Afro-Latin Magical Realism, Historical Memory, Identity, and Space in Angie Cruz’s Soledad and Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints

Abstract

This chapter contends that the Afro-Dominican women writers in this study use magical realism as a narrative strategy to create alternate means to investigate the events of historical violence and the legacy of trauma resulting from these experiences. Magical realism allows Cruz and Rosario to expand their stories beyond the real, which permits them to express the ways in which the legacy of colonialism haunts and damages the human spirit, the body, the psyche, and the family. Furthermore, magical realism demonstrates the profound affect of migration on those in the Dominican diaspora. Framed within the tradition of Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices, families are haunted, sometimes literally, throughout the Dominican diaspora and by the legacy of the Trujillato and the trauma of historical violence.