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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 March 2012
The Dominican American community in New York is perhaps one of the best examples of how processes of transculturation are affecting traditional definitions of ethnic identification. Given the intense economic, social and cultural transnational exchanges between the island and the USA from the 1960s, Dominicanyorks have been challenging the illusion of homogeneity in the definition of Americanness for decades, creating transnational social networks that transcend traditional national and ethnographic boundaries. The theatrical works of Josefina Báez, a Dominican American performer living in New York, and Sherezada (Chiqui) Vicioso, a Dominican poet and playwright who lived and worked in the US metropolis for decades before moving back to the Dominican Republic, lyrically explore issues of diaspora, identity and migration and the impact these phenomena might have in the lives of migrant Dominican women. Presenting diasporic experiences from two differing but interconnected locales – New York and the Dominican Republic – these plays offer two complementary views on the ways in which ethnicity, race, social class, age and geopolitical location interact in the formation of transcultural identities, thus contributing to develop a hemispheric approach to the study of identity formation in the Americas.
1 Edna Acosta-Belén, “Reimagining Borders: A Hemispheric Approach to Latin American and U. S. Latino and Latina Studies,” in Johnnella E. Butler, ed., Color-Line to Borderlands. The Matrix of American Ethnic Studies (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2001), 254.
2 Agustín Laó-Montes, “Introduction,” in Agustín Laó-Montes and Arlene Dávila, eds., Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 1–18
3 Laó-Montes employs the term latinidad (“latinness”) to refer to the specific positionings that Latinos/as (peoples of Latin American and Caribbean descent) occupy in the US, as well as to the historical locations and discursive formations from which these positionings stem.
4 Ibid., 14.
5 Báez, Josefina, Dominicanish (New York: Ay Ombe, 2000)Google Scholar and Luisa Sherezada Vicioso, Nuyor/Islas, in Paquita Suárez Coalla, ed., Aquí me tocó escribir. Antología de escritor@s latin@s en Nueva York (Oviedo: Trabe, 2006), 70.
6 Báez, Josefina, “A 123 Portrait of a Legend,” Callaloo, 23, 2 (2000), 1038–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Even though, in the poem, the changes in Ciguapa's nature are attributed to the pressure to assimilate, i.e. to blend into the receiving dominant culture, I contend that these changes are more clearly explained in terms of a process of transculturation. The term “transculturation,” coined by Cuban cultural critic Fernando Ortiz in the 1940s and vindicated more recently by scholars of Latino/a and Chicana/o studies, refers to the results of culture contact by acknowledging the dynamics of resistance and accommodation to different cultural systems. This model thus challenges the passivity on the part of the subordinate group implicit in the assimilation model, and concentrates on examining the agency of transcultural subjects. Defined as being situated between different cultures, languages and/or definitions of subjectivity, transcultural subjects negotiate their identities by conjugating aspects of the multiple realities they inhabit.
8 Torres-Saillant, Silvio, “Nothing to Celebrate,” Culturefront: A Magazine of the Humanities, 8, 2 (1999), 42Google Scholar.
9 “La Ciguapa,” Diccionario de Mitos y Legendas, 2007–8, accessed 20 Aug. 2010, available at www.diccionariodemitos.com.ar/mitos/ciguapa.htm.
10 There seem to be no references to these creatures either in any of the chronicles written by the Spanish colonizers or in the pre-Columbian cave paintings found in the island. For these reasons, ethnologist Manuel Mora Serrano considers Ciguapas to be a truly “national legend,” shaped over the course of the Trujillo years as part of the nation-building project. Serrano, Manuel Mora, “Indias, vien-vienes y ciguapas: Noticias sobre tres tradiciones dominicanas,” Eme-Eme: Estudios Dominicanos, 19 (1975), 66Google Scholar. By linking it to the indigenous Taino cosmologies, the legend of Ciguapas would conform to the fictive national ethnicity orchestrated by Trujillo, which revolved around an ideal racial and cultural mestizaje between the Taino natives and the white Spanish colonizers. For more information on the history of the myth see Rodríguez, Jorge, Emilio, “Encroachment of Creole Culture on the Written and Oral Discourses of Hispaniola,” Matatu – Journal for African Culture and Society, 27 (2003), 109–35Google Scholar.
11 Báez, “A 123 Portrait of a Legend,” 1039.
12 Ibid., 1038.
13 Claudio Mir, “Orchestrating a Journey,” in Báez, Dominicanish, 11.
14 I am drawing from Avtar Brah's notion of “diaspora space” to encompass the notions of diaspora, border, and dis/location: as a conceptual category it is inhabited not only by those who have migrated and their descendants, but also those who are constructed as “indigenous.” Avtar Brah, “Diaspora, Border and Transnational Identities,” in idem, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).
15 Mena, Miguel D., “Y con ustedes, Josefina Báez, de La Romana al infinito,” Cielonaranja: Ediciones del Cielonaranja, 2005Google Scholar, accessed 8 March 2007, available at www.cielonaranja.com/menajosefinabaez.htm; all translations from Spanish are my own unless otherwise stated.
16 San-Miguel, Yolanda Martínez, Caribe Two Ways: Cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico (San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2003), 322Google Scholar.
17 Ibid., 325.
18 Ibid., 330.
19 Ibid., 330.
20 Silvio Torres-Saillant, “No es lo mismo ni se escribe igual: la diversidad en lo dominicano,” in Torres-Sailllant et al., eds., Desde la Orilla: hacia una nacionalidad sin desalojos (Santo Domingo: Ediciones Librería Trinitaria, 2004), 25.
21 Rodríguez, Néstor E., Escrituras de desencuentro en la República Dominicana, (México DF: Siglo XXI Editores, 2005), 111Google Scholar.
22 The vocable “Nuyor/Islas” is composed of “Nuyor,” which reproduces the Spanish pronunciation of “New York,” and islas, which in Spanish means “islands.”
23 Norma Alarcon quoted in Arrizon, Alicia, Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999), 14Google Scholar.
24 Báez, Dominicanish, 31.
25 Ask Oxford.com, “-ish,” (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), accessed 10 Oct. 2009, available at www.askoxford.com.
26 Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994)Google Scholar.
27 Sandoval-Sánchez, Alberto and Saporta-Sternbach, Nancy, Stages of Life: Transcultural Performance and Identity in U. S. Latina Theater (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001), 54–55Google Scholar.
28 Lorgia García-Peña, “Dominicanidad in Contra (Diction): Marginality, Migration and the Narration of a Dominican National Identity,” PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2008. In Dissertations & Theses: A&I (database online); available at www.proquest.com (publication number AAT 3328825, accessed 15 March 2010), 140.
29 Báez, Dominicanish, 22: “I won't put my mouth like a glove”; emphasis in original.
30 García-Peña, 140.
31 In Dominicanish, Báez re-creates a complex language in which natural language is only one of the symbolic systems providing meaning. References to visual images such as graffiti and publicity slogans, allusions to song lyrics, excerpts from the Dominican national anthem, Hindi philosophy, abound in the text, giving way to a highly symbolic language whose analysis is beyond the scope of this article. For more on this issue see García-Peña's, Lorgia “Performing Identity, Language and Resistance: A Study of Josefina Báez's Dominicanish,” Wadabagei, 11, 3 (2008), 28–43Google Scholar, and Mariñez's, Sophie “Dominicanish, de Josefina Báez: la translocalización de los símbolos,” Agulha. Revista de Cultura, 21, 22 (2002)Google Scholar, available at www.revista.agulha.nom.br/ag21baez.htm, accessed 13 Feb. 2010.
32 Vicioso, Nuyor/Islas, 70.
33 By “transracialization,” I refer to the process of transformation in racial identification experienced by subjects who are exposed to different systems of racial categorization, in the same sense that the prefix “trans-” is applied to the term “transculturation” as discussed in this paper. This usage is different to John Raible's use of the same term focussing on the effects that integration of children of different racial backgrounds has in the processes of socialization and racialization in white non-adopted siblings in US families. More information on the latter is in John Raible, “What Is Transracialization?”, John Raible Online. A Home Away from Home for the Transracial Adoption Community. 28 Jan. 2007. Wordpress. 17 March 2009. Available at http://johnraible.wordpress.com/what-is-transracialization.
34 Ibid., 26–27.
35 The performative aspects of the live performance of Dominicanish deserve a more detailed analysis, but are beyond the scope of this article. I am focussing mainly on the printed version of the play, and the references to the performance and the performer are included to complement the textual analysis. For a more thorough exploration of the performative dimension see Lorgia García-Peña's “Performing Identity, Language and Resistance”; or Irrizarry's, Roberto “Travelling Light: Performance, Autobiography, and Immigration in Josefina Báez's Dominicanish,” Gestos, 42, 21 (2006), 81–96Google Scholar.
36 Laó-Montes, “Introduction,” 9.
37 Latinegro is a term that has gained currency among Latinos/as of African ancestry since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. For Cruz-Janzen it has become “an empowering affirmation of Latinegros’ legitimacy as Latinos.” in Cruz-Janzen, Marta, “Latinegras. Desired Women – Undesirable Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, and Wives,” Frontiers, 22, 3 (2001), 173Google Scholar, 175.
38 Ibid., 168.
39 Ibid., 172.
40 Báez, Dominicanish, 26.
41 García-Peña, “Performing Identity, Language and Resistance,” 142–43.
42 Etienne Balibar coins this term to account for the process of racial and ethnic homogenization existing in the discursive formation of modern nations in “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds., Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 96–100.
43 Rodríguez, Escrituras, 11.
44 Ibid., 12.
45 Aida Heredia, “The Journey Inward: Sherezada Vicioso's ‘Un extraño ulular de voces traía el viento’,” in Miriam de Costa-Williams, ed., Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers (Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle Publishers, 2003), 327.
46 Luisa Sherezada Vicioso, “An Oral History (Testimonio),” in Miriam de Costa-Williams, ed., Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers, trans. Nina M. Scout (Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle Publishers, 2003), 314.
47 Vicioso, Nuyor/Islas, 72–73.
48 Ibid., 76.
49 Daisy Cocco de Filippis. “Dominican Writers at the Crossroads: Reflections on a Conversation in Process,” in Conrad James and John Perivolaris, eds., The Cultures of the Hispanic Caribbean (Gainesville: University Press of Florida: 2000), 156.
50 Báez, Dominicanish, 47.
