Performance and Linguistic Spectacle in Sandra Cisneros’ Caramelo and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Abstract

The roots of narrative in oral storytelling link today’s novels to various modes of performance. For US Latino writers whose culture and history have been devalorized by social pressures to assimilate to the melting pot, performance offers a key strategy of reasserting an unappreciated and sometimes disdained culture. Chicano and Puerto Rican pride, for example, like the Black pride of the 1960s, allowed these groups to delight in the public reassertion and revalorization of their culture. Thirty years later, two Latino writers who have attained immense success in the US mainstream and internationally have carried narrative strategies of performance to great heights. Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros and Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz (2008) highlight performativity in their recent epic novels—Caramelo (2002) and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), which won the Pulitzer prize in 2008. The writers engage in linguistic and ethnic spectacularity as performative strategies through which they present themselves as innovative American writers who display ethnicity and exhibit aesthetic prowess.