Abstract
The Dominican Republic and its relationship with Dominican America have often been studied in relation to the brutal regime of Rafael Trujillo, tíguere masculinity, and the political sphere. Writers like Julia Álvarez and Junot Díaz, as well as anthologies of Dominican women’s writing, form a literary archive that conceives of women’s writing as a perpetual act of rebellion, mostly against Trujillo and Trujillista models of masculinity. Starting from Lorgia García-Peña’s conception of “contradiction” (2016) and Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet (2012), this article argues that Angie Cruz’s Soledad (2001) and Naima Coster’s Halsey Street (2017) are a counter-archive of woman-centered, Dominican American narratives of return dependent on feminized forms of expression and belonging—namely art, quiet, secrecy, surrender, and interiority. These novels reclaim the power of these acts and spaces along a spectrum of quietude, ranging from acts of alienation to tools for bonding, healing, and growth.
Mills, R.M. Beyond Resistance in Dominican American Women’s Fiction: Healing and Growth Through the Spectrum of Quietude in Angie Cruz’s Soledad and Naima Coster’s Halsey Street. Lat Stud 19, 70–91 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-021-00286-8
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Notes
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- 2.
- 3.
I adopt this term from García-Peña (2016) who defines capital-D “Dominicanidad” as “hegemonic and official versions of Dominicanness” while lower-case-D “dominicanidad” represents “the people and the ideas related to Dominicanness” (p. 213, fn1).
- 4.
See also Rodríguez (2018), who considers the place of resistance politics in Latinx literary studies.
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- 6.
- 7.
As Thornton and Ubiera note, Dominican studies scholarship has often focused on the relationship between Haiti and DR, casting Dominicans as “self-hating blacks” or a “novel racial problem” (2019, p. 413). Although conceptions of Afrodominicanidad inform this article, they do so not to reify the Haiti-DR divide but rather to inform my readings of gender, class, race, and migration in the texts. Like Ramírez (2018), I am not interested in homogenizing Africanity but rather in exploring “the prismatic nature of the African diaspora” in the Dominican context (p. 154). See also Candelario (2007) and Silvio Torres-Saillant’s oeuvre.
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- 9.
Ramírez explores the complexities of DR sex work and sex worker narratives in chapter 5 of Colonial Phantoms (2018).
- 10.
Whenever the story focuses on Mirella’s point of view, Penelope’s name is written with the accent over the second ‘e’ to indicate the mother’s Dominican Spanish accent as well as the disconnect between how Penelope sees herself and how her mother sees her. I will use “Penelope” throughout the paper, unless quoting a line that uses the accent.
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- 15.
The centrality of painting to the daughters’ lives in both novels evokes the painting at the center of the mythic DR figure, la Virgen de Altagracia. See Roorda et al. (2014, p. 393).
- 16.
See also Otero (2016).
- 17.
Ramírez’s conception of montería and el monte is applicable here (2018, p. 22).
- 18.
See also Zamora (2017) on AfroDominican women as an “embodied archive” (p. 2).
- 19.
In Halsey Street, water is everywhere: las cascadas in Aguas Frescas, the water that roils and boils when Mirella and Penelope have their big fight that leads to their years-long estrangement, the mother and daughter’s final time together taking place at the beach, and Penelope attempting to cleanse and cool the cigarette burns on her arms created as she tries to process her mother’s sudden death. Although out-side of the scope of this paper, future work should look at the power of water in that novel as well.
- 20.
See Lantigua (2001).
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Mills, R.M. (2024). Beyond Resistance in Dominican American Women’s Fiction: Healing and Growth Through the Spectrum of Quietude in Angie Cruz’s Soledad and Naima Coster’s Halsey Street. In: Torres, L., Alicea, M. (eds) Latino Studies: A 20th Anniversary Reader. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37784-6_16
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