In and Out of the Mainstream: Dominican-American Identity in Junot Díaz's How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie

Abstract

TORRES-SAILLANT: Do you care, does it matter to you at all, where they shelve your book in the library or in the bookstore, meaning in what section, whether it's called writers of color, fiction, Latino writers, or anything else? DIAZ: I feel it's weird because I've been fortunate enough to be considered literary fiction. They're so happy to claim me as because it makes them all look better. They don't want to relegate me to areas of ethnic studies. They don't want that. The suggestion seems to be: You are one of us now. TORRES-SAILLANT: They? DIAZ: The mainstream, the publishers, everybody. They want me Cespedes and Torres-Saillant (Interview, 905) JUNOT Diaz's well-regarded Drown, a collection of short published in 1996, and the more success of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, have made him, rightly or wrongly, the current face of Dominican-American identity in the U.S. At the same time, the way that the larger reading public has embraced Diaz would suggest that he has transcended the literary ghettoization sometimes experienced by ethnic writers. As suggested by the exchange above, Diaz is appreciative of his wider success, though also a little apprehensive about what it means to be labeled as mainstream. This same issue has generated a range of responses in the critical on Drown. Writing in The Boston Review, Eli Gottlieb suggests that while Diaz successfully resists [the] temptations of emotion, self-consciousness, a tendency to nostalgic reverie, and...some Central Casting stockpile of racial characteristics that presumably characterizes other ethnic literature, he at least partly functions as a 'voice of his people'... since he is introducing a slice of heretofore unrevealed life to most readers. Critics like Nicolas Kanellos and Juan Flores, however, have questioned whether appeal has distanced Latino writers like Diaz from their indigenous communities or from the oppositional politics of earlier writers (Kanellos 24; Flores 176-77). In the New York Times, David Gates dismisses any doubts about Diaz's place in the canon by arguing that since [m]ainstream from William Bradford to Toni Morrison has always been obsessed with outsiders, Diaz is smack-dab in the middle of it. In Studies in Short Fiction, however, Rob Jacklosky provocatively insists that although Diaz has been characterized as a hot young Dominican author and packaged as an 'authentic' voice from the streets, he is not an outsider at all since real inner-city experience is hard to find in these stories which are about nothing you wouldn't expect to find in John Updike's A & P or Raymond Carver's suburbs (1). Although there is clearly some difference of opinion here about whether this is a good or a bad thing, these critics largely agree that Diaz's writing is different from that of other Latino or ethnic writers and that this potentially makes him more of an assimilated American writer than not. However, whether the notion of a strict opposition between ethnic solidarity and mainstream assimilation is really the best frame of reference for understanding Diaz's writing is questionable. Literary critics like Raphael Dalleo and Elena Machado Saez have argued that such distinctions do little to illuminate the way that recent Latino/a literature by writers like Diaz, Angie Cruz, Cristina Garcia, and Julia Alvarez, to name a few, imagines creative ways to rethink the relationship between a politics of social justice and market popularity (3). Moreover, historians and social scientists have begun to recognize the need for a new and more flexible vocabulary to describe the dynamics of immigrant identity in the U.S., especially with regards to Latinos who are facing new challenges to their incorporation in society, as well as new opportunities and incentives for maintaining greater ties to their homelands (Oboler 6-11). …