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Abstract:
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The assassination of the Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in 1961 marked the beginning of many rebirths for the Dominican Republic . Confronted with the growing pains of an emerging democratic national consciousness , the island was also faced with an unprecedented circumstance : a massive exodus that displaced thousands of Dominicans to the United States and Puerto Rico . My dissertation focuses on contemporary narrative representations of Dominican migrations to the United States and Puerto Rico . In chapter 1 , "A Product of Exiles , Travels and Displacements : The Constructions of an Ethnic and Racial Consciousness in the United States in Pedro Henríquez Ureña's Memoir ," I propose my own working definition of a Dominican transnational subjectivity at the beginning of the 20th century as I see it surfacing in Henríquez Ureña's memoir . In chapter two , "With Floating (Intranational ) Borders : Displaced Dominicans in Puerto Rican Narratives ," I explore the narrative representation of Dominican migrations to Puerto Rico and the challenges they bring about to the Puerto Rican national discourse constituted in the late 1930s . This chapter analyzes José Luis González's La luna no era de queso : memorias de infancia (1988 ) , Ana Lydia Vega's "El día de los hechos" from her short story collection Encancaranublado y otros cuentos de naufragio (1982 ) and Magali García Ramis's "Cuatro retratos urbanos" from the short story collection Las noches del riel de oro (1995 ) . In chapter three , "Of Absent (nomadic ) Fathers and Boys in Construction : Dominican Diasporic Subjectivities in Junot Díaz's Drown ," I analyze the short story collection titled Drown (1993 ) by Junot Díaz . My reading of Diaz's work interprets his characters as gravitating towards communities in which they become active components of multi -racial and multi -ethnic communities fostered by global migrations . In the last chapter , "Crooked City Women : A Reading of Race , Ethnicity and Migration in Narratives of Late 20th and 21st Century Dominican Women writers ," I focus on Loida Martiza Pérez's novel Geographies of Home (1999 ) and Josefina Báez's performance piece Dominicanish (2000 ) to illustrate how their work challenges patriarchal forms of expression that are rooted in the homeland and then disseminated in U .S . diasporic Dominican communities . |