REVIEW: ‘Dominicana’ is a raw NYC coming-of-age tale
/
“Dominicana” is set in 1960s Washington Heights. Photo by Susan Sermoneta via Flickr
By Joe McCarthy
“Domincana,” the latest book by Angie Cruz, has a grim premise. A 12-year old girl in the Dominican Republic is courted by a man more than twice her age who marries her when she turns 15.
She’s repulsed by him. He arrogantly appears at her family’s doorstep over the years, sweaty and swollen with alcohol. But the family lives in poverty, and views the marriage as a ticket to prosperity — the suitor has connections in New York City.
The arrangement, which takes place in the 1960s, seems like a relic. But it reflects the ways in which girls are routinely undervalued, stripped of autonomy, and used as sexual bartering chips around the world.
The protagonist, Ana, is naive at the outset but she swiftly gains a jaded wisdom. In New York, she knows no one and isn’t allowed to venture outside of their tiny apartment in Washington Heights. Even if she could, she doesn’t speak English.
She’s marooned in a few hundred square feet, kept company by pigeons on the fire escape and commotion on the sidewalk down below.
One day she hears a gunshot outside, followed by screams and sirens. She peers out her window and sees people frantically leaving the theater across the street. Soon, a man is wheeled out on a stretcher. Ana’s total exclusion from American culture prevents her from grasping the significance of the event: Malcolm X’s assassination.
Her isolation isn’t even the worst part. In fact, it becomes a reprieve from her encounters with her husband, Juan, a scheming philanderer.
Juan beats, chokes and rapes Ana. He berates her, squashes her aspirations, and works to mold her into an obedient wife.
But Ana is stubbornly optimistic. She was uprooted from her family, torn from her romantic interest in the DR, and now lives with a textbook domestic abuser.
Her hopes and dreams are irrepressible. That’s the magic of “Dominicana.” It explores horrific incidents, traumas that will leave deep psychological scars, but it’s ultimately a buoyant book, full of the nervous energy of someone excited for the next day. Ana brings an exuberance to her daily interactions. Mundane events, like her only friend Marisela visiting the apartment, are heightened to feel like a soap opera.
While cooped up in her apartment, Ana begins a number of side hustles and hatches a plan, with helpful nudging from Juan’s brother Caesar, to sell home-cooked meals to manual laborers during lunchtime.
The plan takes off when Juan suddenly has to return to DR to handle some business matters and gets stranded there for several months because of the ongoing civil war.
Ana is pregnant at this point and Caesar moves in to help out in his brother’s absence.
Whereas Juan is gruff, Caesar has an easy smile. Juan intimidates, while Caesar charms. He becomes Ana’s confidante, best friend, and number one fan.
In the months that follow, the book takes on Shakespearean layers.
“Dominicana” is based on stories from the life of the author’s mother and other Dominican women. It’s filled with small details — from eating Chef Boyardee for the first time to digging through the crowded wares of backroom clothing markets to the ambivalent arrival of new family members — that give a fresh spin to a classic New York coming-of-age story.
Dominicana starts the book confused and afraid, abandoned by her family. By the end, she’s imagining the Dominican restaurants she’ll open, the extra space her family will need, the way that Washington Heights, once forbidding and grey, will soon be suffused with her culture, people dancing to reggaeton, eating coconuts, and speaking Spanish.
