Movin’ On Up and Out

Abstract

This chapter will reassess the positioning of Dominican-American writing as immigrant literature within Latino/a criticism by turning to the fiction of Junot Díaz and Angie Cruz. By citing the critical and popular reception of these two writers, we foreground how their categorization as immigrant writers requires their differentiation from resident Latino/as in terms of their relationship to politics and the market. Anticolonial criticism in particular equates the terms ghetto, real, and resident, suggesting that resident Latino/a writing embodies an urban realism and resistant politics while immigrant Latino/a fiction appears upwardly mobile and destined for market assimilation. Our reading of Díaz and Cruz will focus on how their work challenges the logic behind this binary on several levels. First, the writings of these Dominican-American authors clearly situate an immigrant Latino/a identity within the ghetto. Second, the urban ghetto is shown to be a restrictive setting for the Latino/a imaginary. Finally, their work outlines the limits of realism, questioning whether the genre is the only politically committed mode by which to represent Latino/a experience. We will argue that Junot Díaz’s Drown (1996) points to the limitations involved in idealizing the inner city as the primary locus of progressive politics, while Angie Cruz’s Soledad (2001) reframes the metaphor of drowning to imagine the possibilities for moving up and out of the ghetto in politically redemptive terms.