Reviewed by: The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning Katherine Miranda Juan Flores. 2009. The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning. New york: Routledge. 237 pp. ISBN 978-0-415-95261-3. A socio-cultural study of the ramifications of diasporic return migration, The Diaspora Strikes Back explodes borders and The Diaspora Strikes Back explodes borders and transcends traditions in both methodology and content to examine the “intense intersections of transnational desires” (p. 3) inherent in caribeño—Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban—return migration. The study tackles scope and specificity through a historical survey of caribeño diasporic cultural production (in literature, music, and the visual arts) and personal experience (through twenty-six testimonies spanning 1960 to the present). Anchored in the concept of “cultural remittance,” Flores defines the phenomenon as “the ensemble of ideas, values, and expressive forms introduced into societies of origin by re-migrants and their families as they return ‘home,’ sometimes for the first time, for temporary visits or permanent re-settlement, and as transmitted through the increasingly pervasive means of telecommunications” (p. 4). In three parts divided into six chapters, Flores examines the ways diasporas transform their countries of origin through these “slices” of life they introduce to them, also recognizing that cultural remittances are significantly interlaced with the imprint of the home country (he insists that salsa, for example, was sent to Puerto Rico from New York, where it originated from caribeño musical traditions “creolized” in the U.S.). Part 1: Conceptual Bearings frames the study’s theoretical trajectory around processes of relationalities and multidirectionalities rather than the traditional binaries of much of Caribbean diaspora and return migration scholarship. Aligned with more recent theorizations of “new” and/or “transnational” diasporas formed around varied axes of power, Flores’ class-oriented “diaspora from below” approach focuses on the poor, disenfranchised, subaltern subjects of Caribbean migrations, a formula embodied by “Créolité in the Hood,” a concept that embodies the ways complex processes of transnationality are linked to the cultural manifestations they spawn, produced largely by urban youth with particular emphasis on race. In Chapter 2, “Of Remigrants and Remittances,” Flores attempts to redirect and marry the scholarly disconnected fields of diaspora studies—saturated with the trope of “de-territorialized nomadism” (p. 34)—and return migration—focused on developmental impacts [End Page 178] through policy-oriented studies. Insisting instead on comparative analysis of the reciprocal relationship between home and host societies, Flores centers the cultural implications of diasporic return migrations and examines their effects on both returnees and their return society’s “established values and exclusionary sense of national identity” (p. 39), particularly in the ways the “oppositional, contestatory quality of youth culture learned in or from the diaspora… engages the realities of the home society” (p. 43) with specific attention to sexual orientation and racial identification. Chapter 3: “Caribeño Counterstream,” teases out the historical (a)symmetries of the popularly imagined cultural unity of las tres antillas, examining how Puerto Rican (“the anachronistic direct colony”) Dominican (“beleaguered neo-colony”), and Cuban (“foundering experiment in dependent socialism”) socio-political diasporic experiences intersect and diverge across similar and discrepant histories of Spanish colonialism and subsequent U.S. hegemony. Flores’ survey interweaves facts that debunk popular cultural assumptions (only two of Machito’s Afro-Cuban All Stars weren’t Puerto Rican!) and importantly stresses the racial implications of antillano “two-tiered”—Caribbean and African—diasporic identity. The methodological crux of Flores’ ethnography, Part 2: Narrative Groundings consists of twenty-two guided conversations, or “Tales of Learning and Turning,” about return migration experiences—eleven Puerto Rican, six Dominican, and five Cuban. Alphabetized by pseudonym and organized generationally from oldest to youngest, the content of each tale remains intact but has been restructured to maintain “narrative coherence and inherent emblematic significance,” (p. 79), reading not as interviews but as first-person narratives. From a young lesbian’s flight from Puerto Rico to escape her family’s homophobia, a Cuban “exile” living in New Jersey aligned more with revolutionary ideals than capitalism, to a prominent Dominican poet whose afro in 1970s Santo Domingo incited racism, the tales are inflected with both micro...
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Sep 30, 2024
Xudong Liu + 4
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