Haunting Legacies: Forging Afro-Dominican Women’s Identity in Loida Maritza Pérez’s Geographies of Home

Abstract

This chapter proposes the existence of a gender-specific migratory experience for the female characters in Pérez’s novel. She reveals the alternative forms of self-empowerment that her Dominican-American female characters employ to heal and manage the effects of violation, abuse, and the daily forms of humiliation and struggle endured as Afro-Latina immigrants in New York City. Pérez renders the marked body, divergent sexuality, and a multishifting perspective on reality as manifestations of her female characters’ challenges with navigating the American landscape and negotiating ties to their homeland. Furthermore, this chapter examines Perez’s formulation of a distinctly Afro-Dominican women’s identity, which counters the official narrative of Dominican national identity.

This is an expanded version of an article that first appeared in the journal Label Me Latina/o. The original content is reprinted with the permission of Label Me Latina/o.