GS 362: Global Literature

In the book Drown by author Junot Diaz is a collection of short stories, Diaz explores the struggle of Dominican Republic immigrants in the United States to achieve the American Dream. Each story is related, but is a separate vignette, each with its own title. The novel does not follow a traditional story arc but rather each story captures a moment in time. Drown is narrated by an educated adult, and set mostly in the 1980s, with much of the narrative occurring in the narrator’s childhood.

Yunior, the narrator, tells the story of his family’s immigration to the United States from the Dominican Republic. The story begins when Yunior and Rafa, his brother, are eight and twelve, and are sent to live with their uncle for the summer so their mother can work. Their father abandoned them when Yunior was 4 and their family lives in poverty, sometimes having to forgo food for clothes and other necessities. Their mother works long hours, sometimes fourteen-hour shifts, at a local chocolate factory while their grandfather watches them.

At 9-years-old, five years after Yunior’s father leaves, he returns from the United States to bring them back. They live in an apartment and establish a new community in New Jersey. Although they still live in poverty, they do not want for food or other basic necessities. The stories then jump forward many years to when Yunior is in high school and living with his mother. He works and helps pay the rent and other bills while she works as a housekeeper.

The last stories chronicle Yunior’s father’s experience as he tries to succeed in the United States. The father, Ramon, is ambitious and hardworking, but still struggles to provide for himself and his family. While he is away from the Dominican Republic, Ramon marries a U.S. Citizen, also from the Dominican Republic, in order to gain citizenship. He lives with her for many years and she bears him a son. Eventually, however, he leaves her and goes to reclaim his family that is still in the Dominican Republic. He leaves New York after getting a tip from a friend that a new apartment complex in New Jersey is looking for supers and is offering a salary and free rent. This is where he brings his family to live. The reality of Ramon’s situation, contrasted with his illustrious dreams of the United States, is stark.

In my opinion, the author is able to capture the crude reality as well as the raw awkwardness of adolescence in an engaging series of stories. Having been born and raised in the Dominican Republic myself I easily related to Junot's transition from there to America. The familiarity and uniqueness of each small detail from his early days in the "campo" to urban living were significant and outstanding to me. Yet Junot manages to keep the person most unfamiliar with any urban or foreign experience, or with Dominican slang for that matter, engaged and wanting more. I truly did not expect to find such whimsical and yet truthful documentation. Proving to be somewhat of a classic man-child’s unconventional memoir, Diaz has the power to make you chew the truth and savor it. This is a subtle celebration of manhood disguised as a collection of entertaining snippets in the life of a true hero for the multicultural fascination in America today; a celebration which is not frilly, nor pretty, but entertaining and fascinating. Who knew emotion could be expressed in poetic discretion.

Rigoberta Menchu‘s compelling and conversational memoire, I, Riogoberta Menchu: An Indian Women in Guatemala offers a thoughtful, dark glimpse into the bloodiest years of Guatemala’s armed conflict and genocide, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As a woman from among the most marginalized in Guatemala, the indigenous class, she recounts her experiences as a symbolic articulation of the struggles endured by other oppressed and persecuted Guatemalans, indigenous and non-indigenous alike. Her testimonio takes readers along a subaltern feminist path exploring the re-securitization and agency of marginalized groups and women, in times of conflict that remains a foundational text in understanding the complexities of post-conflict Guatemala. Menchu recounts her experiences of poverty, racism, and violence throughout her life in the Quiche province of the Guatemalan highlands. Readers follow Menchu’s account, from her stolen childhood of labour on exploitative fincas, to her work as a catechist and community organizer, as part of the Peasant Unity Committee (CUC) and in solidarity with the Marxist guerilla movement operating in opposition to the Guatemalan State and the military.

As her story unfolds, the context of communal victimization shifts to one of agency, as Menchu describes the gradual transition of her family and community into allies of the guerilla forces and securitized subjects in the ongoing conflict. She recounts experiences of community organization to escape massacre, setting up traps to thwart the military (Burgos-Debrary, 1984, pg. 127). In particular, she details the death of her father Vincente Menchu who died in the peasant occupation of the Spanish Embassy in 1980, which was burned down by the military with occupiers locked inside (Burgos-Denray, 1984, pg. 185). For Menchu, “this reinforced my decision to fight” (Burgos-Debray, 1984, pg. 185). She also recalls the kidnapping, rape, torture and murder of her mother by the military (Burgos-Debray, 1984, pg. 198), along with the public burning her alive, but tortured and disfigured younger brother and the other political prisoners at the military who claimed the indigenous were subersivos, communists working with guerilla forces (Burgos-Debray, 1984, pp. 178-179). Finally, Menchu concludes her work with a more holistic understanding of poverty and exploitation in Guatemala, as un understanding that transcends racialized boundaries between the indigena-ladio divide, and that reinforces a revolutionary Christianity central to work: “We all contribute in different ways, but we all are working for the same objective” (Burgos-Debray, 1984, pg. 246).

In conclusion, Menchu’s testimonio represents a foundational yet controversial text in Guatemalan and Latin American studies that provides invaluable insight into the light of Guatemalan indigenous people, particular women during the country’s disastrous civil war and genocide. Her experiences of trauma, war and organizing the Guatemalan military highlight mechanisms of countering the gendered dimensions of conflict, and how engagement in the struggle offers windows of opportunity for women in women in deconstructing patriarchal social structures. Her testimony must be understood not as such, as a Western reading of her story re-imposes a hegemonic, patriarchal framing of the truths she expresses. Rather, it must be read as a testimono through a subaltern lens that incorporates a feminist perspective into the analysis, acknowledging the power behind Menchu's work that challenges not only the dominant order of society, but of patriarchal constructions of knowledge and truth.

Red Sorghum is about a family from China and the dynamics of how family and business are intertwined together. There are different traditions that are played out in China but the traditions in this era of the novel were very rare from what we see today. The narrator of the novel tells the story of his family in the 1920’s and more so, tells the story of her grandmother. The grandmother’s story starts off with the narrator talking about the grandmother being arranged into a marriage with a much older man. She was arranged into the marriage because she was a poor girl and her parents knew it was a good deal for her to be married with a vineyard owner. The good thing that the parents saw that he was wealthy, but that bad thing was that the older man had Leprosy. Leprosy is a chronic disease that multiplies in bacteria, but mainly affects the skin, the peripheral nerves, mucosa of the upper repertory tract and the eyes. They take the young woman in a sedan chair to meet her husband. Before she gets into the sedan chair, she sneaks a pair of scissors inside her blouse. She is carried through the sorghum fields by a group of men, that is called a party. On the way to meet her husband, while passing through the sorghum fields the young woman’s party is attacked by bandits. When the bandit attacks the party, one of the men from the party that is carrying the young woman, defends her and then runs off into the fields. She found herself in the fields and the days after, the man that defended her accosted her the next day in the fields, while she is very grateful for he has saved her life, she makes love to the man. For many years, she stays with the man she was arranged in marriage with and when he dies she takes control of the winery, which is having very difficult financial times. Since she takes control of the winery, she takes a different pride in the winery and shows the workers that they have to have a different type of pride in the winery and their work. She then meets once again the man that saved her life, and he is an alcoholic whom which urinates into a barrel of wine and even though this would seem a bit odd, it actually made the wine taste a bit better. Family and business were very much well intertwined and correlated because of the way the family was structured. The typical Chinese family had a patrilineal family in which the father always made the decisions of the family. The young woman in the story, whom which is the narrator’s grandmother, is not typical of a Chinese family because a woman does take on a business without a man by her side, and more so a woman was not allowed to be a head any type of business. The war also affects the way that business is ran when the Japanese attack and flatten the sorghum fields; the Chinese revolt against them.

The Cosmic Race by Jose Vasconcelos (1925) predicated the coming of a new age, the aesthetic era, in which joy, love, fantasy and creativity would prevail over the rationalism he saw as dominating the present age. The Cosmic Race is a dense piece of rhetoric filled with internal contradictions and ambivalent motives. A racial thinker, Vasconcelos was not exempt from his own period-base racism especially with regard to peoples of African and Asian descent.

Vasconcelos argue that Mexicans and by extension the “hybrid” Ibero-Americans represent a synthesis of all the great races of the past. These races are the black or Lemurian, the oldest; the red or Atlantean and second oldest, ancestor of the current indigenous civilizations of the Americas; the yellow about which Vasconcelos says remarkably little; and the white, among which Vasconcelos distinguishes the two great strains of Anglo-Saxons and Spaniards. Vasconcelos is not particularly committed to the details of this race system, although literal minded readers of the early 21st century, for example, found him intolerably racist. Vasconcelos’ utopian vision of mestizaje leading to a new, privileged subject that lives in a race less world does not hold up theoretically. According to Vasconcelos, the fifth race will symbolize racial diversity. He pointed out that Latin America would be unique globally as the place where racial diversity and interbreeding would occur. Furthermore, he stated that the blood of all races was already present in mixed-race people in this part of the world. At one point, Vasconcelos states that “the Chinese, who under the holy counsel of Confucian morals multiply like rats” (p.19), and he repeatedly speaks of blacks as ugly. But he also states that “the mestizo, the Indian and even the Black surpass the White in an infinity of properly spiritual capacities” (p.32). However, while his nonracist sexual views seem to some redeem his racial views, they at the same time suggest a sexual egotism repugnant to many women. But in the among all this mixture and ambivalence, what really matters to Vasconcelos is that Mexicans not so much as they are but as they could be will synthesize all prior race types into a fifth race. Vasconcelos’ views on mestizaje racial mixture are key to understand the dominant ideological logic behind Mexico’s nationalist relationship with race.

In The Cosmic Race, Vasconcelos sees the vast potential of specifically Mexicans as mestizos, and lands them for their mestizo/a (mixed race, specifically Spanish and Indigenous) character. Significantly, he also casts the mestizos as the first stage in the creation of a new, cosmic race that will eventually take on characteristics and subsume the genetic streams of “all the races.” According to his logic, this cosmic race would take on the best or most desirable traits from each respective race and eventually lines between the “original” races will blur to the point that any one individual’s “racial heritage” would be completely indistinguishable from author’s, thus becoming the ultimate mestizo/a (something akin what some might now call a post-ethnic post-racial world. In conclusion, Jose Vasconcelos will always be a thinker of controversy.

In the article The Theory of Social Change by Michael Asante is about black racial identity that developed in the late 1940’s. By the early 1970’s, researchers began to focus on developing theories that explained the developmental. process of Black racial identity (Cross, 1971, 1991). The pioneer of such theories, William Cross, created a model depicting how African Americans develop their sense of “Blackness” or how they experience “nigrescence”, which means “becoming Black.” According to Cross (1971, 1991), African American individuals who experience “nigrescence” are re-socialized from having a Eurocentric-influenced identity to having an Afrocentric identity. Cross’s model depicts five developmental stages that an individual experience’s to develop his or her Black identity: Pre-encounter, Encounter, Immersion-Emersion, Internalization, and Internalization-Commitment. Stage one - Pre-encounter: This stage of Cross’s model depicts the “old” identity to be changed. Individuals in this stage are unaware of their “Afrocentricity” or Black heritage because of an overexposure to Eurocentric ideals and culture. FurthermoStere,in the perspective of African Americans in this stage is difficult to change concerning race and “being Black” due to a lack of awareness. According to Cross, this lack of awareness contributes to the development of several attitudes and characteristics associated with this stage of Black identity development.

In the article Beyond “difference”: Examining the process and flexibility of racial identity in interracial marriages by Stephanie E. Afful, Corinne Wohlford and Suzanne Stoeling examine the definitions of race used in discussing interracial marriage, arguing that the common framework of cultural differences used in existing insufficiently describes the range of experiences in interracial marriage. The authors use racial formation theory to examine racial identity within interracial marriages and how racial identity might be reclassified as a function of interracial marriage status. They also discuss individual-level implications with respect of how interdependence theory affects racial identity and marital quality in interracial marriages.

The main points in the article were that racial formation theory provides a framework to approach the topic of race, race relations, and racial identity as a socially constructed entities that are vulnerable to change over time pending on the social, historical, and political landscape of a particular culture. Social Identity Theory assets that individuals use their identities as a source for maintaining their self-esteem by engaging in favorable in-group comparisons. White partners in interracial marriages mat be cognizant of their race and even be classified as less white when seen in public places with their Black partners. Black partners may be reclassified as less Black when their interracial partners. Interdependence theory offers a theoretical explanation of how interracial relationships partners might affect each other’s racial identity as well as marital satisfaction. According to Interdependence theory, will lead to partners making decisions based on each other’s interest.

The purpose of the article was to expand how past literature has defined race and to provide a different and perhaps more comprehensible approach to exploring race and racial identity among those involved in interracial relationships. The potential effects of the social scrutiny on participants in interracial marriages, who must view their relationships through a social lens not focused on same-sex marriages. Lastly, to further examine the changing definition of race and racial identity within interracial marriages, in light of racial formation theory and interdependence theory.

The article helped me find and understand how interdependence theory affects racial identity and marital quality in interracial marriages, how I must first understand race in able to in able to meaningfully understand of the experience of individuals in interracial relationships, and how racial formation theory are pertinent to understanding of racial identities and how interracial marriage include racialization and racial signification. It also helped me find new theories that explain racial formation in interracial marriages which is one of my themes in my literature review.

In my opinion, the article was well-structured with a lot of useful informative that I can add in my literature review. The subheadings were helpful because I was able to understand the article better. I also liked how the article primarily focused on interracial marriages (Black and White couples) since that is the topic I am focusing on for my capstone. It has been a struggle to find scholarly articles that focus on my topic but I’m content that I had found several. Overall, I learned that Black partners feel their own Blackness more acutely in contrast with a White partner’s inexperience with racism or Black traditions.