ABSTRACT
An outline of Dominican-American literature perhaps should begin by discussing how the body of writings under perusal relates to the literary tradition of the Dominican Republic. The Dominican population in the United States consists of people with various different lengths of stay, social incorporation, and cultural integration in American society. What US scholars and the media term “the Dominican community” includes people born in the United States, often going back several generations, as well as persons who only recently arrived as immigrants. Among the latter, some arrived in the United States young enough to have received their schooling and overall socialization in the host country. These tend to view American society as their cultural frame of reference and civic loyalty, even while their ancestry may remain a factor of their family lives. Some may have arrived in the host country as adults several decades ago but have maintained a perception of the receiving society as a foreign soil. They could hold on to their sense of living abroad even if they never get to materialize their dream of returning home. No less likely are individuals whose family roots in this country go back several generations, to the start of the twentieth century in a number of cases, and who may lack an intimate rapport with their origins. Also, the intermarriage of Dominicans with partners of other ethnicities sometimes creates circumstances that, depending on the dominant ethnic presence in the environment surrounding the family, may lead the children to identify with the ancestry of one of their parents rather than the other. Thus, Ana García Reyes, the Associate Dean of Community Relations at Hostos Community College, CUNY, participates in the public sphere of New York primarily as a Dominican although one of her parents is Puerto Rican. Similarly, Sandra Maria Esteves, whose poetic voice pierced its way vigorously through the mostly male Nuyorican literary movement of the 1970s and continued to shine forth in the subsequent decades, has identified mainly with the ethnicity of her Puerto Rican father rather than that of her Dominican mother. The complex portrait of the Dominican population as it relates to locations of identity inevitably raises the question of what qualifies for inclusion in the body of writings we think of as Dominican-American literature.
