obscured by the categories “Latino” and “Hispanic.”
Since his literary debut in 1996, the Dominican writer Junot Díaz has been giving sharp-witted eloquence to the complexities of being Afro-Latino and an immigrant in the United States. In his collection of short stories Drown (2006) and in his novel, Díaz guards against the commoditization of the immigrant tale and the reduction of the immigrant to type by using a healthy dose of humor. Díaz’s sensibility is a lot like that of the late actor-comedian Groucho Marx, who was fond of playing with the old saying that American streets are paved with gold. When immigrants get here, Marx said, they learn, first, that the streets are not paved with gold; second, that the streets are not paved at all; and, third, that they are expected to pave them. This is one of Díaz’s most powerful gifts: that he uses a wry sense of humor to write an immigrant literature that does not obsess over identity and immigration, as well as an Afro-Latino literature that does not obsess about race. Instead the focus is on craft and the art of showing, in language, what it means to be black, Latino, and immigrant in America.
Díaz troubles the color line and long-cherished conventions in American immigrant literature by refusing to act as a native informant who is supposed to enlighten a primarily white mainstream audience; he refuses to agonize about life lived in the hyphen: between two languages, between two cultures. Díaz also refuses to whiten Latino culture. Instead, he embraces the heavy African roots of his country of birth and explores its racial complexity. Finally, he challenges authors from ethnic minorities to interconnect. He embraces the exhilarating improvisational freedom of fusing languages — he experiments with Dominican Spanish, Latino Spanish, and African-American slang, as well as with the language of science fiction — within a historical framework that anchors his work. He highlights the African Diaspora as a common historical context that the different cultures of the Americas share. Through the brio of his language, Díaz gives voice to an Afro-Latino consciousness, a consciousness too often muted both in the United States and in other countries in the Americas, while presenting a defiant and vibrant new model of immigrant expression.
