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GLOBAL DESIRES: [RE]CREATION, SEX, AND SURVIVAL IN
CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVE OF THE HISPANOPHONE CARIBBEAN

By

Christopher Alan McGrath

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Hispanic Cultural Studies

2010

ABSTRACT

GLOBAL DESIRES: [RE]CREATION, SEX, AND SURVIVAL IN
CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVE OF THE HISPANOPHONE CARIBBEAN

By
Christopher Alan McGrath

This study considers recent narrative fiction of the Hispanophone Caribbean to
analyze how several authors are constructing the area’s emergent cultural imaginary by
textually mapping “contact zones” created through transnational flows of capital and
human bodies—especially as these are articulated through tourism and, in particular, sex
tourism. The specific texts under consideration include several short stories by
Dominican author Aurora Arias taken from her collections Fin de mundo (2000), Invi ’s
Paradise y otros cuentos (1998), and Emoticons (2007); the literary autoethnography
“De un pajaro las dos alas” (2009) by Puerto Rican author Larry La F ountain-Stokes; the
short story “La causa que refresca” (1998) by Cuban writer José Miguel Sénchez (Yoss);
the short story “Los aretes que le faltan a la luna” (2000) by Cuban author Angel
Santiesteban; the testimonio Jineteras (2006) and the novel Tatuajes (2007) by Cuban
writer Amir Valle.

This study uses an interdisciplinary approach that draws from literary analysis,
sociology, anthropology, postcolonial studies, gender studies, and discourse theory to
demonstrate how these works explore multiple social forces, daily life events, and
historical processes that make up contemporary vital experience within the region. As
they sketch the spaces where local and foreign social actors meet in the context of
commodified sexuality, these texts show those places to be constituted by structural and

personalized forms of domination, resistance, negotiation, gain, loss, potential, and risk

within conditions of marked socioeconomic disparity. These settings ultimately become
discursive sites by which the authors treated in this study construct a dialogics of
sexualized encounter through which local selves articulate their relation to their foreign
Other and to national power structures.

In chapter one, I contend that Arias’s works attempt to textually apprehend the
ephemeral male tourist Other and the forces which his presence sets in motion—forces
rooted in, indeed, reiterative of, colonial practice and discourse that continue to shape
contemporary Dominican social experience and space. Ultimately, I argue that these
texts offer themselves as counter-narratives to hegemonic representations of the
Caribbean and the praxis that accompanies and reinforces it. In chapter two, I analyze
the works of La F ountain-Stokes, Sénchez, and Santiesteban to argue that, while
concerned with the interplay of discursive structures and social processes in shaping local
experience, their primary focus is on the constitution of subjects in the places where such
social forces converge. Specifically, I argue that these texts, responding to a fimdamental
tension increasingly felt at both the social and the discursive levels within Cuba of the
special period, take as their central theme the constitution of particular types of
subjectivities indicative of that sociohistorical moment. In chapter three, I focus on how
Valle’s texts constitute a discursive project that examines the most sordid side of what it
terms the “human putrefaction” that comprises jineterismo, seeking to cleanse the Cuban
nation. In spite of their express attempts at discursive purification however, Valle’s texts,
driven by the impulse of abjection, ultimately reify the jinetera as a simultaneous object

of repulsion and desire, their discourse a fragmenting and misogynistic pornographos.

Copyright by
CHRISTOPHER ALAN MCGRATH
2010

In loving memory to my father Thomas J. McGrath, whose labor is still bearing fruit.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To the members of my committee—Miguel Cabanas, Michael Largey, Maria
Mudrovcic, and Kristine Byron—I thank you for your dedication and investment in my
professional development. Each of you in your own way has served as a model and
source of inspiration to me as a scholar and a teacher. In particular, I thank my director
Miguel Cabanas, who has borne the majority of the burden in shepherding the writing of
this dissertation. Your feedback and support have been invaluable in the successful
completion of this project. I would like to thank the College of Arts and Letters of
Michigan State University for the 2010 Summer Support Fellowship which assisted me in
the final stages of writing, revising, and defending this dissertation. I would also like to
thank the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Michigan State University
for the Summer Field Research Fellowship which made possible my first trip to the
Dominican Republic in 2005 and proved pivotal for the direction this study would take.
My thanks also go the department of Spanish and Portuguese at Michigan State
University for travel monies, instructorships, and other forms of support. Finally, I
would like to thank my family for all their support, encouragement, and patience—my
mother Arlene F. McGrath, my two beautiful children Ariel Nicole and Aidan Joseph,

and my loving wife, whose words served as the spark for this project.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Global Processes, Colonial Legacies ............................................................... 1
CHAPTER 1

Searching for la vida verdaa’era in the Dominican Republic: A Dialectical View ........ 37
CHAPTER 2

Cuba Part 1: Performing Subjectivities of the Special Period ............................... 110
CHAPTER 3

Cuba Part II: The Staging of a National Abjection ............................................ 180
CONCLUSION

Toward a Dialogics of Sexualized Encounter .................................................. 247
WORKS CITED ................................................................................... 253

vii

Introduction: Global Processes, Colonial Legacies

Y [las islasjson fertilisimas en demasiado grado, ésta
en extremo[..] La genie [...] son tanto sin engafio y
tan liberales de lo que tienen, que [...] de cosa que
tengan, pidiéndosela, jamas dicen que no, antes convidan
la persona con ello, y muestran tanto amor que darian los
corazones [...] Y por ende se hardn cristianos, que se inclinan
a1 amor y servicio de Sus Altezas y de toda la nacion
castellana [...]Esta [isla] es para desear, y vista, es para
nunca dejar [...] toda la Cristiandad debe tomar alegria y
hacer grandesfiestas y dar gracias [...] por los bienes
temporales que no solamente a la Espafia, mas a todos los
cristianos tendran aqui refrigerio y ganancia.l

~Crist6bal Colon “Carta 3 Luis de Santangel”2

-,'Diablo, papi, tzi si ta' bueno, buen perro.’—grita una de las
(res mujeres, la masjoven. Un solo grito a plena voz y sin
miedo, consciente de su poder. [Ella tiene] cara de ‘ven papi,
buen perro, comeme, que quiero ver co'mo tr} me pones, ven,
que todo esto es tuyo, y es mas, me lo voy a afeitar y me le voy
a poner tu nombre para que veas que he estado espercindote la
vida entera y ya no puedo vivir mas sin ti. ’3

~Aurora Arias “Novia del Atléntico”

This study considers recent narrative fiction of the Hispanophone Caribbean to
analyze how several authors are textually mapping local sociocultural space and
experience in the “contact zones” created within the region by transnational flows of

capital and human bodies, especially as articulated through tourism and, in particular, sex

 

' “And [the islands] are abundantly fertile, this one extremely so [. . .] The people [. . .] are so lacking in
guile and so generous with what they have, that [. . .] whatever they may possess, if asked for it, never say
no, but rather offer it to the person who asked, and they demonstrate so much love that they would give
their hearts [. . .] Therefore they will become Christians, inclined to the love and service of your Royal
Highnesses and of the whole Castilian nation [. . .] This [island] is highly desirable, and, once having seen
it, one does not wish to leave it behind [. . .] all of Christendom should take joy and celebrate with great
festivities and give thanks [. . .] for the temporal wealth, refreshment, and gain that not only Spain, but all of
Christendom will enjoy here.” Translation mine as are all translations throughout this study, unless
otherwise noted.

2 “Carta 3 Luis de Santangel.” Modemized Spanish version taken from Chang-Rodriguez and Filer, 13—4
except for the lines “La gente. . .toda la nacién castellana,” which were rendered into modernized Spanish
by the author of the present study based on the original text as found in Varela, 141-2.

3 “‘Hell, papi, you sure are hot, hot stud!’ shouts the youngest of the three women. A single shout at full
force and without fear, conscious of her power. [She has] a face that says “come on papi, hot stud, eat me,
I want to see what you do to me, come on, all of this is yours, and what’s more, I’m going to shave it and
I’m going to put your name on it so that you’ll see that I’ve been waiting for you my whole life and I can’t
live any longer without you.”’ '

tourism. The specific texts under consideration include: the short stories by Dominican
author Aurora Arias “Hotel Radiante” (Fin de mundo 2000), “Invi’s Paradise” and “30h,
Bavaria!” (Invi ’5 Paradise y otros cuentos 1998); “Bachata,” “Novia del Atlantico,” and
“Emoticons” (Emoticons 2007); the literary autoethnography “De un pajaro las dos alas”
by Puerto Rican author Larry La F ountain-Stokes (Ufias pintadas de azul/Blue

F ingemails 2009); the short story “La causa que refresca” by Cuban writer Jose Miguel
Sénchez (Y 085) (Encuentro de la cultura cubana (1998); the short story “Los aretes que
le faltan a la luna” by Cuban author Angel Santiesteban (Los nuevos canz'bales: Antologia
de la mas reciente cuentistica del Caribe hispano 2000); the testimonio Jineteras (2006)
and the novel Tatuajes (2007) by Cuban writer Amir Valle.

Selection of the above texts was based on two main criteria: the first of these was
their taking as their central theme some aspect of the relations between local and foreign
social actors in the context of commodified sexuality—Le. that which attaches itself in
particular to tourism, either incidentally or as part of the express purpose of travel (sex
tourism); second of all was the choice to use a representative selection of the most recent
texts to treat the theme, as these correspond to a marked upsurge of the phenomenon
within the region during roughly the last twenty years. This, as we shall see, corresponds
to the increasing grth and economic centrality of tourism within Caribbean societies.
Thus, although there is a literary tradition that treats the theme of commodified sexuality
within the Hispanophone Caribbean, some texts fall outside the parameters of this study.
For example, texts such as Cuban authors Tomas F emandez Robaina’s Historias de
mujeres priblicas (1998), Guillermo Cabrera lnfante’s Tres Triste T igres, Miguel Bamet’s

Cancion de Rachel (1969), Zoe' Valdés’s La nada cotidiana (1995), Pedro Juan

Gutie'rrez’s T rilogia sucia de La Habana (1998) and El Rey de La Habana (1999) either
deal with an earlier sociohistorical period, treat the theme merely as a motif, or focus
principally on sex work involving local social actors. The same holds true for Puerto
Rican authors Mayra Santos F ebres’ Nuestra Senora de la noche (2006) and Sirena
Selena vestida de pena (2000), Francisco Font Acevedo’s La belleza bruta (2008), and
Dominican author Rey Emmanuel Andfijar’s Candela (2006) and El hombre triangulo
(2005). While such texts as Jordi Sierra 1. Fabra’s Cuba: La noche de lajinetera (1997),
Olga Consuegra’s La noche pario unajinetera (2008), Lisette Bustamante’s Jineteras:
La explotacio'n sexual en Cuba, de la revolucion al revolco'n (2003), and Zoe’ Valde's’s
short story “Traficante de marfil, melones rojos” (1998) fall within the established
parameters, they all primarily deal with Cuba and would thus cause a marked imbalance
in the countries represented within this project.4

Thus, while focusing on a representative sample of texts, the present study argues
that, through their portrayals of localized encounters between foreign sex tourists and
members of local society, these works generate a discourse that attempts, in a variety of
ways, to come to terms not only with the area’s experience of colonial legacies, but also
with the impact of the intensified global processes that characterize the region’s recent
experience, especially as they are articulated through sex tourism.

While there is a growing amount of scholarly writing on the subject of sex
tourism in the region, it has been almost exclusively a product of the social sciences—Le.

anthropology, sociology, tourism. studies. While drawing on such material as secondary

 

4 The emerging importance of the phenomenon as a theme within contemporary Caribbean cultural
production is not only limited to literary texts. It is also seen in recent films from the region such as
gQuién diablos es Juliette? (I997), Princesas (2005), Azucar amarga (I996), San/0; Panky (2007),
Heading South ‘Vers le sud’ (2005), and Flores de otro mundo (1999).

resources, mine constitutes the first systematic study of locally produced literary
representations of the phenomenon and allows me to analyze a key discursive element of
the region’s evolving cultural imaginary as it has emerged at the close of the twentieth
and beginning of the twenty-first centuries.

In order to contextualize the settings in which these works take place, in the
following section I develop a sociohistorical framework of the Hispanophone Caribbean
with particular emphasis on the Dominican Republic and Cuba and the historical
development of tourism and sex tourism within the area. This will be followed by a
delineation of the theoretical framework by which I approach and analyze these texts.
Finally, I provide a brief chapter summary.

Soda-historical Overview

As the authors treated in this study produce a cultural imaginary through their
portrayals of the [sexualized] encounters between local subjects and foreigners, they
construct “ethnoscapes,” Arjun Appadurai’s term for one of the “imagined worlds” born
of recent human mobilities and “global cultural flows” that he theorizes thus:

By 'ethnoscape', 1 mean the landscape of persons who constitute the
shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles,
guest workers and other moving groups and persons constitute an
essential feature of the world [. . .] This is not to say that there are not
anywhere relatively stable communities and networks, of kinship, of
friendship, of work and of leisure, as well as of birth, residence and
other filiative forms. But it is to say that the warp of these stabilities is

everywhere shot through with the woof of human motion, as more

persons and groups deal with the realities of having to move, or the
fantasies of wanting to move. (Modernity at Large 33-4)

Indeed, the “ethnoscapes” of tourism reflect the very mobility of which Appadurai
speaks. In the Caribbean, where, as we shall see, governments have drastically
restructured their economies by placing tourism as a central strategy for development,
these same restructurings have triggered a double movement as tourist influx and local
emigration—when possible—have increased exponentially. When unable to leave and
escape deteriorating economic conditions, increasing numbers of local Caribbean
residents seek to plug themselves into tourist flows as these intersect the island, looking
to benefit from their participation in the formal and/or informal tourist economy, usually
performing service-oriented labor.5

The dynamics of an “ethnoscape” of transnational mobility are well exemplified
by a series of commercials of the early 19905 through which the privately-owned
Dominican rum company Brugal sought to position itself within the increased
transnational flows triggered by neoliberal economic restructurings of the island
economy. The series consists of three commercials which form a series known as “La
americana de Ron Brugal.”6

The first ad starts in the middle of a sunny downtown Manhattan of the 19903 as a
scene unfolds under the gaze of the Twin Towers of The World Trade Center. After
dropping off some fares, a Dominican cab driver is called by the sounds of some live

music being played across the street. He is so absorbed that he doesn't notice the thirty-

 

s I use the term “informal economy” and its related terms as defined by Steven Gregory in The Devil
Behind the Mirror: “economic activities outside formal wage-labor relations and unregulated by the state”
7).
I take the titles from their assignation as such on the youtube. com website where they are labeled “La
americana de Ron Brugal,” “La americana de Ron Brugal pt 2,” etc.

5

something blond woman who enters the taxi asking "Sir, are you on duty?" Seemingly
unaware of her presence, he continues to gaze upon a scene of a musical group playing a
traditional Dominican music form, merengue, replete with typical musical instruments
associated with it: a Dominican marimba, a saxophone, a giiira, a tambora, and a conga.
As the music continues, the dancing crowd surrounding the musicians continues to grow,
a mix of Whites, Asians, Hispanics/Latinos, most of whom appear to be in their twenties
and thirties, all smiling in this moment of impromptu celebration of cross-cultural
interaction under the continued vigilance of the icons of the newly triumphant global
capitalism, the Twin Towers. As the camera alternates between the cab driver’s face and
the scene he beholds, it highlights his facial expressions, which convey fond memories
and nostalgic longing; almost as if he were caught between desire for home and his
reality of being in the United States. It is only after an almost defiant or determined
downward turn of the mouth that appears to reflect a decision taken, an affirmation to
self, that he is able to emerge from his reverie and finally respond to the repeated "Sir?"of
the blond woman seated in his back seat, waiting expectantly. He responds: "Si, perdon,
mi musi. . .", abruptly correcting himself when he sees the rubia ‘blond woman’: "My
music..." He seductively raises his eyebrows in emphasis as he identifies: "merengue."
The woman responds, eyes narrowed and smiles knowingly with a sassy, slightly
seductive air of her own: "Ah, merengue. . .Mucho buena!" indicating to the driver, if in
stereotypical gringo mispronunciation and grammatical assassination of his language,
that she perhaps knows something of his culture and finds it exciting and pleasurable. As

they laugh together, the taxi driver pulls away, proclaiming with a smile and a knowing

air of friendly superiority "y eso, que tu no sabes nada, americana" ("You don't know

anything, Americana"). As the music continues, the camera zooms out, panning over the
impromptu party celebrants and the official logo of Brugal Rum appears on the screen as
a voiceover announces: "Brugal, contigo en todo lo nuestro" ("Brugal, with you in
everything that is ours" ).

"Todo lo nuestro" 'Everything that is ours' is, of course, all the cultural capital
that follow the flows of human movement and the circuits of consumption and
production, the "authentic"—music, food, and laboring bodies, and, of course Brugal
rum—commodified to cross the same borders as its primary consumers, Dominican
citizens. Here, in transnational space, Brugal will serve as an iconic link to home even as
it celebrates those transnational flows and seeks to position itself accordingly within
rapidly expanding new circuits.

This commercialized ethnoscape would be more specifically identified within
Appadurai’s theorization as a “mediascape,” which refers to both the distinct media for
the production and distribution of images as well as the actual “images of the world
created by these media” (35). As he continues: “What is most important about these
mediascapes is that they provide (especially in their television, film and cassette forms)
large and complex repertoires of images, narratives and 'ethnoscapes' to viewers
throughout the world, in which the world of commodities and the world of 'news' and
politics are profoundly mixed” (35) Thus, as broadcast throughout the Dominican
Republic, the Brugal ad reflects back to the nation’s citizens a growing fact of their
everyday lives—transnational flows—while pointing to how some might and do position
themselves under the auspices of transnational capital, participating, like the taxi driver

and the rum which is pitched as subsuming all that is authentically Dominican, in spaces

of economic commodification, labor, and material goods which may be consumed
transnationally.

It will be consumption which will be the point of connection for intercultural
relationships also, as the second commercial offers a glimpse of the blond americana in
her adventures throughout the island, consuming “authentic” Dominican food, enjoying
the company of several Dominican men with whom she dines, dances, and, of course,
imbibes Ron Brugal. At the end of the commercial, we find her once again back in New
York, recently arrived and in search of a taxi. When asked from where she is returning
by the taxi driver, whose back is to her, she responds “Paradise,” upon which he turns to
see the “authentic” Dominican tambora drum upon which is painted a Dominican flag
and, recognizing her, exclaims joyously, “Americana!” As they celebrate this happy
reunion with much laughter and excitement, each of them holding one end of the
tambora, new lyrics for the jingle are heard: "Somos uno juntos / somos e1 corazon de lo
nuestro" ("We are one together / we are the heart of that which is ours"). In this way, the
commercial joins together the americana and the Dominican male in a harmonious union
of consumption and service.

Once again, the commercial conforms to the functions Appadurai describes as
pertaining to the “mediascape”:

'Mediascapes', whether produced by private or state interests, tend to be
image- centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what
they offer to those who experience and transform them is a series of
elements (such as characters, plots and textual forms) out of which scripts

can be formed of imagined lives, their own as well as those of others

living in other places. These scripts can and do get disaggregated into
complex sets of metaphors by which people live as they help to constitute
narratives of the Other and proto-narratives of possible lives, fantasies
which could become prologemena [sic] to the desire for acquisition and
movement" (35-6).

In a sense, one could argue that the story being told in these commercials serves a
hegemonic didactic function originating with members of the country’s economic elites.
It not only describes the transnational and local experience of many Dominicans, but also
seeks to interpellate local consumers at the same time it proposes a desirable and
“natural” order of things within the global tourist economy, positing an ideal relationship
between “Self” and “Other.” Here, smiling, friendly, and helpful Dominicans cater to
smiling, hungry, and consuming tourists. That it suggests the wedding of the (trans)local
male to the foreign female may also be understood as not only an attempt at libidinal
stimulation toward the sale of the product, but also an attempt to play to real desires and
fantasies of many Dominicans for a way off the island. As we will see in the course of
this study, this also constitutes a primary motivation for many who place themselves
within the transnational flows of the sexual economy as they enter into sexual labor with
tourists, be these male or female, desirous to capitalize on their contact with the
mobilities those tourists embody.

Thus, one of the more salient features of this commercial is precisely its
representations of the Dominican “Self” and his/her cultural “Other” and how their social
experience—indeed, how each of them—is constituted through their relationship with

one another. In this way, they illustrate Tevtzan Todorov’s “problematics of alterity”

which he developed to explore the dynamics at play in the encounters between selves and

others within the context of the “discovery” and conquest of America:
“We can discover the other in ourselves, realize we are not a homogenous
substance, radically alien to whatever is not us [. . .] But others are also
“1”s: subjects just as I am, whom only my point of view—according to
which all of them are out there and I alone am in here—separates and
authentically distinguishes from myself. I can conceive of these others as
an abstraction [. . .] as the Other—other in relation to myself, to me; or else
as a specific social group to which we do not belong. (3)

As told from the local Dominican perspective these commercials show multiple
ways in which individuals and/or groups from different cultures of origin perceive,
interact, identify, and “know” each other. In so doing, these commercials reveal the
complexity of identitarian categories within the context of contact and encounter,
simultaneously proposing both stasis and flux as constituent components of them. For
example, there is a sense in which the commercials seek to promote an image of fixity to
cultural identity so as to posit the product they wish to sell as one of many constitutive
elements that will maintain the “authentic” Dominican “Self” when in the transnational
space of the American “Other.” Cultural elements from “home” such as music, food,
dance, and rum will be the anchors of authenticity there. But what of all the others who
are united together through consuming such products. Are they then also Dominican?
Or do they maintain their difference? Consider the americana. Throughout the series of
commercials she progressively becomes, as the lyrics of the jingle suggest, united and

identified with Dominicans and they with her—both at home and abroad—while at the

10

same time, the viewer is constantly reminded of her fundamental difference, not only
phenotypically, but also by her consistent mispronunciation of the extremely limited
Spanish vocabulary she possesses. She is objectified and parodied; a stereotype, yet
economically necessary, desired and catered to. Yet it is claimed that she is one of “us.”
On the other hand, who is the Dominican? He is the New York taxi driver, the local
flirtatious bartender, the smiling dance and dining partner. Where is he? He is on the
island. He is in New York, the territory of the gringo/a “Other.” Yet there, in New York,
he is the “Other.” In fact there are many others—Latinos, Asians, African Americans
and other Dominicans—yet “we are all one together / we are the heart of that which is
ours.” We are bound together, same, yet distinct within transnational spaces, be these on
the island or in a foreign land.

The commercial and its representations of the harmonious relations between
Dominicans and white tourists from the North, is a product of and reflects, of course, the
ever growing move toward tourism which has, since 1967, marked the Caribbean region
as local governments and international organizations have promoted and expanded
tourism as a central development strategy in the economic structures of the region’s
countries7. Steven Gregory points out, for example, the form this development took in
the Dominican Republic:

Beginning in the late 19605 and spurred by the aggressive promotion of
tourism as an economic panacea by the World Bank, the Inter-
American Development Bank (IDB), and other international

agencies, the administration of President Joaquin Balaguer began an

 

7 For more information on the Caribbean in general, see Crick. For more information on the Dominican
Republic, see Cabezas and Padilla .

ll

aggressive campaign to promote tourism. Tourism was presented by his
international boosters as a means to advance from a primary
sector-based economy to one based on services, without passing through a
phase of industrialization, as had been attempted through earlier import
substitution policies. (Devil Behind the Mirror 23)
Indeed throughout since the 19705, the Dominican Republic has experienced, as Gregory
affirms: “a transition from the production of primary agricultural exports to international
tourism and export-oriented manufacturing and services” (7). By the 19905, when these
commercials were filmed and circulated, these structural forms had become more deeply
enmeshed in the national economy.

The imagery of commercials like those discussed here that market the Caribbean
as a type of paradise and an idyllic place for refreshment, consumption, and fim among
friendly local populations, predisposed to service and gentleness, articulate versions of
imagery with a long history in the Caribbean. As Polly Pattullo describes:

It is the fortune, and the misfortune, of the Caribbean to conjure up the
idea of "heaven on earth" or "a little bit of paradise" in the collective
European imagination... the region, whatever the brutality of its history,
kept its reputation as a Garden of Eden before the fall. The idea of a
tropical island was a fiirther seductive image: small, a "jewel" and a
necklace chain, far from centres of industry and pollution, a simple place,
straight out of Robinson Crusoe. Not only the place, but the people too,

are required to conform to the stereotype" (Pattullo 1996: 142)” (qtd. in

Sheller Consuming the Caribbean 5-6).

12

These images, of course, find their prototype in the portrait of the lands and people of the
New World quoted in the epigraph from Christopher Columbus with which this study
begins.

Excerpted from the oft-cited letter of Columbus to Luis de Santangel, this passage
offers the first European description of the island of Hispaniola and underscores its
highly desirable fertility ripe for European development and exploitation. As goes the
land, so too its people, whose generosity and lack of deceit are proposed as an indicator
of their likely servility within the system that would soon be imposed upon them. Thus,
one finds here the seminal vision of the Caribbean which would inform the European
imaginary, inscribing and positioning both land and people relative to what would
become modern European empire. This document thus serves as a blueprint not only for
the idyllic imagery that would eventually evolve into the mass tourism industry’s
discourse, but also for the global expansion of modern empire and set the discursive
groundwork for practices still operative in that island space some 500 years later as
would-be adventurers—AKA. tourists—follow in the footsteps of the Admiral,
protagonists in their own voyages of discovery and impelled by the very desire for
refreshment, festivities and gain recommended and prophesied by Columbus. Indeed, as
Mimi Sheller contends in Consuming the Caribbean, the Caribbean represents within the
“West” a ‘global icon’, that is, a place within the West’s imaginary and set of practices
that “encapsulates modernity, enfolding within itself a deep history of relations of
consumption, luxury and privilege for some”(37) as will be illustrated below.

Indeed, it is not only at the level of discursive renderings but also at that of the

practices these guide and by which they are, in turn, shaped, that the “West” implemented

13

within the Caribbean the two primary uses for that region and its peoples indicated by
Columbus—refreshment and gain. Indeed, Amalia L. Cabezas locates Caribbean tourism
within a geopolitical and economic structural framework that she sees as an extension
and outcome of colonial patterns:
Although the world has changed significantly since the 16th century, the
basic political and economic relationships between colonies and empires
remain largely structured along a colonial axis of domination. The
enormous transfer of raw materials and labor power from the
Caribbean to Europe and North America continues to follow the
fundamental patterns established during the colonial era. The
underlying relationships between features of the industrial countries in the
North and poor countries in the South have remained constant. Patterns in
the circulation and distribution of commerce, money, and migration
were established during the colonial period and have
continued to the present. For instance, air jet travel revolutionized
transportation after World War 11, following previously established
navigational travel routes from the global North to the South [. . .] As
in the colonial period, most travelers continue to be Western European and
North American men (51-2).
Thus, circuits of travel, production, consumption and flow of goods, services and
human beings are those that were established during the colonial period and basically
repeat the power differentials between former metropolitan centers and peripheries

(Cabezas 52). Steven Gregory argues that “the uneven manner in which transnational

l4

within the Caribbean the two primary uses for that region and its peoples indicated by
Columbus—refreshment and gain. Indeed, Amalia L. Cabezas locates Caribbean tourism
within a geopolitical and economic structural framework that she sees as an extension
and outcome of colonial patterns:
Although the world has changed significantly since the 16th century, the
basic political and economic relationships between colonies and empires
remain largely structured along a colonial axis of domination. The
enormous transfer of raw materials and labor power from the
Caribbean to Europe and North America continues to follow the
fundamental patterns established during the colonial era. The
underlying relationships between features of the industrial countries in the
North and poor countries in the South have remained constant. Patterns in
the circulation and distribution of commerce, money, and migration
were established during the colonial period and have
continued to the present. For instance, air jet travel revolutionized
transportation afier World War 11, following previously established
navigational travel routes fi'om the global North to the South [. . .] As
in the colonial period, most travelers continue to be Western European and
North American men (51-2).
Thus, circuits of travel, production, consumption and flow of goods, services and
human beings are those that were established during the colonial period and basically
repeat the power differentials between former metropolitan centers and peripheries

(Cabezas 52). Steven Gregory argues that “the uneven manner in which transnational

14

flows of capital, culture, and people” that mark local areas of the Dominican Republic are
the results of “key asymmetries in the sovereignty, economic influence, and, indeed,
military power among contemporary nation-states—disparities that are effects, in the
main, of the enduring legacies of imperialism and colonialism [Mishra 2001; Mutrnan
2001; Petras and Weltrneyer 2001]” (4).

And so it is that tourism both at the level of discourse and the level of systemic
material processes and supporting structures is enmeshed in dynamics with clear roots in
the period of discovery, conquest, and colonization. Several authors have cited such
phenomena as the self-contained “all-inclusive” enclave tourism which benefits primarily
foreign owners with little real economic benefit to local populations who find themselves
excluded from the facilities except to serve as a source of labor (Gregory 26; Cabezas
29). They thus posit this as following some of the basic structural dynamics of the
plantation in as much as “it is structurally a part of an overseas economy [and] is held
together by law and order directed by the local elites” (Hall and Tucker 4)8.

The impact of the devastation wreaked by the plantation system continues into the
present and has left indelible scars upon the Caribbean experience as etched deeply
within the memory of local cultural producers such as Martinican author Eduard Glissant,
who, in Poetics of Relation, points to the hermetically sealed plantation as a precursor
and a basis for the type of relations that the islands would maintain with their exteriority,
the latter making of the Caribbean a site for continued metropolitan exploitation. For
Glissant, the plantation comprises, “one of the focal points for the development of
present-day modes of Relation [, a] universe of domination and oppression, of silent or

professed dehumanization [where] the tendencies of our modernity begin to be

 

3 See also Crick, 317, 319-23; Gregory, 26; Padilla, 1-8.
15

detectable” (65).9 Antonio Benitez Rojo in The Repeating Island, for his part, refers to
the “giant sucking machine” introduced by Columbus and those who would follow him
and the subsequent imposition of the plantation system with its totalizing and destructive
presence. The plantation violently and forcefully destroyed, brought together, and mixed
many cultures and peoples, even as it supplied Europe with the capital necessary to file]
the Industrial Revolution, which leads Benitez Rojo to affirm, “the history of the
Caribbean is one of the main strands in the history of capitalism, and vice-versa” (5; 8-9;
33-81)”.

Central to the plantation was the slavery system and the hierarchical structure of
power exerted by the minority class over the slave populations, organizing human capital
along gendered and racialized lines within its division of labor—a division which touched
upon sexual relations between the white master and the black slave. A5 Beckles points

‘6‘

out, the structure of slave systems entailed not only the compulsory extraction of labor

from the blacks but also, in theory at least, slave owners’ right to total sexual access to

9”

slaves (qtd in Kempadoo 5). As Kempadoo states: “White slave owners made ample
use of this ‘right’: rape and sexual abuse were commonplace, and concubinage and
prostitution quickly became an institutional part of Caribbean societies” (5). The
sexualized labor of slave property extended beyond the master’s personal use inasmuch

as the latter could also hire their slaves out to other men as another source of income

(Kempadoo 6). As Kempadoo further states: "Within the context of slavery, prostitution

 

9 Relation is a term Glissant uses, in part, to distinguish the interconnectedness between "geocultural
entities" (142)—e. g. between nations and territories, including current and former metropolitan centers and
their peripheries—such that "each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other"
(11).

‘0 See also Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic for a further discussion on the colonial impact on
contemporary experiences of modernity, especially as the latter was effected through the flows of culture
and bodies generated by the institutionalized slavery which powered the plantation.

16

was lodged at the nexus of at least two areas of women's existence: as an extension of
sexual relations (forced or otherwise) with white men and of labor relations for both slave
and ‘free colored women’" (6).

The aforementioned practices and the sexualized imaginary that arose concerning
the Caribbean as a space of easy access for the Western male, laid the groundwork of
today’s sex tourism (Kempadoo 6). As Julia O’Connell Davidson and Jacqueline
Sénchez Taylor state: “The demand for sex tourism is inextricably linked to discourses
that naturalize and celebrate inequalities structured along lines of class, gender, and
race/Otherness; in other words, discourses that reflect and helped to reproduce a
profoundly hierarchical model of human sociality” (52). Indeed, as Steven Gregory
points out in reference to the Dominican Republic:

The rapid grth of the tourism industry in the Dominican Republic relied
on the mobilization and reconfiguration of social hierarchies and
ideologies based on gender, class, and racial distinctions. As many
researchers have pointed out, the international tourism industry

constructs, commodifies, and markets exoticized and deeply gendered
images of the non-European host societies that stress the passivity and
enduring "otherness" of their peoples (Enloe 1989; Truong 1990; Bolles
1992; Mullings 1999; O’Connell Davidson and Sénchez Taylor 1999).
These representations, rooted in centuries-old fantasies of male European
travelers and colonizers, construct tourist destinations such as the

Dominican Republic as sites of hedonistic license and consumption

17

that recapitulate the historic prerogatives of imperial elites among
colonized peoples (Kempadoo 1999). (136-7)
In this way, relational positioning between the island and its exteriority, as mediated
through current [sexualized] practice, repeats discursive as well as deep structural
distinctions in which some local persons are at the lower end of a gendered, racialized,
and sexualized hierarchy, a phenomenon with a lengthy historical precedent in
transCaribbean experience.

Thus, on material, structural, and discursive levels, the contemporary experience
of tourism and sex tourism evidences continuity between the present and the past, what
Mark Padilla points to as the simultaneity of colonial and current dynamics located at the
site of sexuality:

"[...] contemporary Caribbean sexualities simultaneously express certain
colonial institutions while also reflecting more recent postcolonial
formations. Therefore, the important question to ask is not whether
Caribbean sex work is related to the users of sexuality during
colonialism—since this is the unavoidable historical reality of the
Caribbean—but rather how the historical context of colonialism converges
with more recent transformations in neocolonial political economy to
shape the social organization of Caribbean sex work as it presently unfolds
on the ground" (2).

For the majority of the texts examined in the present study, the continuity of the past and
its convergence with the present at the site of sexual encounter forms an important

concern.

18

Thus far we have considered at some length the sociohistorical processes that
have shaped the Caribbean in general while focusing in on the Dominican Republic in
particular. Even though, as Amalia L. Cabezas observes, there is a similarity that exists
between the Dominican Republic and Cuba due to similar experiences of colonialism and
the recent tourist phenomenon as it “integrates Cuba and the Dominican Republic into a
transnationalization of production that generates the unification and homogenization of
both countries” (53), Cuban history and experience has its own specificity and it is from
that and to that specificity that the Cuban authors treated within this study write.
Therefore, I now turn to a brief consideration of the Cuban experience as it has unfolded
since the triumph of the 26 July Movement in 1959.

One of the first tasks that the new revolutionary government assigned itself after
assuming control of the Cuban nation was to “cleanse” the country of mafia-run casinos,
drug trafficking, and prostitution that had grown vertiginously on the island under the
Batista regime and the former sway of the US. which had held a hegemonic presence on
the island since the Spanish—American War of 1898. By 1965 the country was considered
officially to be free of prostitution, the revolutionary government having exerted a
concentrated effort to reeducate prostitutes for entry into society (Kummels 15).

Whereas in the Dominican Republic tourism came to take an ever-increasing
centrality in the nation’s economic life as part of its development strategy as the country
transitioned away from being a sugar economy due to the latter’s decreasing value on the
world market (Gregory 22), Cuba, sheltered by Soviet subsidies and favorable trade
arrangements (Pérez 270), enjoyed, from the 19605 to the 19805, mostly domestic

tourism for Cuban citizens and “solidarity” tourism in which foreigners interested and/or

19

sympathetic to the socialist cause came to the island, at times participating in work
projects while there (Cabezas 48).ll Beginning in the early 19805, however, the
government began to open the country up slowly to foreign investment and joint ventures
in the tourism industry, passing a law in 1982 that ultimately benefited government
coffers and foreign investors to the exclusion of direct participation of citizens in such
ventures (Cabezas 63).'2

It wasn’t until the 19905, however, that the nation would turn ever increasingly to
tourism as the main development strategy in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union
and its allied countries, which had formed Cuba’s principal trading partners. The ensuing
crisis, the severity of which the revolutionary government had not faced before, drove the
government to put into place the “special period in times of peace,” which as Louis Pérez
Jr. points out, was “a series of contingency plans conceived originally as a response to
conditions of war. The periodo especial established a framework within which to
implement a new series of austerity measures and new rationing schedules to meet
deteriorating economic conditions” (293). These conditions were marked above all by
scarcity. As Pérez continues: “Scarcities increased and shortages of almost every kind
became commonplace. Goods and services previously plentiful became scarce; what had
earlier been scarce disappeared altogether" (293). Carrying out the normal tasks of daily

living became extremely difficult to such a degree that, “days were frequently filled with

 

1‘ As Cabezas points out: “Solidarity groups such as the Venceremos Brigade—composed of Chicano and
Black nationalists, along with others in the US. Left—and the Antonio Maceo Brigades, made up of
young, radical Cuban émigrés, came to harvest coffee and tobacco, cut sugar cane, and build schools” (48).

Cabezas states: “Joint ventures and tourism quickly attracted foreign investment. The law on joint
ventures, passed in 1982, eased restrictions on foreign investors (Glazer and Hollander 1992). The law for
investments, which had been on the books since the 19805, allowed the repatriation of profits and the
importation of management teams. Although privatization and joint ventures enticed capitalists from all
over the world to invest in Cuba, the law does not allow Cuban citizens to invest, profit, or benefit directly
from capitalism" (63).

20

unrelieved hardship and adversity in the pursuit of even the most minimal needs of
everyday life, day after day" (Pe'rez 295).

Aside from increasingly austere rationing, the Cuban government responded by
implementing a series of reforms which were capitalist in nature and designed to steer the
country through the crisis while allowing the country to retain its socialist character.
Some of these included “dc-penalizing the dollar, opening free markets for agricultural
products, allowing certain forms of self—employment, increasing foreign investment, and
emphasizing tourism as the most important means of rebuilding the Cuban economy"
(W einreb 22). The first of the reforms listed here—the depenalization of the dollar,
which had been illegal to possess prior to 1993—was an attempt on the part of the
revolutionary government to obtain much needed foreign cash,13 but had the effect of
creating a dual economy and new social divisions within Cuban society. As Esther
Whitfield observes:

[T]he dollar's superiority over the Cuban peso set a 'pattem for social
inequalities that the revolutionary project had sought to eliminate.
Salaries continued to be paid in pesos while material goods were sold in
dollars, so that labor hierarchies were distorted and service work that
could earn dollars (waiting tables, guiding tours, driving taxis,
prostitution) was valued over specialist professions" (5).
Indeed, to recoup some of the money lost to a burgeoning black market, the government
instituted the tienda de recuperacion de divisas ‘foreign currency recuperation store,” the

TRD, where much needed items were sold only in dollars at inflated prices (Weinreb

 

'3 See Gott, 291.
21

22).14 In the midst of the scarcity of everyday life, obtaining dollars became the goal of
many citizens. Amalia Cabezas explains the situation:
[M]ost Cubans needed US dollars to provide for a household’s survival on
a daily basis [. . .] Rationed goods were in scarce supply in the state stores,
with the libreta [a government rationing coupon book] providing at most
10 days of food supplies. Essential provisions could be purchased only in
dollars or through the underground economy and at very high prices,
thereby establishing universal dependence on dollars to obtain necessary
items, such as soap, cooking oil, and foodstuffs. ( Cabezas 64)
As mentioned above, a primary way of obtaining these dollars was through some sort of
attachment to service-related work, which was increasingly tied to service within the
tourism industry, either formally or informally at the margins of tourism and/or the black
market.15 Indeed, the special period saw a marked rise of a phenomenon which came to
be known as jineterismo.

Although commonly associated with sexual labor in contact with foreign tourists,
jineterismo, and its associated terms jinetero and jinetera—which refer to male and
female practitioners respectively—applies to a broad range of activities in the informal
economy, all of which principally have to do with tourists. A5 Cabezas states:

“jineterismo is a colloquial term that refers to the broad range of activities
and behaviors associated with hustling, including, but not limited to,
tourist-oriented sex work. Jineteras [a plural form encompassing

both genders] trade on the margins of the tourist economy; they are

 

‘4 See also Gott, 291-2 and Cabezas, 65.
'5 See p. 5, note 5.

22

often seen soliciting foreigners in the streets of Havana, peddling
everything from cigars and rum to sexual services. They act as tourist
guides, escorts, brokers of sexual services, and romantic companions”
(169-70).
Although first making their appearance during the late 19805 as the tourist economy
began to expand (Kummels), it wasn’t until the crisis of the special period and the rapid
expansion of capitalist practices and policies—chief amongst them, tourism—that the
phenomenon of jineterismo became an ever more integral part of daily life, especially in
the areas of heaviest tourist concentration: Havana and the beach resort area of Varadero
as impoverished people in increasingly desperate times sought ways to access the hard
currency that tourists carried.

The informal economy in the Dominican Republic has followed a similar
trajectory as that of Cuba and attaches itself in a similar way to the tourist economy,
primarily being the result of such neoliberal policies as the devaluation of Dominican
currency, deregulation of labor, increasing privatization of the public sector, a decrease in
public sector employment, and the increase in foreign investment, especially in the
tourism industry (Gregory 7, 30; Cabezas 41-3). These gave rise to unemployment and
underemployment and triggered the growth of informal economic activities similar to
those engaged in in Cuba. Steven Gregory explains the case of one young man from the
resort town of Boca Chica who, having lost his job, “turned to the tourism economy,
improvising a living as an unlicensed tourist guide, marijuana dealer, and occasional
pimp” (31). Among those activities not related to sexual labor, but still attached to

tourism, Gregory found that: “Men mostly sold a variety of products, ranging from

23

clothing, crafts, and cigars to shellfish, fruits, and other foods. Women mostly worked on
the beaches as masseuses, manicurists and pedicurists, and hair braiders, catering largely
to foreign tourists” (31). Of course, as in Cuba, so too in the Dominican Republic, a
prominent feature of informal work within the tourist economy is related to sexual labor,
“targeting the largely European and North American tourists who visited the area”
(Gregory 33). Indeed, it was such that the town of Boca Chica, one of Gregory’s sites of
investigation, was structurally affected by sex tourism: “Much of the town’s tourism
infrastructure—small and midsized hotels, restaurants, bars, and discotheques——owed
their livelihood to [. . .] predominantly male, sex-oriented tourism” (33).

Thus, distinct, yet similar colonial and contemporary histories and social
processes have marked both Cuba and the Dominican Republic, processes that have
produced a long history of relationship between the residents of the islands and travelers
from former metropolitan centers. Such processes have produced not only the white,
“Western” discoverer, conqueror, colonist, owner, master, and, as of late, tourist, but also
the Indian, the slave, the racialized, gendered, and classed local social actors at the
shallow side of a power divide, yet who, as we will see in the present study, exercise an
agency of their own in spite of overarching socio-economic inequalities between
themselves and the clients they seek to serve. . .and take advantage of as they look for
ways to position themselves advantageously within current flows and networks of power.
Thus, the Cuban jinetero and jinetera walk a strikingly similar landscape of transnational
capital as that of their Dominican counterpart quoted in the epigraph with which this
dissertation opens. There, juxtaposed in answer to Columbus’s idealization of the island

and its people, a Dominican cuero ‘whore’ calls out to her white, foreign, and male Other

24

from a position of personal power that derives from her geographic, discursive, and
corporal locus—that is, her exoticized Caribbeanness and eroticized body which she uses
to her own advantage. In her sexualized performance, her body becomes the site for the
negotiation of mutual desire even as she seeks to allure her interlocutor. Her look
commands him to partake of an anthropophagic feast on her body and sex, above which
she promises to inscribe his name, thus rehearsing and playing on the dynamics of exotic
objectification, ownership, subjugation and dependency first set in motion some 500
years earlier, converting them into tools and conduits to connect with transnational
capital and mobilities. It is precisely this type of dialectical interplay of present and past,
of foreign and local, embodied and enacted by the men and women of separate yet
interrelated cultures who enter into contact in a space of mutual desire, that serves as the
raw material out of which the Caribbean authors whose works comprise the focus of the
present study weave their narratives, representing the social experiences and dynamics at
work within local island spaces [re]configured by contemporary processes of
globalization,‘ processes rooted. in colonial structurations of transatlantic interactions.
Theoretich Approach

As we have seen in the previous section, tourism operates according to the
foundational logic of refreshment and gain established some five hundred years ago.
This logic, in turn, was predicated upon the basic relational dynamic between island
selves and their geographic and cultural others—a dynamic that continues to govern both
tourism and sex tourism. Indeed, as the commercials for Brugal rum analyzed earlier
demonstrate, even though the americana is identified as “one of us” and, thus, implicated

in dominicanness and Dominican experience, the commercials repeatedly come back to

25

and insist on her difference. This suggests that the binary distinction and separateness of
self/other is a persistent and necessary categorical condition that drives tourism. Indeed,
it is based on that distinction and the parameters it sets in place that the local social actors
depicted in the works treated in this study find their possibilities and means for agency
and action. For example, sex workers such as the Dominican woman described at the
close of the preceding section actively appropriate and utilize their difference and
“otherness” as a form of cultural capital to their own advantage. Thus, even though
ultimately, the “Self” and “Other” are not fixed, essentialist identitarian categories, the
Self/Other binary distinction serves as the primary optic through which these Caribbean
authors tell the story of the myriad ways local social experience and space are shaped by
the sexualized encounters attendant on tourism.

Therefore, although throughout this dissertation I use traditional methods of
literary analysis (e.g. the close reading of texts) and draw on other fields of research and
scholarship such as sociology, anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, gender studies,
and discourse theory to study specific works and the contexts from which and to which
they speak, I utilize and adapt a cluster of primary theoretical constructs as a general
framework by which to conceptualize and approach the texts collectively, the phenomena
represented in them, and the discursive work they carry out. Given the coloniality
evident in the sexualized encounters represented in these texts, I turn primarily to Diana
Taylor’s “scenario” and “repertoire” and Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zone.”

As we see from the example with which I closed the previous section, tourism,

from a local perspective, enacts performance, and the performance that local subjects as

well as the tourists with whom they come into contact restage in daily practice, is a

26

contemporization of what Diana Taylor has described in the context of performance
studies as a “scenario of encounter.” Also called a scenario of “discovery,” within
Taylor’s theory this functions as a type of master plot and rehearses or reenacts the
historic scene of colonial encounter. Taylor describes it as “a theatrical scenario
structured in a predictable, formulaic, hence repeatable fashion [. . .] No matter who
restages the colonial encounter from the West's perspective—the novelist, the playwright,
the discoverer, or the government official—it stars the same white male protagonist-

I”

subject and the same brown, found 'object (Archive and Repertoire 13). As we see
portrayed in the scene from the epigraph above, however—and, in the socio-historical
overview we gave in section two—as experienced and perceived locally, the
[re]enactment of the scenario of encounter in its most recent sociological and discursive
permutation of [sex] tourism reaches down into everyday vital experience, into the very
livelihood of subjects, and inscribes the phallocentric, penetrating act of discovery,
encounter, possession, and consumption on and in the body. Indeed, this particular
scenario at the heart of tourism structures whole lives and economies. Yet, again, as we
have seen, it is within these circumstances that local social actors show agency within the
overarching inequities of power which shape and structure their experience. Therefore,
the works analyzed in this study, in their portrayals of contemporary social dynamics
constitutive of tourism and sex tourism, produce the “scenario of encounter” as a tool to
construct various facets of their regional, national, and cultural discourses in a manner
consistent with the discursive function of scenarios: "scenarios exist as culturally specific

imaginaries--sets of possibilities, ways of conceiving conflict, crisis, or resolution--

activated with more or less theatricality" (13). Staging scenarios specific to their cultural

27

milieu, these texts construct their imaginaries based on the embodied performances
constitutive of the specific encounters that they represent. Furthermore, the social
scenarios that they portray textually are enacted in, and, in turn, produce certain
[re]configurations of social space referred to by another theorist’s terminology as
“contact zones.”

According to Mary Louise Pratt, “contact zones” refer to “the space of colonial
encounters” (6), and are “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple
with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and
subordination—like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across
the globe today"(lmper_ial Eyes 4). Here we see Pratt’s recognition of the continuance of
coloniality within present-day structures. However, although former metropolitan centers
still exert hegemony and occupy the privileged position within transatlantic networks,
questions of domination and subordination are not—with the notable exception of Puerto
Rico—as geopolitically direct nor of the same character as they were during the colonial
historical period that forms the focus of her study. Nevertheless, as I have argued thus
far and as will be seen in my analysis of several works, tourism and sex tourism do,
indeed, repeat and continue colonial patterns, primarily as manifested in the area of
relationships facilitated through processes of globalization.'6 At the end of the twentieth

and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, we find the contact zones of sexualized

 

'6 James Clifford recognizes the applicability of several “contact approaches” throughout his book Routes
and underscores the temporal nexus of the past and the present contained within current systems of
relations: “Contact approaches presuppose not sociocultural wholes subsequently brought into relationship,
but rather systems already constituted relationally, entering new relations through historical processes of
displacement” (7). Thus, in a region like the Caribbean whose current system is an outcome of relations
first established five hundred years ago and the attendant historical legacies of geocultural relations and
their present-day modulated [re]articulations—e. g. in tourism and especially in sex tourism—Pratt’s
contact zone can be seen as a temporally flexible spatial category for the discussion of present-day
relational dynamics.

28

tourism characterized by the “interactive, improvisational dimension of colonial.
encounters” (Pratt 7) in which local subjects often invent and adjust their behaviors on
the fly to extract the greatest gain from their transient Other as they engage in a type of
survivalist bricolage.

Within the space of the contact zone subjects interact with each other developing
and relying on what Diana Taylor refers to as a “repertoire of embodied
practice/knowledge” which enacts “embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality,
movement [. . .] in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, non-reproducible
knowledge” (Archive yd Repertoire 20). It is precisely through “embodied
practice/knowledge” that local and foreign actors engage one another, seeking to fulfill
their desire and negotiate the social arena of the contact zone. Just as wealthier travelers
from abroad use their cultural capital of whiteness, socio-economic privilege, and greater
mobility, local actors use the relational positioning and identification embedded in
hegemonic racializing and exoticizing discourses and practices as well as their own
territorial knowledges as their own cultural capital to fulfill desires and accomplish goals.
As mentioned above, the dialectical interplay between them comes to be mutually
constituting, for, within the contact zone, “subjects are constituted in and by their
relations to each other [which, in this case, are characterized by] copresence, interaction,
interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations
of power” (Pratt 7). Indeed, whereas the “contact zone” offers the conceptualized social
space, the “scenarios” which produce them and in which they unfold “frame and activate
social dramas” (Taylor 28). As they reenact the scenario of encounter, the local cuero,

jinetero/a and the foreign male or female, straight or gay, activate the basic “set up and

29

action” of that moment of contact: “encounter, conflict, resolution, and denouement, for
example. These elements, of course, are themselves the product of economic, political,
and the social structures that they, in turn, tend to reproduce” (28). Thus, the embodied
knowledges and practices—the repertoires—used to execute the performances of the
scenarios of sexualized encounter, become a primary path or conduit for the transmission
of those structures according to which they unfold.

In this way, the contact zone, as produced through contemporary sex tourism,
provides the social stage for such transmissions of cultural knowledges, practices,
memories and structural arrangements—serving as an arena for the convergence of the
past and the present, for the current production and reiteration of discourses and
subjectivities, of both structural and personalized forms of domination, resistance,
negotiation, gain, loss, potential, and risk. In short, the contact zone forms a spatio-
temporal continuum that provides an optic into the makeup of social experience and
intersubjective relationships as constituted at the intersection of the local and the global.
Conceptualized this way, the contact zone as a configuration of social space and
experience resonates with the discursive space of literary narrative forms as theorized by
Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination.

According to Bakhtin, narrative forms of literary art are linguistic constructs
which simultaneously incorporate and set into dialogue multiple discourses and
temporalities. Referencing the novel in particular, Bakhtin considers it a “zone of
maximal contact with the present (with contemporary reality) in all its openendedness”

(Dialogic Imagination 11), an open-endedness that entails, like Pratt’s contact zone, a

30

space of convergence of distinct temporalities as articulated , in this case, through
multiple discursive forms.

As will be seen in the present study, this “zone of maximal contact” is present in
the novel, testimony, and the shorter narrative works examined here, which exhibit the
dialogic character to which Bakhtin refers. Moreover, in order to carry out their dialogue
with their historical present, these works appropriate the social space of the contact zone
so that it functions as a chronotope, a spatio-temporal construct that James Clifford
defines as “a setting or scene organizing time and space in representable whole form”
(25). Thus, the specific contact zones of commercialized sexual encounter where their
narratives are situated become textual space—a readable and writable space—a site of
and for textual production and meaning-making, and a lens through which to interpret
social reality and space. In this way, as textual representations of chronotopes, the
contact zones constructed in these works come to assume an additional function in the
Bakhtinian sense of chronotope: “as an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at
work in the culture system from which they spring” (425-6). They thus serve
simultaneously as the representational object and the means by which that object’s social
referent is observed. Therefore, one could argue that, inasmuch as these texts engage not
only current manifestations of the encounter with the cultural Other, but also the
historical discursive tradition and sociocultural logic which underpins and governs that
encounter, the texts analyzed here offer a “contrapuntal reading” of Caribbean social
reality. That is, a locally produced imaginary to counterbalance the weight of Western

representations of the region produced over the last five centuries.l7

 

'7 “Countrapuntal reading” is a term that comes from Edward Said, which he offers as a corrective
analytical strategy to fill in the silences and gaps created in canonical texts of the “West” through their

31

It is, therefore, according to this broad theoretical framework that I approach the
texts treated in this study, understanding them as discursive sites for the production of
social meaning and as forming part of the material and social reality—the culture—that
they represent. That is, I view these texts as artistic discursive mediations that engage the
‘realities’ from which they emerge and with which they are intimately intertwined, the
former being shaped by and, in turn, giving shape and meaning to the latter to produce a
way of representing contemporary socio-historical experience.

Chapter Summaries

Chapter one, “Searching for la vida verdadera in the Dominican Republic: A
Dialectical View,” treats several short stories by Dominican author Aurora Arias that
bring to the fore some of the predominant characteristics of foreign male-dominated,
heterosexual sex tourism. Here Arias explores the sexualized/affective relationships into
which some Dominican women enter with foreign males in order to make a living,
highlighting the forrner’s agency while at the same time examining the desires and
motives of male travelers who are in search of “the real life” in the island. Urban streets,
tropical beaches, hotels and the simulacrum of cyberspace become the stages for the
negotiation of mutual desire between sex tourists longing for erotic encounters with the
exotic Other and those local actors seeking to capitalize on their relationships with the
transient outsiders who enter within their field of action.

Thus, this chapter analyzes the ways in which Arias represents the construction of

social space within the crucible of commodified [hetero]sexual encounter. I argue that

 

erasures of the colonial underpinnings upon which Western civilization rests. Whereas Said proposed such
a method so as to ultimately understand Western culture and the historical foundation on which it has been
built, I put forth the term here to point to the ways that these texts offer local perspectives on their
interaction with Western others and the impact this has had on Caribbean experience. See Said Culture and
Imperialism, p. 66-7.

32

the dynamics of sex tourism are presented as part of an unfolding relationship that traces
its origin all the way back to early colonial encounters and, thus, are an extension of it.
The texts studied here can be seen as attempts to textually apprehend the male tourist
Other and the forces which his presence sets in motion—forces rooted in, indeed,
reiterative of, colonial practice and discourse that continue to shape contemporary
Dominican social experience and space. Ultimately, I argue that these texts set
themselves over and against the discourse of hegemonic representations of the Caribbean
and the praxis that accompanies and reinforces it, offering themselves as a counter
narrative which explores and documents present day vital experience while anchoring
such experience within an historical continuum of colonial relations, whose latest
permutation is readily evidenced and apprehended in contemporary [sex] tourism.

In chapter two, “Cuba Part 1: Performing Subjectivities of the Special Period,”
three works by Puerto Rican author Larry La Fountain-Stokes (“Del pajaro las dos alas,”
[2008]), and Cuban writers José Miguel Sénchez (akaYoss; “La causa que refresca”
[1998]) and Angel Santiesteban (“Los aretes que le faltan a la luna” [2000]) portray some
of the same and similar phenomena as Arias, showing how Cuban contact zones of the
special period, like their correlates in the Dominican Republic, become individualistic
predatory fields of action for the negotiation of the multiple desires embodied in local and
foreign social actors. As 1 demonstrate through my analysis, it is not only geographical,
physical space, but also the body—embodied experience—that becomes a site for the
articulation and/or disarticulation of various competing discursive structures as social
actors come to negotiate and occupy subject positions produced under the harsh

“disciplining” conditions of the special period and articulated through a group of

33

repetitive actions, gestures, movements, and thought processes—i.e. a scripted or
“naturalized” repertoire of social behavior. Central to my analysis is a F oucaultian
approach to discourse, especially as developed by Judith Butler in her concept of
“performativity.” This approach, coupled with Diana Taylor’s constructs of the
“scenario” and the “repertoire,” serve to demonstrate the way in which these texts, while
concerned with the interplay of discursive structures, social processes and conditions and
the way these shape local experience, place a greater emphasis on the constitution of
subjects in the places where such forces converge. Specifically, I argue that these texts,
responding to a fundamental tension increasingly felt at both the social and the discursive
levels within Cuba, take as their central theme the constitution of particular types of
Cuban subjectivities indicative of the special period, which, in turn, reflects the tension
between competing socialist and capitalist social systems and their accompanying
discourses.

Chapter three, “Cuba Part II: The Staging of an Abjection,” analyzes Cuban
author Amir Valle’s mixed genre work Jineteras (2006) and novel Tatuajes (2007) that
depict, like the works considered in the previous two chapters, the dynamics and realities
of the touristic contact zone that result from the encounter of local and foreign subjects as
they negotiate their desire. These texts show how local actors utilize that space as a
predatory field both to meet basic material needs and to seek social and material
advancement. Local subjects seize, from their comparative immobility, fleeting
opportunities, employing tactics of seduction and manipulation to extract the most

advantage from their encounters with their mobile foreign others.

34

However, whereas in the majority of the texts treated in chapters one and two a
good deal of attention is given to the portrayal of the foreign tourist in dialectical contact
with local social actors, the latter form an almost exclusive focus of narrative exploration
within Valle’s texts. While present, male sex tourists are granted minimal treatment and,
then, never assume a role as individual protagonists, their part limited to indicate the
basic dynamics which configure the contact zone and the social experiences that
accompany sex tourism within Cuba. Indeed, the texts under consideration in chapter
three are much more concerned with the immediacy of local actors’ experiences of the
national crisis of the special period. Employing Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, I
argue that both Jineteras and its novelistic complement, T atuajes are the textual
manifestations—the material artifacts—of a process of abjection that constructs the
jinetera so as to identify, discipline, and bring her under textual control, to thereby purge
her from the narrative consciousness that calls her into being and, at the same time, purify
the Cuban nation. Yet, in so doing, the male narrative voice that would seek to cleanse
himself and the nation ultimately reifies and inscribes her within a patriarchal and
misogynistic discourse as the dual embodiment of desire and repulsion.

To close this section, I turn to Néstor Garcia Canclini who, as part of his
interdisciplinary project to create a transnational sphere for cultural politics and
engagement among artists and intellectuals, analyzes multiple discourses that describe
globalization—from the “raw data” of the social sciences to various types of works
produced by artists (La globalizacio'n imaginada 15-6, 36). Among the latter he places
those narratives which, from distinct viewpoints, “expresan el modo en que sujetos

individuales y colectivos se representan su lugar y sus posibilidades de accion en [los

35

procesos de la globalizacion]” (“express the way in which individual and collective
subjects represent their place and their possibilities of action in [processes of
globalization]; 36). In a similar fashion, the literary texts analyzed in the present study
locate the dialectical position and possibilities of action of the individual social actors
they portray at the sites of one of the most visible and prominent processes by which
globalization is articulated within the Hispanophone Caribbean —[sex] tourism.
However, as seen already in the chapter summaries provided above, instead of imagining
globalization in any holistic sense, these works, through their focus on the contact zone of
sexualized encounter produced by transnational flows and mobilities, are concerned first
and foremost with the impact of such encounter on the [re]configurations of local social
experience and space. These are shown to be constituted by multiple and competing
discourses, personal desires, as well as national and transnational interests and global
processes all of which converge, intermingle, clash and are negotiated on a daily basis.
Through their richly nuanced portrayals of contemporary life on a micro-scale, these
narratives, to use Garcia Canclini’s words, encompass “that which slips through the
cracks and inadequacies of theories and policies” ‘lo que queda suelto en las grietas e
insuficiencias de las teorias y las politicas’ (14) and produces a multifaceted depiction of
the socio—historical dynamics that mark current experience in the Hispanophone
Caribbean. In this way, these works contribute to the emerging cultural imaginary of the

region as a whole.

36

Chapter 1. Searching for la vida verdadera in the Dominican Republic: A Dialectical
View

This chapter analyzes six stories by Dominican author Aurora Arias (“Hotel
Radiante” (Fin de mundo 2000), “Invi’s Paradise” and “50h, Bavaria!” (Invi ’5 Paradise y
otros cuentos 1998); “Bachata,” “Novia del Atléntico,” and “Emoticons” (Emoticons
2007) to examine the ways in which the author represents the construction of social space
within the crucible of commodified [hetero]sexual encounter. It argues that Arias
produces a discourse that enters into dialogue with and demystifies hegemonic
representations of the Dominican Republic through its portrayals of the dynamics of sex
tourism as an extension of an unfolding relationship that traces its origin to the moment
of first encounter between indigenous populations and Europeans. This chapter will show
that the texts herein studied can be seen as attempts to textually apprehend the outside
Other and the forces which his presence sets in motion—dialectical forces rooted in,
indeed, reiterative of, colonial practice and discourse that continue to shape contemporary
Dominican social experience and space.

By way of setting up the chapter, I begin with a brief ethnographic narrative and
textual analysis based on my first trip to the Dominican Republic. Here I recall a scene
and sequence of events that would crystallize into some of the main themes which inform
both this study and, in particular, this chapter. In reflecting back on that moment, I
realize that as I sat in an open-air café reading a newly acquired collection of short
stories, I did so from within the oldest seat of European power in the New World, Santo
Domingo’s Zona Colonial, and in the plaza named after Europe’s first arrival, Parque

Colon—a place where history, contemporary social processes, and national and artistic

37

discourses converged, the latter taking the form of a locally produced literary text that
was in dialogue with its past and present, with the local and the foreign, with its society,
indeed, with the very built environment in which I read it.

After spending the better part of the afternoon in the cafe, as evening approached,
I began to read the opening narrative frame to Aurora Arias’ story “iOh, Bavaria!” with
which her collection Invi’s Paradise closes:

Imaginemos, Bavaria, que por una noche, quién sabe en busca de qué, tr'l
también estuviste de paso por la 151a. Que te llevaron a la Zona a tomar
unos traguitos. Calcula, entonces, que esto que te voy a contar sucedio.
Que se trato de algo mas que una simple historia de saltimbanqui
ilustrados y piratas. Que algr'ln dia, en el fin del mundo, conociste a un tal
Pepe” (Berlin 43).

Let’s imagine, Bavaria, that for a night, who knows in search of what, you
also were passing through the island. That they took you to the Zona for a
few drinks. Calculate, then, that what I’m about to tell you took place.
That it had to do with more than just a simple story of enlightened gold
diggers or pirates. That one day, at the end of the world, you met a certain
Pepe.
While I read these words, I felt identified to an extent, interpolated, if you will,
considering that I too was a visitor to the island and seated in the Zona Colonial, similar
to the “Bavaria” to whom the narrative voice addresses itself throughout the story. The
mention of pirates briefly brought to mind childhood memories and images from

Treasure Island and Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean amusement park attraction.

38

As I continued to read, it became clear that “Bavaria,” although associated
specifically with a female visitor to the island, served as a metonym for the foreign
traveler in general and, thus, a device for establishing a specific dialogical relationship
between the local subject voiced in the text and his or her interlocutory Other. Thus, to
the possibly incredulous visitor, it offers to reveal its own story in contradistinction to the
discourse that has informed the Western imaginary concerning the Caribbean, populated
as the latter is by images of romanticized pirates and whose early modern imperial
expansion equated the region with the “end of the world” (“fin del mundo”), positioning
it as a periphery. And yet, even as it seeks to clarify the island’s reality in the face of
touristic ignorance, the narrative voice reveals its own lack of knowledge of foreign
motives—a consequence, perhaps, of the transitory nature of travelers who merely pass
through the island “in search of who knows what” (“quién sabe en busca de qué”)—and,
thus, underscores the fundamental difference that separates the two actors in the dialogics
it proposes.

Indeed, the text continues highlighting the role of the foreign presence in shaping
local experience even as it partially constructs its own discourse by echoing and
positioning itself within the discourse with which the Other has historically described it:

(Yo no sé por que', Bavaria, de un tiempo a esta parte, por los predios de
Ciudad todo el mundo andaba un poco loco. Una ludica suerte de motin,
de carnaval, de desmesura, una etema caravana, un diario safari por la
oscuridad, nos apremiaba. Mucha gente llegaba a los puertos y los

aeropuertos, a conocer a La Isla y a convivirla. Mucha yola alucinada

39

partia a1 amanecer. [...] La Ciudad. La Isla. El mar. [...] Mas forasteros
que de costumbre llegando a ver). (43)
(I don’t know why, Bavaria, for some time, people were going around a
little crazy all through the City. A type of ludic mutiny, of carnival, of
excess, an eternal caravan, a daily safari in the dark, hounded us. A lot of
people arriving to the ports and airports, to know The Island and cohabit
it. A lot of deluded yola were departing in the morning [. . .] The City. The
Island. The sea [. . .] more outsiders than usual arriving to see).
This passage points to the global processes which currently mark island space and social
experience as it juxtaposes the simultaneous dual movement of arrival to and departure
from the island, the ironic contrariwise motion of both Dominicans who seek to escape
the harshness of local conditions in small makeshift boats (“yolas ") and those wealthier
outsiders who arrive to the island, having most likely left their homes as part of a
temporary escape from daily life. Furthermore, through its “tropological” evocation of
the safari into darkness, the caravan, carnival, excess, etc., the passage not only identifies
the behavior that besets the island with the arrival of the outsider, but also continues its
discursive self-exoticization from the point of view of its foreign interlocutor, playing on
the imagery within the West that equates travel to the area with a voyage to exotic lands
of indulgence.
Here was a text, then, that still bore the traces of that original Colonial moment
inaugurated by Cristobal Colon—Christopher Columbus—upon his arrival to the islands.
Indeed, as it seeks to dialogue with its foreign Other, inviting him or her to hear its tale, it

immediately anchors its discussion in the weight of historical experience and the

40

discourse of encounter, triggered by the phenomenon of the tourist presence and
industry—the contemporary consumerist permutation of the dynamics set in motion by
Columbus and the conquistadores and colonizers who followed in his wake.

While I sat pondering these things, I looked up from the text to consider the
reminder of that initial colonial encounter that stood just a few yards away from me in the
center of the parque which bears the Admiral’s name. This monument to Columbus and
the nation’s Spanish heritage depicts, frozen in metal and stone, the navigator looking
toward the horizon, pointing confidently to a spot in the distance while beneath him a
Taino woman, with pen in hand and arms stretched upwards in exaltation, has just
inscribed his name and praises on the pedestal on which he stands: [lustre y esclarecido
don Cristo'val Colo'n ‘The Illustrious and Distingushed Sir Christopher Columbus’.

I then followed the trajectory indicated by the “Discoverer” as it cut through the
growing dark, crossing the places where street vendors plied their wares, ambulant
musicians performed, and beggars asked for money, to point a little to my right at the
scene of another encounter between foreign male and local female. In this instance, the
scenario was enacted by what appeared to be a pale, non-Spanish-speaking middle-aged
tourist whose giddiness was betrayed by the grin that fluctuated between self-satisfaction
and timidity with each bob of his head as he sought to avert eye contact with the
Dominican woman who accompanied him, frustrated in her futile attempts to
communicate with him.

It was time for me to go and, to get to my hotel, I had to travel further down the
path pointed out by Columbus. Ironically, when I arrived, the armed night watchman

pulled me aside to discretely inform me that, should I be interested in any female

41

companionship, he could procure “young and clean girls” (“muchachas jovenes y
limpiecitas”) for me without a problem because he had a “small business” (“un pequefio
negocio”) he ran on the side.

Such was my introduction to the existence of sex tourism in the Dominican
Republic—a permutation of the original colonial encounter that I saw evidenced twice in
one day, demonstrating another way in which social space is produced through the
contact between Self/Other. As I would soon learn, the theme of local and foreign contact
that Arias first treats in Invi’s Pmdise assumes a prominent place within her literary
trajectory, also present in her two subsequent collections of short stories Fin de mundo
(2000) and Emoticons (2007). The latter two works include stories that take the
dynamics of heterosexual sex tourism as experienced in the Dominican Republic as their
central theme, first finding their setting in the Zona Colonial itself, and then in other
spaces throughout the island.

I begin the remainder of the chapter by analyzing an early story that constitutes a
first attempt at describing the phenomenon. Here the narrative voice, telling the tale from
the perspective of a local female, seeks to decipher the mystery represented by male
travelers even as it registers the effects of their ephemeral presence on the construction of
Dominican social space. I then consider an even earlier text that takes up the theme of
travel to the island and anchors it within a historical continuum of invasion, thus serving
as a contextualizing device to understand current local experience. Next 1 turn to a
selection of Arias’ most recent publications in which she explores the actions,
motivations, and inner life-world of a white, male traveler of uncertain origin who moves

about the island in search of “real life,” configuring island space as a stage for his

42

personal recreation and protagonism even as he enters into contact with local actors who
also seek to [re]fashion their own lives. To conclude, I return to a brief analysis of “;Oh,
Bavaria!” to consider Arias’ textual work as constituting a local discourse which inserts
itself in a contestatory fashion within the broader tradition of hegemonic discourse and
practice relating to the Caribbean.

One of the earliest stories to directly treat sex tourism on the island is “Hotel
Radiante,” from Arias’ 2000 collection Fin de mundo. The narrative establishes in a
preliminary fashion some of the basic themes that will be more fillly developed in later
stories as they locate the Dominican Republic at the nexus of global flows of desire,
focusing on specific places within the country where the particular desires both of local
subjects and the foreign tourists whom they encounter are played out. Set in Santo
Domingo’s historic district, the Zona Colonial, "Hotel Radiante" centers on the
experience of a young woman—referred to only with the third person singular pronoun
(ella)—who teaches kindergarten during the day to children of the wealthy while
spending her evenings on the main commercial pedestrian thoroughfare of El Conde in
the company of well-heeled foreigners looking to have a good time. The narrative
addresses itself directly to one of these men, Lucas, a now absent Italian sex tourist, and
recounts the trajectory of their relationship from the perspective of one who knows both
of them. Privileging this local perspective, the text explores the impact of sex tourism
within such a contact zone, especially in its portrayal of it as a space where desires and
relationships are initiated, made, and undone primarily according to the dynamics of

social and physical mobility understood as both means and end.

43

At the core of the text there is a sense of the unknowability of the absent, foreign
Other, because of which the narrative voice struggles to piece together the true identity
and motivations behind this mysterious European who appears and disappears without
notice or explanation and whose only account of himself is in doubt: "Nunca te creimos
demasiado, aquello de que trabajabas de obrero en la telefénica de Milan. . .Lmontando
cables? Oh, si. LY por que' ibas y venias continuamente a Santo Domingo? 3A ningl'ln
obrero de ningun pais 1e dan tantas vacaciones!” (“We never really believed you much,
the whole thing about your job as a telephone worker in Milan. . .installing cables? Oh,
sure. And why were you continuously coming and going back and forth to Santo
Domingo? They don’t give that much vacation time to any worker from any country!”;
48). This same uncertainty extends itself to Lucas’s Canadian friend the “viejo Ivan,” in
whose company the protagonist has spent much of her time: “Y por fin, Lucas, nos
quedamos sin saber como fue que tl'l y ese sef'lor se conocieron (LFue en Roma, Milan,
Montreal, 0 Santo Domingo?), ni qué era lo que verdaderamente hacian aqui, ni por qué
los dos desaparecieron de repente sin dejar rastros, ni por qué ese viejo canadiense tenia
tantos dolares para repartir. (JDe donde los sacaba?” (“F inally, Lucas, we never did find
out how it was and that man met each other (Was it in Rome, Montreal, or Santo
Domingo?), nor what it was you were really doing here, nor why the two of you
disappeared suddenly without a trace, nor why that old Canadian had so many dollars to
spread around. Where did he get them?”; 48). Apart from what limited, direct contact
with these travelers affords and their self-professed taste for the beaches and women as
explanation for their presence on the island, no more is known of the men with any

certainty (48). From the position of the relatively static and immobile local, the constant

44

movement of these international travelers and the consequent volatility of their
presence/absence has a destabilizing effect, producing a lacuna of relational knowledge
which is consequently filled with suspicion as evidenced in the accusatory and skeptical
language that marks such passages as the above while the narrative seeks to unveil and
apprehend its ungraspable, interlocutory Other—as it interrogates that Other's true
identity, motives, and sources of wealth. Indeed, the text's structure suggests a type of
investigative enquiry and takes on the characteristics of juridical discourse, divided into
lettered segments—a), b), c), etc—as if providing exhibitory evidence. Each brief section
of the plot thus provides the only sketchy clues by which to reconstruct such visitors to
the island and convey what they represent to the Dominicans who have had contact with
them. As seen from the perspective of the local, knowledge of the Other is thus partial,
identity and truth veiled—a consequence of the relational asymmetry between those
whose wealth affords them a greater freedom of movement and those local subjects
whose economic circumstance impedes the same.

Highlighting this asymmetry stands the female protagonist of the story, her social
position and limited choices for advancement evidenced in the text through reference to
her educational level, which fails to encompass the completion of secondary school. In
the following passage the text ironically valorizes her education, simultaneously
suggesting the deficiencies of the country's educational system. At the same time, it
antagonistically counterpoises these against the absent Lucas, placing his own
educational level in question: “Mas, para tu sorpresa, Lucas, esa muchacha es, lo que tal
vez tl'l no eres, ‘casi bachiller’, y del colegio donde trabaja, la enviaron a hacer un cursillo

de capacitacion pedagogica que duro un fin de semana, nada mas y nada menos que en la

45

Secretaria de Educacion” (“But, for your surprise, Lucas, that girl is, perhaps what you’re
not, “almost graduated” from high school, and the elementary school where she works,
they sent her to take a brief pedagogical training course that lasted a weekend, at the
Secretary of Education no less”; 48). As the text describes elsewhere, her social and
physical mobility—beyond teaching kindergarten--extends to enrolling in language
classes primarily as a means of leaving home at night without arousing the suspicions of
the aunt with whom she lives and so spend time on El Conde in search of relationships
with men from abroad (47).

This once again underscores the central importance of mobility within the story,
being the main motivation behind the protagonist's dalliances with the foreign men whom
she seeks. This is once again highlighted in the following passage in which she sits at a
local restaurant in the company of el viejo [win on the night she first meets Lucas,
observing her classmates as they leave the nearby language school:

“Sus compafieras de clase armaron una bulla paradas en el balcon de la
Escuela de Idiomas; [. . .] Luego bajaron de prisa las escaleras, con sus
blusitas cortas y sus jeans apretados. Ella sabia, que en el fondo, aunque le
acusen de «avion», ellas también se mueren porque un extranjero de los
que deambulan por la calle El Conde, las enamore, y se las lleve bien
lejos. (47-8)

Her classmates made a racket as they stood on the balcony of the
Language School; [. . .] They then hurried down the stairs, with their short
little blouses and their tight jeans. She knew that, deep down, even though

they accuse her of being an avion, they too were dying for one of the

46

foreigners that roamed about El Conde street to court them and carry them

far away.

In its use of the term "avion," the text employs a term utilized in common parlance to

refer to a female who flies from one sexual partner to another and furthermore suggests

the underlying

desire for flight which drives some members of Dominican society to seek

advancement and social mobility elsewhere through connecting with foreign travelers.

As Kamala Kempadoo points out with specific reference to Dominican sex

workers from the poorest classes, such relational positioning vis a vis the foreign tourist

can be seen as:

a strategy that allows [them] a form of freedom from oppressive and
exploitative national and global economic relations that keep them in
poorly paid work or poverty and positions them to gain access to a life
that takes them out of miserable social conditions and to obtain the power
and freedom symbolized by the 'developed' world. In practice, the
struggle can rest on sex workers seeking to find caring partners with
enough financial security to assist them to overcome economic hardship,
unemployment, and a bleak future for themselves and their families; of
obtaining "La Gloria" in Dominican women's words. For many, this
includes leaving their home countries and migrating to live with a lover.

(27)

Although not belonging to the poorest of social classes that Kempadoo studies, nor a sex

worker per se in that she doesn't receive money in exchange for sex, the protagonist still

engages in her

relationships with men primarily as a means of leaving the island. This

47

dynamic is further elucidated in the following conversation she has with Chiquita, an

employee at the Hotel Radiante, a lower class hotel that was the last place she and Lucas

were together:

El tiempo ha pasado, y ella se acostumbré a mentir [. . .] Chiquita, la
empleada del Radiante [. . .] 1e preguntoz —g,Y tu marido, el italiano?—
dijo—. Ya ustedes no van por alla.

Sin perder tiempo, ella 1e respondio que todo iba bien, que ustedes seguian
juntos. Pero Chiquita, insistente, la volvio a interrogar.

"LY tu no le has dicho que te lleve para Italia? Yo supe que Carmen, tu
amiga, ya se fue con el suizo para Suiza, el mes pasado. Y a una prima
mia que vivia en el campo, un holande’s se la llevo pa' Holanda, como a los
dos meses de tratarse. jEse italiano te 'ta cogiendo de pendeja, muchacha,
no seas tan boba!

;Eso si le dolio! (49)

Time has gone by, and she’s gotten used to lying [. . .] Chiquita, the
employee at the Radiante [. . .] asked her, “And your old man, the Italian?”
she said. “You guys don’t go there anymore.”

Without missing a beat, she responded that everything was going well,
that you were still together. But Chiquita, insistent, started interrogating
her again.

“Haven’t you told him to bring you to Italy? I found out that Carmen,
your friend, already left with the Swiss guy for Switzerland, last month.

And a cousin of mine that lived in the countryside, a Dutchman took her to

48

Holland, after something like two months of knowing each other. That
Italian is taking you for an idiot, girl, don’t be such a fool!”
That really hurt her!

In as much as the Zona Colonial serves as an international convergence point for foreign
travel and sex tourism, it becomes a space of risk and opportunity for those who place
themselves within its flows. The pain provoked in the protagonist by Chiquita's words is
that of one who is reminded of her failed position within a social hierarchy produced in
places where achievement is measured by one's ability to successfully negotiate what is
perceived as the primary path to social mobility on hand—the path off the island.

Yet the text also portrays the ambiguity which attaches itself to relationships
forged within such contexts in which socio-economic self-interest and romantic attraction
mingle, suggesting that the protagonist may actually be in love with Lucas even as she
seeks to take advantage of her connection to him. This ambiguity is made manifest fiom
the opening of the story which describes her first impression of him as he approaches the
table where she is seated with his friend—and her companion for the evening—Ivan.
Here the text posits both his physical attributes and his foreign origin as sources of her
interest in him: “Llevabas tus gafas de vidrios claros y montura gruesa, y enseguida, ella
te miro, alzando las antenas: ni muy joven, ni muy viejo, alto, pelo bueno, medio rubio, e
italiano. iJusto como el médico se lo recomendé!” (“You were wearing your glasses with
the clear lenses and the thick frames, and suddenly, she looked at you, raising her
antennae: neither very young nor very old, tall, straight hair, somewhat blond, and Italian.
Just what the doctor ordered!”; 47). Although it is not clear in this passage what primarily

attracts her to him, as the story progresses, it seems to indicate that her interest is more

49

than merely socio-economic. For example, although she has spent time with other
foreigners prior and subsequent to Lucas’s departure, it is to him her thoughts return even
after he is gone. From time to time she passes the Hotel at a distance and reminisces on
the moments they spent together there. Toward the end of the story, she remembers
angrily leaving the room on their last night together because of his alcohol-induced rage,
violence, and refusal to take her out to celebrate New Year's Eve. Going to the same
restaurant where she first met him, she encounters Tom, a gringo merchant marine, and
takes him to a bar known to be a meeting ground for Dominican women and foreign men.
As she and her new partner dance and fondle each other, she can only recall the attraction
she feels toward Lucas and, in spite of her anger, returns to the hotel to make love to him
(50). Thus, her actions and attitudes seem to reflect what is also true of some Dominican
sex workers who distinguish their relationships with foreign men as either por amor ‘for
love’ or por residencia ‘for residency’, the latter underscoring socio-economic motives
but which may very well mix with the former (Brennan, What’s Love, 3).

The text thus offers in broad strokes a portrait of the ambiguities, frustrations and
transitory nature of relationships forged within international contact zones of desire.
While men from the United States, Canada, Switzerland, Holland and Italy arrive at the
island desirous of “playas y mujeres” ‘beaches and women’, they come and go with the
impunity that their privileged freedom of movement brings, remaining beyond reach and
leaving only a trace of their presence in the memory and unfulfilled desire of the women
they leave behind. As the text articulates this, it also delineates contemporary social uses
of the oldest district of the Dominican Republic, the Zona Colonial—the site for the

preservation of the Dominican Republic's Hispanic cultural patrimony and the first seat

50

of European power in the "New World"—an unstable contact zone that continues to
preserve, amidst the flow and circulation of desiring bodies, the legacy of asymmetrical
relational positioning between the inside of island space and its outside. Here mobility is
both an end and a means within this place where stasis and fluidity meet and overlap even
as outside indulgence and local escape are negotiated between foreign and local social
actors.

The Zona Colonial can thus arguably be posited as a not so felicitous version of a
space that conforms to what Glissant envisions as a "zone of relational community" that
might evolve within Relation, a term he uses in part to distinguish the interconnectedness
currently at work in the present phase of globalization between "geocultural entities"
(142) such that "each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the
Other" ( Relation 1 1). Although through his poetics of relation Glissant ultimately seeks
to propose a way of overcoming the weight of historical oppression, violence, and
inequity that has determined the current articulation of the relationship between the
Caribbean region and the traditional centers of hegemonic power, he acknowledges the
lingering presence of the legacies of encounter as he describes in some detail the
trajectory and impact of that relationship, which is the outcome not only of such
institutions as the Plantation system--a "universe of domination and oppression [where]
the tendencies of our modernity begin to be detectable" (65)--but also the result of
imperial expansion first manifested in the travel associated with the original moments of
"Discovery and Conquest" (16). These travels were intimately related to power such that
Glissant categorizes the Conquistadors, as the Huns, "whose goal was to conquer lands

by exterminating their occupants before them”, as travelers who practiced "invading

51

nomadism" [which] spares no effect [and] is an absolute forward projection: an arrowlike
nomadism [that] is a devastating desire for settlement" (12). The conquering impulse
fueling the desire for "Voyage" and its execution also bears directly on the identities of
both the traveler and the resident of the place travelled to. This expresses itself
particularly in the conception of Self and Other on both sides of the relationship. As
Glissant explains as part of his theoretical integration of Deleuze and Guattari’s
distinction between root and rhyzomatic identity':
In the course of this journey identity, at least as far as the Western peoples
who made up the great majority of voyagers, discoverers, and conquerors
were concerned, consolidates itself implicitly at first ("my root is the
strongest") and then is explicitly exported as a value ("a person's worth is
determined by his root"). The conquered or visited peoples are thus forced
into a long and painful quest after an identity whose first task will be
opposition to the denaturing process introduced by the conqueror. A
tragic variation of a search for identity. For more than two centuries
whole populations have had to assert their identity in opposition to the
processes of identification or annihilation triggered by these invaders [. . .]
for colonized peoples identity will be primarily "opposed to"[. . .] (16-7)
Thus, Glissant identifies two particular past articulations of the contact between
local residents and foreign outsiders: the smothering, totalizing weight of the plantation
system and travel, a prefatory invasion that made both settlement and the plantation
possible. Combined, these two factors establish a process that would strip away

conceptions of self on the part of subjected peoples (part of the “denaturalization

 

' see A Thousand Llateaus.

52

process” referred to above), seeking to impose through violence a new conception based
on Western perspectives of an essentialist “rooted” identity. These two factors, then, turn
encounter into a dialectic of domination/resistance.

Indeed, the assertion of local identity in the face of invasion is a theme taken up in
the title story of Arias' first collection Invi's Paradise, which recounts the events
surrounding a group of young bohemians who, as part of their countercultural escape,
seek refuge from the oppressive gaze of local power through going to a cave along the
ocean's edge to party.2 After having imbibed a hallucinatory brew, the members of the
group see a ship approaching the cave that one of the members identifies thus: "es una de
las naves vikingas de cuando los tainos, men, que los vikingos nos descubrieron primero
que Colon, (’no se acuerdan? (“it’s one of the Viking ships from when the Tainos lived
here, men, the Vikings discovered us first before Columbus, don’t you remember?”; 30-
l). Upon hearing these words of self-identification with the island’s earliest known
inhabitants, members immediately assume various postures with which to encounter
these new arrivals to the island. Ranging from playful confrontation to fear and defiance,
the group collectively appeals to different elements that make up their cultural identity
which they then marshal as a basis for solidarity and strength. The first character to
respond is Behique, whose name comes from the Taino and used to refer to a type of
curandero or priest and healer (F erly 74). He invokes famous figures of resistance from
Dominican history and spirituality while also pointing to the island's African and Taino
heritage as he seeks to assuage the fear that this vision has triggered. He calls upon others

of the group to join him to greet the newcomers:

 

2 Nestor E. Rodriguez makes this point in Escrituras de desencuentro en la Republica Dominicana 104. See
pages 93-109 for a more thorough treatment of the story in its entirety.

53

--;Qué cool, men! No se asusten, esto es parte de las profecias, men [. . .]
No se preocupen, los espiritus de la gente de nosotros nos protegen, Mama
Tingo, men, Santa Marta la Dominadora, tranquilos, men, tranquilidad.
Somos los elegidos [. . .] No es casual que todos estemos viendo lo mismo.
[. . .] Que nadie se paniquee, somos fuertes, tainos, men. Mandela, Africa,
Yemalla, men. Lopez, Terror, vengan, vamos a recibirlos bien cool,
men. . .(29)
How cool, man! Don’t be scared, this is part of the prophecies, man [. . .]
Don’t worry, the spirits of our people protect us, Mama T ingo', man, Santa
Marta la Dominadora, chill, man, chill. We’re the chosen ones [. . .] It’s
no accident that we’re all seeing the same thing. [. . .] Nobody panic, we’re
strong, Tainos, man. Mandela, Africa, Yemaya, man. Lopez, Terror,
come on, let’s give them a real cool welcome, man...
At the core of this evocation of the island's cultural heritage lies the appeal to
strength through resistance. 3 For example, Mama T ingo is the popular name of
F lorinda Soriano Munoz, a female farmer who was killed in 1974 for her nonviolent
struggles against the appropriation and redistribution of land and around whose name
groups have successfully continued her fight (Rochclcau 93: Ferly 72, 75). Behique

appeals in like manner to the island’s Afiican heritage, linking the Dominican collectivity

 

3 Odile Ferly, in “La historici(u)dad en ‘Invi’s Paradise’ de Aurora Arias,” sees this appeal to resistance
through identification with different historical and religious personages and cultural elements that make up
the island’s past as a way in which Arias rewrites history, reinscribing indigenous, Afrodominican and
female subjectivities into Dominican cultural discourse : “En ‘Invi’s Paradise’ se opera una reescritura del
pasado, tanto lejano como reciente, que al reinsertar la presencia taina y africana y al reafilmar el papel de
la mujer en la construccio’n de la nacion, cuestiona la historiografia oficial” ‘In ‘Invi’s Paradise’ a rewriting
of both the remote and recent past is operative, which, by reinserting the Taino and African presence and
reaffirming the role of the woman in the construction of the nation, questions official historiography.’ (67-
8).

54

to the figure of Mandela while also signaling Santa Marta la Dominadora, a female deity
of Afrodominican religion called upon at times, as her name implies, to dominate
adversaries. Taken together, these form the basis with which to face this new, if
anachronistic and hallucinatory, invasion witnessed by the whole group.

For her part, Sara, the first to have identified the Viking ship, assumes a posture
of mocking flirtation : "Mirales los cachos en la cabeza, qué bonitos [. . .] vengan, vamos
a levantamos a esos hombres, 0 sea, mira qué bonitos son, ji ji ji, con esa barba roja,
men" “Look at the horns on their heads, how cute [. . .] come on, let’s pick up those men,
you know, look at how cute they are, hee, hee, hee, with that red beard, man”; 31) But
even as she feigns seduction as a goal and desire, she immediately turns to another of the
group who is from the United States, goading her into communicating with the members
of the ship: "Erica, vocéales en inglés: jellos ser los tainos!, 0 sea, nosotros. . . 3diles que
Anacaona soy yo!" (“Erica, yell at them in English: they’re the Tainos!, I mean, we. . .tell
them that I’m AnacaonaI”; 31). Thus, she too invokes resistance through self-
identification with the Taino people—specifically, the female cacica ‘chietain’ , who was
hung for her part in fomenting rebellion and putting up a successful front and, as Odile
Ferly states, “oponiendo resistencia de mas de diez afios a los invasores” ‘resisting the
invader for more than ten years’ (71).

After this, a musician of the group, Terror, is convinced to heed Behique's call to
greet those aboard the ship: "--Vamos a componerles una cancion a los vikingos. Yo.
Ellos tienen que saber que van a desembarcar en Santo Domingo, Quisqueya, Primada de
América, je, la tierra del Terror; que yo mismo, Terror, les voy a tocar una [. . .] Ok. 5N0

trajeron camara? [Qué fuerte! Pero okey. (A Behique): Una bachata, men" (“‘We’re

55

going to compose a song to the Vikings. 1. They have to know that they’re going to
disembark at Santo Domingo, Quisqueya, Primada de América, heh, the land of Terror;
that I myself, Terror, am going to sing them a song [. . .] Ok. They didn’t bring a camera?
That’s too bad! But okay. (To Behique): A bachata, man”; 32). Even as he appeals to
the island’s cultural identity in preparation to greet the newcomers, a special link is made
in his choice of identifying the island and the capital city by the names bestowed upon
them by historically dominant groups. This is seen principally in his use of the Taino
name for the island, Quisqueya, followed by the title Primada de América to refer to the
capital city, pointing to its being considered and touted by official discourse as the first
city established by the Spanish after ‘discovery’ and conquest. In all of the appeals to
cultural identity made by members of the group, his is the only mention of the Spanish
component of the island’s identity and it is immediately followed by the statement that
the Vikings will soon land at “la tierra del Terror,” perhaps a deliberate counter-
discursive play on words linking the Spanish heritage with terror. That his is a counter-
cultural posture is reinforced in his choice of native Dominican music forms, for the
bachata during the time frame in which the story is set—the 19805—was considered a
marginalized music form associated with the marginalized sectors where it originated and
enjoyed its greatest popularity.4 In his brief comments, he thus offers a less
romanticized assessment of the island’s history than his companions, but equally
valorizes autochthonous culture to form a position of more deeply entrenched resistance.
Finally, even as he engages in the unfolding of the unlikely encounter which is about to

take place, he inquires as to whether or not the new arrivals possess a camera, thus

 

’ See Pacini Hernandez, Deborah. Bachgta: A Social HistoryI of a Dominican Popular Music. Philadelphia:
Temple UP, 1995.

56

pointing to the typical apparatus with which modern invaders—tourists—are equipped.
Before Terror and Behique can play, however, all are silenced in the face of what they
now witness as the ship draws closer:
Desde lo mas oscuro del horizonte, la nave 5e acercaba movida por
enorrnes remos de madera; cada vez mas, moviendo a su antojo la entera
furia del mar, venida desde no se sabe cual rincon del pasado, cargada de
hombres rojos y sangrientos [. . .] que a1 rato, cuando los divisaron bien,
comenzaron a gritar algo desde la proa en un idioma de piratas, con sus
escudos, sus sombreros de metal, y esas lanzas, como dispuestos a iniciar
una guerra que los tomaba desprevenidos y no les convenia. (33)
From the darkest part of the horizon, the ship drew nearer, propelled by
enormous wooden oars; progressively moving at its whim the entire fury
of the sea, come from who knows what corner of the past, laden with red
and bloody men [. . .] that soon, when they saw them well, began to shout
something from the prow in a language of pirates, with their shields, their
metal helmets, and those spears, like they were ready to initiate a war that
took them by surprise and wasn’t in their best interest.
Thus the past comes to haunt the present. Emerging from the darkness of the horizon,
disparate historical periods spanning centuries are condensed into the bloody logic of
invasion which has bridled and crossed the ocean's fury to arrive at the island. Before
such a threatening vision stands the "fragile and ephimeral" (33) figure of another
member of the group, Josh Tibi, whose reaction prophetically deciphers for all the core

logic of what they witness: "5610 tenia ojos para mirar hacia alla, saber lo que esta

57

sucediendo no es nada del otro mundo, que esa nave vikinga siempre estuvo ahi [. . .] y
siempre lo estara. Ahi etemamente. Porque todo lo que fue sigue siendo. Todo [...]
Aunque como ahora, todo 5e este’ derritiendo y 5610 me queda el mar para hundirme en
él" (“he only had eyes to look there, to know what’s happening isn’t anything out of this
world, that that Viking ship was always there [. . .] and always will be. There eternally.
Because all that has been continues to be. Everything [. . .] although like now,
everything’s melting away and only the sea remains for me to sink myself into”; 33).
After the collective call to resistance based in a common cultural heritage is muted, the
story closes by pointing to the only alternative seen by one of the group’s members in the
face of invasion—self-annihilation.

The above passage also suggests the cyclical repetition of invasion which
penetrates even local spaces of escape and play,5 triggering among the majority of those
present an affirmation of cultural identity, solidarity, strength and resistance vis a vis the
invading Other while at the same time inducing some to rehearse a self-destruction born
of despair—an echo of the choice made centuries before by some members of the Taino
population, who committed mass suicide in the face of the harshness of conquest and
colonization (Moya Pons 33-4). Thus, Josh Tibi, rehearses an almost conditioned
response when faced with the island’s experience of invasion. As Ne'stor E. Rodriguez
points out: “[Josh Tibi] es el unico de los contertulios que parece captar la imposibilidad
de superar el Iastre de una memoria historica que se prolonga hasta el hastio ” ‘[Josh
Tibi] is the only one of those present that seems to capture the impossibility of

overcoming the rubble of an historical memory that is prolonged ad nauseum ’ (104).

 

5 See Rodriguez, who argues that the cave is a type of counter-cultural heterotopia (102-4).

58

In this way, travel to the island is associated with power and struggle, pitting local
resident against outside invader, ultimately provoking a particular type of relational
conceptualization regarding Self and Other rooted in historical legacy—a dual
consciousness that lingers to this day and which Glissant describes thus, "one is visitor or
visited; one goes or stays; one conquers or is conquered" (17). In this way the episode
surrounding the Viking ship is demonstrative of what Silvio Torres-Saillant terms "the
hypermnesic element within Caribbean poetics,” a thematic phenomenon characterized
by "the uncommon compulsion to remember, to look for meaning in the exploration of
past experience" (288). Furthermore, inasmuch as the episode is an evocation of a
collective past experience of initial colonial encounter and its subsequent repercussions
on local life and consciousness, it exemplifies Simone Gikandi's contention regarding
Caribbean cultural producers’ reaction before the memory of Columbus:

Caribbean literature and culture are haunted by the presence of the
“discoverer” and the historical moment he inaugurates. For if Columbus’s
“discovery” of the Americas and his initial encounter with the peoples of
the New World have paradigmatic value in the European episteme because
they usher in a brave new world, a world of modernity [. . .] these events
also trigger a contrary effect on the people who are “discovered” and
conquered [. . .] Caribbean writers and scholars exhibit extreme anxiety
and ambivalence toward the beginnings of modernity. (Writing in Limbo
1)

Thus, the eternal presence of the invading ship as portrayed above anchors current

social life in a type of phantasmagoric “deep past” from which to understand current

59

experience. In Arias' works, therefore, the anxiety and ambivalence to which Gikandi
refers are produced within a continuum of local historical experience centered on travel,
forming a common ground for autochthonous self-identification and a prism through
which to contextualize the exploration of modern encounters between local Selves and
invading Others within contemporary tourism and sex tourism.

If, within Arias’ narrative trajectory, "Hotel Radiante" represents a first attempt to
directly confront contemporary local experience of sex tourism, several stories from her
latest collection Emoticons continue discursive forays into the theme. Here the narrative
exploration of both local residents and tourists is much more fully developed, providing
an in-depth consideration of each of their perspectives and the dialectical interplay in
which they engage as they configure the social space of encounter. Here, Arias will
explore the motivations and the inner life-world of the male traveler, revealing the
operation of colonial patterns of perception and use of Caribbean space as well as the
tactics deployed by local subjects as they seek to take advantage of their contact with
him.

The stories “Novia del Atlantico,” and “Bachata” center on the travels and actions
of protagonist James Gatto within the Dominican Republic. He forms one of the main
vehicles used by Arias to represent the wealthier traveler from abroad and it is he who
will receive the greatest development as a character, standing in metonymically for what I
term the Euromale due to characteristics which link him not to any one country in
particular, but rather to the many countries of the so-called developed world whose
majority or dominant population is white and where the predominance of European

presence and/or legacy is still operative. A restless, white male of uncertain origin who

60

speaks Spanish, French, English, and Italian (Arias, “Novia” 112), Gatto wanders the
world and the Dominican Republic in search of “la vida verdadera” (“the real life”; 121)
and embodies practices which have marked metropolitan interaction with the Caribbean
from the outset of modernity. Arias introduces him in the following passage taken from
the beginning of the story “Bachata”:
Miraba todo desde afuera, como un gato que se detiene a auscultar encima
de un tejado un escenario. [...] gOtro escenario mas de los tantos que habia
conocido a lo largo de su vida de giramundo? No, de ningl'rn modo. Un
escenario muy singular, donde nacen hermosas flores entre los basureros.
Donde ocurre una belleza nunca vista por sus ojos, como la de Yajaira, la
muchacha que vivia junto al mar. Alta, prieta, encendida. Trabajaba de
mesera en un disco-terraza. Una tarde cualquiera, James Gatto, sin
proponérselo, cayo por ahi. (93)
He was looking at everything from outside, the way a cat pauses on a
rooftop to survey the scene [. . .] One more scene of the many he had
known in the course of a lifetime of globetrotting? No, by no means. A
very singular scene, where beautiful flowers spring up among the garbage
heaps. Where there was to be found a beauty never before seen by his
eyes, like that of Yajaira, the girl who lived next to the sea. Tall, dark-
skinned, glowing. She worked as a waitress in a disco-restaurant. One
afiemoon like any other, James Gatto, without intending to, found himself

there. (Trans. MaGuire)6

 

6 Unless otherwise noted all translations of the story “Bachata” will be taken from the non-published
translation of Emily Maguire.

61

In effect, this scene restages what Diana Taylor describes as the typical “Western”
scenario of colonial encounter that “stars the same white male protagonist-subject and the

'99

same brown, found 'object (13). Indeed, from the very outset, the narration places Gatto
on the outside looking in, that is, the detached observer who gazes upon the local scenery,
delimiting that space and, as will be seen, converting the scene before him into a stage for
his own protagonism. In this he exemplifies the practice of what John Urry has termed
“the tourist gaze,” which involves a dynamic of distancing and totalizing vision. This
becomes a practice of mastery for affirming one’s place in the world and, as Ellen Strain
contends, building on Urry’s concept, grew out of “Western” imperial expansion (24-5).
This “touristic vision” is constructed by way of a series of objectifying strategies which
reduce that which is seen to a surface spectacle that can become mystified through the
projection of the will, imagination and desire of the observer. But, as Strain points out,
the reality thus reduced and subsequently re-produced in the eye of the tourist becomes a
mystery which demands an unveiling (18). Thus, in addition to the distancing inherent in
the practice of the gaze, there is at the core of tourism the competing impulse for
movement toward the observed, a desire for immersion in that Other reality (Strain 24-5)
and perhaps an impulse for possession similar to that which characterized the figure
identified by Mary Louise Pratt as the imperial “seeing man” of European colonial
expansion whom she describes thus: “the European male subject of European landscape
discourse—he whose imperial eyes passively look out and possess” (7). Indeed, as Gatto

surveys his environs his eyes recognize the trash heaps which surround him but fix on the

“beautiful flower” Yajaira, the dark, exotic “girl who lived by the sea.” As we will see

62

later, her very beauty and allure will convert her into “one more mystery to be
deciphered” (“un misterio mas por descifrar”; 94) and an object of pursuit.

However, another story, “Novia del Atlantico,” reveals a search for more than
mere libidinal gratification and offers a glimpse into other elements that constitute “real
life” for Gatto. The story begins with a passage similar to the one with which “Bachata”
opens, this time as he views the northern coastal city of Puerto Plata. Like “Bachata,” it
portrays him in the moment of delimiting and mystifying the space before him: “Parado
en el malecon, James Gatto penso que toda aquella luz que lo circundaba podria
iluminarlo a él también. Animado, se dispuso a recorrer el lugar al que recién habia
llegado” (“Standing on the walkway that ran along the city’s sea wall, James Gatto
thought that all that light that surrounded him would be able to illuminate him too.
Enthused, he decided to look over the place to which he had recently anived”;l 1 1).
Thus, spurred on, Gatto continues to delimit space even as he penetrates it further,
passing bars, hotels, and the beach where “la gente 5e baftaba feliz, sin prisas, sin
problemas” (“people swam happily, without hurry, without problems”; 111). Arriving at
the end of his brief survey of the local terrain he comes across two structures associated
with the vigilance of institutionalized power that juxtapose different historical moments
in the present: on the eastern border, the modern “Policia Turistica” ‘Tourist Police’,
designed to defend the rights of tourists, and on the West, the Fort of San Felipe,
described by the text as “witness of the city of Puerto Plata since the sixteenth century
(“testigo de la ciudad de Puerto Plata desde el siglo XVI”) and whose current function is
to form part of the picturesque and “authentic” touristic scenery, a piece of commodified

history (I 1 l).

63

Aside from this passing mention of the reconfiguration of space and its social
function according to the logic of tourism and pointing out the process of delimitation
according to the tourist gaze, the passage cited above also signals, through its ascription
of illumination as prominent in Gatto’s self-conscious desire, more deeply existential
motives behind his presence on the island. As the text continues, the reader is offered a
more complete portrait of Gatto’s first arrival to the city and its place within his life-
trajectory:

Al te'rmino de su caminata, Gatto entro a un bar. Escogio una mesa cerca
de la playa. Se sentia encantado. La arena, el mar. Todo 1e parecia tan
simple y primitivo, una ancha frontera abierta donde cabia, incluso, la
felicidad. [. . .] La brisa marina y las sombras de las palmeras le inspiraron
lo suficiente para saber que aquello era exactamente lo que buscaba.
Quiero vivir aqui, quiero explorar, crecer, amar. Esta es la vida, y es
cierta, pensaba complacido.[. . .] Le sobraba tiempo y energias, y esa tarde
se sentia especialmente heroico, lleno de una euforia inusual. Tan distinto
a un tiempo atras, cuando al'rn habitaba en el anodino infiemo que alguna
vez fue su vida [. . .] El Oce'ano Atlantico batiéndose frente a e'l
funcionaba, sin dudas, como un elixir. El sentimiento de renovada ilusion,
ese mar, esa luz, esa ciudad costera romanticamente bautizada como
“Novia del Atlantico,” 1e parecian tan maravillosos que enterrarian por
siempre todo lo que dejo atras. (112-113).

At the end of his walk, Gatto entered a bar. He chose a table near the

beach. He felt enchanted. The sand, the sea. Everything seemed so

64

simple and primitive, a wide-open frontier where even happiness had a
place [. . .] The ocean breeze and the shadows of the palm trees inspired
him enough to know that that was exactly what he was looking for. I want
to live here, I want to explore, grow, love. This is the life, and it’s certain,
he thought, content [. . .] He had more than enough time and energy, and
that afternoon he felt especially heroic, filled with a euphoria to which he
was unaccustomed. So different than a little while back, when he still
inhabited the anodyne hell that once was his life [. . .] The Atlantic Ocean
beating in front of him functioned, no doubt, as an elixir. The feeling of
renewed dreams, that sea, that light, that coastal city romantically baptized
Novia del Atlantico7, seemed to him so marvelous, that they would bury
all he left behind.
This paradisiacal tropical space, invested with his own sense of euphoria, assumes a vital
importance for this traveler who sees it as a “wide-open frontier” for his heroic
protagonism as he “lives,” “explores”, “grows,” and “loves.” It holds the possibility of
personal illumination and the life he seeks, a place to find “renewed hopes and
happiness”—an environment in which to lose himself and “bury” his past life. His
travels to the Caribbean and the Dominican Republic suggest a personal quest for self-
fulfillment, entailing a break with the past, a passage to another, more “certain,” life,
another way of being. In short, Gatto’s desire takes on an almost religious dimension and
exhibits some of the ritualistic qualities that have been ascribed to tourism in general by

several theorists.

 

7 "Novia del Atlantico” can be translated either as “Bride” or “Girlfriend of the Atlantic.” The author, as
will be seen, plays with the latter two of the meanings. I leave it untranslated in the text as it is a title by
which the city is commonly known.

65

Those models of tourism that focus on its ritual aspect derive in large part from
anthropologist Victor Tumer’s work on the nature and function of ritual, which, in turn,
builds on French ethnographer and folklorist Arnold Van Gennep’s analysis of rites of
passage whose characteristics Turner summarizes as follows: "Rites of passage are the
transitional rituals accompanying changes of place, state, social position, and age in a
culture. They have basically a tripartite processual structure, consisting of three phases:
separation, margin or limen, and reaggregation" (Turner and Turner, 249). Participants
in rites of passage thus move from social normativity into a socially sanctioned “margin”
or liminal state in which norms are suspended and characterized by what Turner
describes as an “anti-structure” that entails “the dissolution of normative social structures,
with its role-sets, statuses, jural duties, etc” (Turner From Ritual to Theatre 28). This
model is flexible and is used to describe ritual spatial movement, as Turner explains,
pointing to the physical movement frequently associated with transitional rites and in
particular with pilgrimages: "the passage from one social status to another is often
accompanied by a parallel passage in space, a geographical movement from one place to
another [. . .] the spatial passage may involve a long, exacting pilgrimage in the crossing
of many national frontiers before the subject reaches his goal, the sacred shrine [. . .]"
(25). Having passed through that experience, the pilgrim can then come back to re-enter
society, changed from her or his experience of liminality.

In a parallel fashion, the “transitional rite” of international tourism often
demonstrates a similar progression: separation from home, crossing of borders and
entrance into the tourist destination, and eventual return. On the experiential level, this

movement through space and time entails a temporary departure from the accustomed

66

experience of home and everyday life and the particular time constraints and social norms
associated with these, and the entrance into a place, a culture, and a normativity at least
perceived as qualitatively different than that of home (Grabum “Sacred Journey,”
“Secular Ritual”; Selanniemi, “On Vacation”; Ryan and Hall, Sex Tourism). Thus, as
seen from the perspective of the tourist and the society from which s/he originates, the
tourist destination constitutes a margin or an anti-structure—a liminal space which is a
type of “no—place and no-time” (Turner and Turner 250), suspended “betwixt and
between” (249)8 what is the normal, routine life of the tourist and a place where “the
magic of tourism” may occur (Grabum “Secular Ritual” 45).

In describing the existential “magic” of occupying the anti-structural liminal of
tourism, Tom Selanniemi, in what he describes as the tourist “south”—i.e. the
geographically varied “places” associated with sun, sand, and sea and the typical
activities in which the tourist engages—affirms: “The spatio-temporal
transition/transgression from home and everyday life to the “south” changes our
psychological state, the social order and our bodily state or the way we perceive and
experience our surroundings” (27). The tourist experience thus sets up the conditions of
possibility for the traveler to temporarily be other than he or she normally is before
eventually returning home to resume life as before. As Selanniemi argues, “tourists
travel more to a different state of being than to a different place” (25). In this way, the
tourist experiences existential transitions on multiple levels: the spatial, the temporal, the
mental, and the “sensory/sensual” (26-7). Thus, the sensual experience of the beach

environment and the elixir-like effect of the pounding of the Atlantic surf all lead Gatto

 

8 Also qtd. in Grabum, “Secular Ritual” 47; Ryan and Hall, Sex Tourism: Marginal People and Liminalities
3, 101.

67

to a state of “euphoria” and “enchantrnent,” that is, to undergo a mental transition which
is made possible by the voyage or travel. Selanniemi considers touristic practice “a
transgression of our boundaries at home and work, the place and time of everyday life,
into the placeless and timeless liminoid ‘South’” (27). Indeed, it is precisely the escape
from the normativity of home that ultimately leads Gatto to transgress it through his
travel to the Caribbean and the Dominican Republic seeking a definitive break with that
“insipid hell” with which the text describes his daily existence before his arrival in search
.of “real life.”
In this, Gatto seems to exhibit what Dean MacCannell has described as a central
part of tourists’ motives and the experience they seek, both noting the religious/sacred
qualities that characterize tourism and correlating them as the compensatory product of a
disenchantment provoked within modernity and consequently sublimated into what he
asserts as a longing for authenticity:
‘The concern of modems for the shallowness of their lives and
inauthenticity of their [everyday] experiences parallels concern for the
sacred in primitive society’ (MacCannell, 1973: 589-90). [. . .] 'The more
the individual sinks into everyday life, the more he is reminded of reality
and authenticity elsewhere' ( MacCannell, 1976: 160) [. . .] Therefore
'Authentic experiences are believed to be available only to those modems
who try to break the bonds of their everyday existence and begin to "live"’
( MacCannell, l976:159)’" (qtd. in E. Cohen 187).

As Gatto observes Puerto Plata, having broken the bonds of his everyday existence, he

begins to feel the certainty of the life he witnesses in the liminal space of the Caribbean.

68

The reader will recall once again how his ecstatic state is heightened by his perception of
the “primitive” and “simple” nature of the tropical island scenery, underscoring that this
“here” and now constitutes “the life” that he has sorely been missing. That he should
search among primitiveness and simplicity for the real and certain, is a further indicator
that he seeks authenticity. As MacCannell affirms, “For modems, reality and
authenticity are thought to be elsewhere in other historical periods and other cultures, in
purer, simpler lifestyles” (3).9 Thus, Gatto travels to the Caribbean to more than merely
bask in the sun, sand and surf, he also seeks to immerse himself in a place “Other” than
his home culture where he can transition away from his old way of living and experience
an authentic life anew. That is, Gatto’s travels have to do not only with sensuous
pleasure and recreational indulgence, but also with personal recreation.

This is indeed highlighted throughout the story “Novia del Atlantico” as in the
following passage when he chats with the personnel manager of a hotel in which he seeks
employment:

Gatto, tratando de hacerse el divertido, le dice [su nombre] en tres idiomas
distintos y le pide que elija el que mas le guste. Ya alguna vez, en su gira
existencial por otros lugares del Caribe, probo a ocultar su verdadera
identidad cambiandose de nombre. Asi, de Marco F erreti durante su breve
estadl'a en Cuba, habia pasado a ser Fidel Mulheiro en su paso por las islas
Caiman y Puerto Rico, y Joseph Ross cuando estuvo en Haiti. Ahora, sin

saber por qué, desea ser quien es [...]" (l 16 emphasis added)

 

9 See also the introduction of Regina Bendix’s, The Search for Authenticity. Along similar lines Bendix
argues that because of the spiritual and epistemological loss that accompanied the secularizing impact of
the modern period in Europe, authenticity became “the origin and essence of being human” (6), and the
search for it, a quest undertaken to satisfy “a longing for an escape from modernity” (7).

69

Gatto, trying to come off as witty, tells her [his name] in three different
languages and asks her to pick the one she likes the most. He had already,
at some point in his existential tour through other places of the Caribbean,
tried to hide his true identity by changing his name. Thus, from Marco

F erreti during his brief stay in Cuba, he become Fidel Mulheiro in his
passage through the Grand Caymans and Puerto Rico, and Joseph Ross
when he was in Haiti. Now, without knowing why, he wants to be who he
is [. . .].

Here we see how Gatto, having spent some time on his “existential tour” of the
Caribbean, has grown tired of trying on different identities and seeks to exist as himself.
This ought not to be understood, however, as his wanting to recuperate or revert to some
sort of essential Self rooted in the home or country he has left behind, for he has come to
Puerto Plata to bury his past. Indeed, his “root” identity, to use Glissant’s term, becomes
so remote to him later in his trajectory upon the island, he has difficulty, as told in the
story “Bachata,” of giving an answer to the question of where he is from, having to take a
drink first to buy some time, "para acordarse por fin de donde es. Ha dado tantas vueltas
por tan diferentes lugares, que ya no sabe a cual de ellos pertenece. Seguro que a todos y
a ninguno. De tanto ir a todas partes, simplemente, se quedo sin patria, y cuando le
hacian esa pregunta, no sabia qué responder" (“to remember, finally, where he’s from. He
has roamed about so many different places, that he no longer knows to which he belongs.
From so much going to such different places, he simply wound up with no country, and
when they asked him that question, he didn’t know how to respond”; 100). No, this

unanchored traveler who is constantly in motion is not seeking to recapture an original

70

essence or core but is instead continually on the move, demonstrating the type of
wandering impulse that characterizes what Erik Cohen has denominated the “drifter
tourist,” which he claims is a type of “disoriented post-modem traveler” (189). Drifter
tourists, while sharing in the general trend of mass tourism to move “away from the
spiritual, cultural or even religious centre of one’s ‘world’, into its periphery, toward the
centres of other cultures and societies” (182-3), can take such movement to an extreme,
becoming people who, “lacking clearly defined priorities and ultimate commitments [. . .]
get accustomed to move steadily between different peoples and cultures, who through
constant wandering completely lose the faculty of making choices, and are unable to
commit themselves permanently to anything" (189). Thus, Gatto is a type of ex-patriot
and nomad whose story is the tale of one who moves perpetually within the periphery and
the liminal, seeking new experiences and ways to recreate himself, yet never landing long
enough to claim any one place as a center nor allowing any to claim him. That is, these
stories tell the tale of the gradual re-centering of the Euromale whose ultimate center is
himself and his immediate experience in the here and the now.

Yet, whether Gatto’s search for authenticity and a new way of being in a
marginal space is born of a particularly modern condition, such as MacCannell’s theory
would suggest, or is an example of Cohen’s post-modem drifter tourist, his desire and
actions rehearse an old pattern, dating back to the foundations of modernity and the
globalization set in motion by Columbus and the conquistadores and colonizers who

arrived to remake themselves in the “New World.” '0 As Fernando Ortiz reminds us,

 

'0 I don’t seek here to enter into the debate over the modern/postmodem. Suffice it to say that when
MacCannell published his text in 1976, he was actually interested in turning the focus of ethnographic
studies from “primitive and peasant societies” towards modern society (xv). In any case, “postmodem” did
not yet enjoy the currency in the theoretical nomenclature that it would in the 19805 and 19908. As Strain

71

these early arrivals to the Caribbean also undertook the voyage there in an attempt to
recreate themselves and did, indeed, undergo change, spurred on particularly by the
desire for financial gain:
The mere fact of having crossed the sea had changed their outlook; they left their
native lands ragged and penniless and arrived as lords and masters; from the
lowly in their own country they became converted into the mighty in that of
others. And all of them, warriors, friars, merchants, peasants, came in search of
adventure, cutting their links with an old society to graft themselves on another
new in climate, in people, in food, in customs and hazards (100-1).ll
Indeed, in the midst of his self-refashioning, Gatto utilizes to his advantage an
identitarian repertoire based in the historical colonial relationship of encounter between
those privileged travelers who come from the outside of island space and those who dwell
within it. For example, when in “Novia del Atlantico” a sex worker thrusts herself upon
him, he, thinking that no good would come from a dalliance with a mere “cuero” ‘whore,’
puts on “su mejor estampa, la de gentleman llegado de lejanas tierras, adorable y
aventurero que intenta parecer, la imagen con la que pretende reinventarse [. . .]" (“his
best face, that of the gentleman from distant lands, the adorable adventurer that he tries
to appear, the image with which he tries to reinvent himself ’; 124 emphasis added). In his

personal reinvention, he draws on the history of travel to the Caribbean to assume a

 

points out (8-9), MacCannell later would come to equate his “tourist” with the figure of a postmodern
person, describing him in a strikingly similar way to Cohen above: “Perhaps ‘the tourist’ was really an
early postmodern figure, alienated but seeking fulfillment in his own alienation—nomadic, placeless, a
kind of subjectivity without spirit, a ‘dead subject’ (MacCannell xvi).

" In this, they were following Columbus’s example and the discursive prescription for the imperial use of
the islands as set forth in the “Carta a Luis Srintangel” quoted in the epigraph at the introduction to this
dissertation—i.e. the ganancias to be had in the Caribbean for all European nations and individuals.

72

posture and a role in order to cast an exotic image that will establish his superiority and
distance relative to the local.

In another passage, as he contemplates soliciting a job as night manager of a
hotel, he ponders the relational position he can establish between the local employees and
himself in light of the attributes which he possesses: “a todos se les meteria en su bolsillo
gracias a su carisma, a su caballerosidad y encanto, a su pinta de hombre educado,
blanco, a su buen espafiol, francés, ingles, e italiano” (“he would put everybody in his
pocket thanks to his charisma, his gentile manners and his charm, his look of an educated
man, white, his good Spanish, French, English, and Italian”; “Novia” 112). Beyond his
enchanting personality and gentlemanliness, and the desire and confidence to put
everybody in his pocket, we see traces of colonial relation even as Gatto seeks to
capitalize on his fluency in four of the languages of Empire that have served as tools for
domination in the region. Nor can one overlook his racialized otherness—his
whiteness—which confers upon him a special status. Although only briefly mentioned in
this passage, this factor is emphasized more pointedly in the title story “Emoticons” in
which Gatto makes an appearance as a secondary character who comes to the aid of a
local Dominican, Pepe, who has fallen victim to a pickpocket while out on a date with the
Spanish “fiance'e” whom he met in a chat room on-line and who has recently arrived to
the island. The text summarizes the effect Gatto’s arrival and offer of help have on Pepe:
“Pepe entonces 5e relajo un poco. La oportuna llegada de aquel tipo alto, blanco, ojos
claros, con cara de buen bandido, 1e hizo sentir una inesperada calma. En cualquier lugar
[...] resulta oportuno hacerse acompafiar de alguien asi. Al fin y al cabo, ser blanco es

una profesio'n en este pals, tal como suele decir e1 comr'rn de la gente” (“Then Pepe

73

relaxed a Little. The opportune arrival of that tall, white guy with the light-colored eyes
and the face of a kind outlaw, made him feel an unexpected calm. Wherever you went

[. . .] it was fortunate to be accompanied by someone like that. In the end, being white is a
profession in this country, as the common folk tend to say”; 68). Thus, some members
of Dominican society such as Pepe also pull on the repertoire of colonial encounter,
assuming the lower position in a hierarchical relationship, conferring superiority on
whiteness, which can be traded, as Gatto in effect does at times, for personal gain.

In this way, even as these passages demonstrate his attempts at self-refashioning,
they simultaneously reveal the colonial dynamics which obtain in the Self/Other equation
that has historically shaped the region and the lives of those who pass through and/or
occupy island space. These passages also demonstrate that these same phenomena form
part of the relational repertoire upon which Gatto draws in the execution of his personal
makeover. Thus, just as early travel to the periphery of empire established the Caribbean
as a site for personal transformation, its original violence establishing greater power and
privilege upon the traveler from abroad, that same space still firnctions as a
transforrnative peripheral space for the outside visitor to the islands. In this way, tourism
is but another manifestation of global processes closely linked to the travel and
identitarian impulses that have marked “Western” modernity from the outset, locating the
Caribbean within its flows and webs of power. Furthermore, as Mimi Sheller affirms:
“[These processes have] powerfully shaped transatlantic cultures over the past five
hundred years, and [have] shaped the Caribbean [through] the making and remaking of

places, cultures, bodies and natures” (6).

74

An important part of that reshaping of the region, of course, has come about
through the discourse concerning it as produced within the European imaginary. Thus, as
Gatto occupies the liminal zones of the Dominican Republic, drawing on a relational
repertoire consisting of colonial discourse and practices to [re]fashion himself, he sees, as
did the earlier travelers to the Caribbean, a “wide-open frontier,” for the personal
protagonism and adventure he desires. The enchantrnent provoked by the primitiveness
he perceives there also is ultimately a continuation of the legacy of the objectification
strategies deployed by the Western traveler to the islands. As Anne McClintock
observes:“For centuries, the uncertain continents—Africa, the Americas, Asia—were
figured in European lore as libidinously eroticized [. . .] Africa and the Americas had
become what can be called the porno-tropics for the European imagination--a fantastic
magic lantern of the mind onto which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and
fears" (22)”. Thus, Gatto observes, delimits and circumscribes space to invest the
objects and bodies found there with a desire born of the exoticizing discourses inscribed
in his cultural “Other.” Once having entered that transgressive margin where, in
Selanniemi’s words, his own “latent ‘Other’ may come forth and reveal characteristics
that self-control and social control keep hidden in everyday life”(27), he pursues
exoticized, primitivized and racialized women like the “tall, dark-skinned” Yajaira in the
story “Bachata.” As the story later reveals, he perceives her as the key to the authenticity
that he seeks when he observes her dancing a bachata at the bar where she works, the
movement of her hips showing such “soltura, gracia y libertad” ‘ease, grace, and

freedom’ (97) that they reveal her as the embodiment and gateway to “la verdadera vida,”

 

'2 In addition to Said’s classic Orientalism, see also Ryan and Hall 12-3, for a discussion of how the Far
East and the South Pacific were exoticized and eroticized within the European imagination and practice.

75

consisting for him, in part, of a natural sensuality “stripped [. . .] of any kind of restriction
on the laws of instinct” (despojada [. . .] de toda restriccion a las leyes del instinto” 97).

Therefore, it is precisely the “remaking of places and bodies” within globalized
economic flows of desire and consumption that mark such places as Manresa—outside
the capital city of Santo Domingo and the setting for “Bachata”—and Puerto Plata
through the sex tourism which exists there. This is one of the main themes explored in
“Novia del Atlantico” in which Arias portrays the current realities of this industry as
manifested in Barbanegra—“an erotic, exotic resort for single men and adventurous
couples” (126)—which, in a similar fashion to the Zona Colonial in “Hotel Radiante,”
but more intentionally so, has become a global convergence point for men from abroad to
repeat colonial sexual fantasies commodified through tourism. Within the story, Arias
explores the types of negotiations which occur between Dominican sex workers allowed
to work there by foreigner John F inch—the owner of the hotel—and the wealthier
outsiders who come in search of the objects of their fantasies.

These are fueled to a great extent by the intemet, through which flow the erotic
images for the male “tourist gaze” to behold, linking Puerto Plata to the current global
sex trade. The narrative offers the following depiction of the role of the net, underscoring
the desire which motivates some of the men and the power of foreign wealth and travel to
shape local conditions:

para [algunos] la cosa esta bien clara, un cuero siempre sera un cuero, un
pedazo de came caliente que hay que tratar de conseguir a1 menor precio
posible. ‘Mejor si la engaflo y no le pago nada, y luego, en el message

board del World Sex Archives doy testimonio sobre mi estupenda estadia

76

en aquel paraiso de came que es ese paisito, coloco las fotos que tome,
trofeos de caceria desde Puerto Plata, paraiso de cueros baratos, de
mujeres y nifias que se ofrecen a Mr. Finch para que las deje buscarselas
en su hotel.’ (120)

for [some] it’s crystal clear, a whore will always be a whore, a piece of hot
meat that one has to try and get at the best possible price. ‘Even better if I
trick her and don’t pay her anything, and then, on the message board of
the World Sex Archives I can give a testimony about my stupendous stay
in that fleshly paradise that that little country is, 1 put up my photos that I
took, hunting trophies from Puerto Plata, paradise of cheap whores, of
women and girls that offer themselves to Mr. Finch so he’ll let them
busccirselasl3 in his hotel.

It is just such web sites as World Sex Archives which fall within the eroticized
gaze of tourists from all points of the globe: “gringos en su mayoria [. . .] viejos, menos
viejos, blancos de Ohio, negros de New York, un noruego palido todavia [. . .], el aleman
de 85 afios de edad” (“mostly gringos [. . .] old men, some less old, whites from Ohio,
blacks from New York, a still-pale Norwegian [. . .], the 85 year old German”; l 17).'4
Here the author once again highlights the place of the Dominican Republic within
globalized flows of desire while underscoring the motivational function of the intemet on
these men and the consequent configuration of the island within exterior discourse as a

porno-tropics. Interpreting what he observed in his research within Boca Chica,

 

‘3 In the Dominican Republic, “buscarselas” is roughly the equivalent of “to hustle.” Like the English word
with which I associate it, it is used in a variety of circumstances and generally connotes a combination of
ambition, drive, and astuteness to achieve one’s goals.

'4 World Sex Archives is an actually existing intemet sex tourism forum, located at

www. worldsexarchives. com.

77

 

Dominican Republic, Stephen Gregory describes the impact of sex tourism and the
instrumentality of the intemet, highlighting the positioning and shaping of local women
within global economic processes and a male imaginary: “ Male sex tourism positioned
women as subjects of gender-based labor exploitation; it also figured them within an
electronically mediated masculine imaginary as eroticized subjects of sexual control and
consumption” (141). Within these contexts, Gregory sees the intemet as a “scopic”
instrument for what he terms the practice of “imperial masculinity” in which “men
collectively constructed and naturalized ideologies of racial, class, ethnic, and sex/ gender
hierarchies of the global division of labor” (133).

As Arias’ text indicates, some of the men go there merely in search of the
cheapest “piece of hot meat” possible. However, others’ motives range from the wish to
be treated well, if only fleetingly, to “falling in love” and perhaps taking a few of these
“infelices” ‘wretches’ home with them to their countries, or, at least send them monetary
remittances (117). As we saw earlier in “Hotel Radiante,” mobility and escape from the
island also constitute the desire of many of the sex workers from the Dominican
Republic. But whereas in “Hotel Radiante” the female protagonist is cast into the role of
the unfulfilled, possibly in—love “victim” of shadowy and highly mobile men whose
motives are concealed, in “Novia del Atlantico,” the men are reduced by these
professional sex workers to mere means toward material benefit. Indeed, as Brennan
points out in her article on the sex trade in Sosr'la, just as male sex tourists may “view
[Dominican sex workers] as commodities for pleasure and control,” so too the women see
them as “readily exploitable [and] potential dupes” and vehicles for their own material

gain. These women use sex, romance and possibly marriage toward that end and also as

78

III.

 

a “stepping stone” off of the island (“Selling Sex” 168), thus seeking escape and, as did
the protagonist of “Hotel Radiante,” participation in the mobilities that local conditions
prohibit. In other words, Dominican sex workers also seek to recreate themselves
through their participation in the recreational sex of others. They are, as Brennan states,
“marginalized women in a marginalized economy [who] can and do fashion creative
strategies to control their economic lives” (168), thus making the contact zone a space of
potential mutual transformation. '5
The socio—economic disparity that exists between sex tourists and sex workers
puts into question, of course, the extent to which the latter can refashion themselves and
their circumstances. “Novia del Atlantico” explores this point as it offers a portrait of the
marginal conditions referred to by Brennan as well as the strategies and tactics deployed

”'6 at Finch’s establishment. The

by the “Barbanegra girls” as they seek to “buscarselas
narrative describes how these women arrive to work fiom the town outside the tourist
zone, “where they have left their children with the old man,” (“Novia” 118) thus, hinting
at the importance their work plays in maintaining the family. Some of the women, if they
are successful in getting a client, know that they “will have the means to eat” while others
“will lose everything in the casino and wake up drinking, snorting coke, and crying
alone” (1 18).
Within this context, the following passage encapsulates the aspirations the
workers hold for the evening as well as the means of encouragement they employ to carry

them through the task that lies ahead as they make their theatrical entrance into the space

of colonial encounter:

 

 

15

Also see Brennan, What '5 Love Go! to Do with It?.' Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the
llgomim'can Republic.

See note 13 above.

79

Las Barbanegra girls hacen su entrada [. . .] por la puerta principal,
caminando como por una pasarela, hasta llegar al centro del bar, tratando
de demostrarles a las demas que ‘yo tengo mejor pinta que tu, mi amor, yo
toi ma bueno, yo voy a conseguir mucho cualto eta noche, un par de short
terms de RD$I ,5 00 0 an overnight de RD$3, 000, [a mamar gilevosfue
que vinimos.’, asi que animo, y si el animo no basta, unos buenos tragos y
unafundita de perico ayudan. ’ (1 18)

The Barbanegra girls make their entrance [. . .] through the main door,
walking as if down a runway, until arriving at the center of the bar, trying
to show the other women ‘I look better than you, my love, I’m so much
finer, I’m going to earn a lot of coin tonight, a pair of short terms for
$1500 Dominican or an overnight for $3000 Dominican. It’s cocks we’ve
come to suck! So, courage, and if courage isn’t enough, a few drinks and

a baggie of coke help.’ '7

This passage demonstrates the nature and the material motives of the local performance

of desire within sexualized contact zones, underscoring its competitive nature, its object,

and the personal meddle needed to carry it out, often bolstered by drugs and alcohol.

Thus, these women initiate the embodied performance of el agarre [. . .] “the

great circus of seduction” (l 19) as they take the dance floor:: “caras de orgasmo, caderas,

senos, caderas, cuerpos no tan perfectos porque saben lo que es mal pasar; dinero,

decadencia, frustracion sexual e impunidad de un lado; juventud, miseria, hambre del

otro” (“orgasmic faces, hips, breasts, hips, not-so-perfect bodies because they know what

 

'7 As of this writing, the exchange rate for the Dominican peso against the US dollar is roughly 36 pesos to
the dollar. Thus, a short term service would be worth roughly $40.00 US and an overnight, approximately

80

it is to live through hard times; money, decadence, sexual frustration and impunity on one
side; youth, misery, hunger on the other”; 121). In this way, this space becomes the
performative interstice between local poverty and outside wealth, both of which exact
their toll.

The text then further underscores the consumerist nature of the interaction
between the girls and their clients, juxtaposing their respective attitudes and activities the
following day as each group segregates from the other. While the men sit by one side of
the pool, “otorgando votos y advirtiendo cualidades y defectos de este negocio de vacas”
(“casting votes and noting the virtues and defects of this meat market”; 119), the women
sit on the other, “a jugar barajas y a chismear entre 5i, riendo de lo que quitaron a tal o
cual gringo pendejo. Los “mi amor”, parte del circo de la seduccion, han sido falsos, ‘te
lo hago bien para que no te olvides de mi después de que te vayas, para que me mandes
dinero’, ya tengo cuatro viejos que me envian cuartos y me lloran por teléfono” (“playing
cards and gossiping amongst themselves. The ‘mi amor,’ part of the circus of seduction,
have been false, ‘I do you right so you won’t forget me after you leave, so that you’ll
send me money’, I already have four old men that send me money and cry for me on the
phone”; 119). In this way, the narrative encapsulates the main pecuniary interest
involved in these relationships, highlighting what some women gain for their night’s
work, showing the falsity of professed love, and revealing how the women take
advantage of the men, further exemplifying the two-way commodification that occurs
within such places as Barbanegra.

Such are the relational dynamics which govern this space when James Gatto

anives to apply for the job of night manager, unaware at first, of the “adult” nature of the

81

establishment. As he awaits an appointment with the owner Finch, he notices some of
the girls who, once they spot him, “don’t take their eyes off him even for a second.”
Thus, Gatto, the white foreigner, falls under the local gaze, there to be quickly reduced to
a surface spectacle, an object invested with the economic desires and fantasies of the sex
workers, one of whom, Jennifer, calls out to him as indicated in the epigraph with which I
opened this dissertation—<quablo, papi, tl'l si ‘ta bueno, buen perro!», etc. She is
eighteen years old and already a veteran of her trade, who, “when it comes to men, knows
all the tricks” (124)—a young woman confident in the power that resides in her
sexualized body. Gatto, who arrives thinking he can put everyone in his pocket, is
represented as an “unweaned child” compared to her (124), even though he’s twice her
age. Later that night, she will seduce Gatto who is caught “betwixt and between” being
led by the unrestrained “laws of instinct,” on the one hand, and those ‘civilized’ codes
which place him above a vulgar “cuero”, on the other (124).

Prior to that, however, Gatto is forced to wait all day for an interview which never
materializes due to the fact that the owner, Finch, is in a drunken stupor and can’t see
him. Thus, Mercedes, the personnel manager whose “black eyes” and “black African
mouth” had so interested him when he first met her earlier in the day, informs him that
he’ll have to spend the night at the hotel (117). In the mean time, the great "circus of
seduction" described earlier begins as the girls take the dance floor. Mercedes then grabs
Gatto and brings him out onto the floor and begins to dance. Gatto, standing immobile
for a moment within that liminal interstice, at last, “sin saber lo que hace, se tira a la pista
y baila” ("without knowing what he’s doing, throws himself onto the floor and dances”;

121), entering a performative contact zone of racialized desire. Mercedes then reiterates

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that the interview won't happen that day, encouraging him to "[. . .] olvidate, Jaimito,
disfruta” (“[. . .] forget it, Jaimito, enjoy” ; 121), upon which Gatto, “baila con ella, se rie,
le gusta que esa morena de boca africana le llame Jaimito, no piensa en donde ni en como
va a amanecer, ésta es por fin la vida verdadera" (“dances with her, and laughs, he likes it
that that dark woman with the African mouth calls him Jaimito, he isn’t thinking about
where nor in what condition the morning will find him, this, at last, is the real life”; 121).
Thus, Gatto moves into a state of anti-structural liminality within the space of the dance
floor where norms and structure melt away, a state of unknowing, of non-planning, of
slackened control as he surrenders himself to the flow of circumstance within the bar and
the hotel, stimulated by the “primitive,” seductive features of his Other. Once again, he
is transported to “the real life.”

Yet, not all is completely settled within Gatto’s conscience regarding his choice to
occupy the anti-structure of liminal space, for later that night, after he has gone to bed, he
dreams the following:

Ve entre suefios a un hombre flaco y mas viejo que e’l, sin camisa,
completamente tostado por el sol, parecido a uno de esos gringos que
acaban con su vida en playas extranj eras, luego que todas las demas
opciones se han evaporado. Triste, solitario, sin familia, objeto de burla
de los que le arrancaron todo y ahora no encuentran qué hacer con él [. . .]
James descubre que ese hombre es él mismo en unos cuantos al’ios.” (122)
He sees in dreams a skinny man who is older than he, without a shirt,
completely toasted by the sun, similar to one of those gringos that end

their lives on foreign beaches, after all their other options have evaporated.

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Sad, solitary, without family, an object of mockery by those who ripped
everything away from him and now can’t find what to do with him [. . .]
James discovers that that man is himself in a few years.”
The imagery from this dream carries the weight of centuries of discourse surrounding the
Caribbean, this time of the area as the other side of paradise, a hell in which a wandering
and profligate Euromale may founder and be lost (Sheller 114). The passage thus plays
on the second term of the binarism that operates within the metropolitan consciousness
concerning the Caribbean as porno-tropics, the flipside of desire——fear——of the
dissipation and decadence associated with the “Other” space. As Mimi Sheller explains:
The ‘imperialist self” in the West Indies was always at risk of getting lost,
never finding a way back to Europe, both literally and metaphorically.
The imperialist body is literally vulnerable to losing its bearings and being
shipwrecked on a distant wild shore, starving, being eaten by cannibals, or
succumbing to disease (11 l) [. . .] The detour into tropical luxuriance must
remain only that, lest the European not return. (118)18
Part of what is at stake, of course, is that which will come to ruin if James himself does—
the wife and children we discover that he has. As the older and dissipated version of his

future self takes James’ hand, he transports him back to his mother’s house where Gatto

 

'8 As Médar Serrata points out, within Western discourse, from the Odyssey onward, one finds the
recurring image of the traveling hero in danger of becoming incapacitated as a result of the encounter, in
particular, with female/sexual temptation. This is a central motif within the 1942 epic poem Yelida by
Dominican author Tomas He'rnandez Franco in which a young, virgin Norwegian seaman travels across the
Atlantic allured by the mythical tales surrounding the Caribbean to land in Haiti. There he dallies with and
eventually marries a Haitian prostitute and eventually loses his life. As Serrata argues, his "purpose [in
traveling to the Caribbean] was [. . .] to satisfy his sexual appetite" (217-8). Thus, in as much as the white
protagonist of the poem is allegorical of the Western male (Serrata 217), he seems to be an early
representation of what I call the Euromale sex tourist and a predecessor of Gatto within Dominican literary
discourse.

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sees his son in worn out, ill—fitting clothing who, looking at him sadly, tells him “’yo
sabia que ibas a volver, papa, lo sabia, y si no volvias, yo sé lo que iba a hacer para
encontrarte’, me dice llorando y abrazandome,” (“‘I knew that you were going to come
back, dad, I knew it, and if you didn’t come back, I know what I was going to do to find
you’, he says, crying and hugging me”; 123) to which James responds, “‘éQué tri ibas a
hacer, qué tzi estcis diciendo?, 1e pregunto y lo abrazo mas fuerte. Pobre hijo mio, me fui
y te abandoné junto a tu hermanita, que' locura, qué locura, esto tiene que ser una
pesadilla sin remedio, ya no podré hacer nada por ti, nada” (“What were you going to do,
what are you saying?, I ask him and hug him more tightly. My poor son, I left and
abandoned you together with your little sister, what madness, what madness, this has to
be a nightmare with no solution, I won’t be able to do anything for you any longer,
nothing”; 123).

Thus, at this point, Gatto’s past is still operative within his psyche, forming part of his
dreams and referencing a deep-seated part of his identity and of the normative structure
of home, pointing to the fact that at this stage of the process of his reinvention, he has not
yet made a break, nor completely assumed a new identity. No, the normative structures
of his home society still have purchase on him as evidenced in his self-condemnation
within the dream and in the following excerpt when he is abruptly awakened by an
insistent pounding at his door: “LQuién me busca? (Donde estoy?, [,donde esta mi hijo?
Ah, este hotel. . .Se tira de la cama, y abre 1a puerta. Recupera su otro yo, el que vive en
esta isla desde hace meses” (“Who’s looking for me? Where am 1?, Where’s my son?
Ah, this hotel. . .He throws himself out of bed, and opens the door. He recovers his other

self the one that '5 been living on this island for months”; 123 emphases added).

85

As it turns out, this has been only a fleeting moment of memory and attachment
connecting him with his past, for in conscious life, he quickly re-assumes a self that he
has been cultivating within this island margin. Indeed it is Jennifer who pounds at the
door, breaking his oneiric connection to his children and past, summoning him to join her
in the Jacuzzi, which he had noticed earlier in the day, hidden within the grounds as he
viewed them upon his arrival:

Enfrente, una fuente de cemento y yeso con un par de flamencos a ambos
lados, y al centro, una Venus Afrodita lanzando agua. A la izquierda, una
pared parecida a un cerco, con muchos arboles puestos alli para ocultar el
area, darle privacidad. Se trata del inmenso jacuzzi a1 aire Iibre, disel’iado
para meter a mucha gente, a cualquier hora, a hacer de todo. En el amplio
balcon del primer edificio acostumbran a amontonarse los gringos,
mirando hacia el jacuzzi, listos para no perderse los momentos de mas
intere’s. (112-3).

In front, a cement and plaster fountain with a pair of flamingos on both
sides, and in the center, a Venus Aphrodite spouting water. To the left, a
wall similar to a fence, with many trees placed there to hide the area, give
it privacy. It was an immense open-air Jacuzzi, designed to fit a lot of
people, at any time, to do anything and everything. The gringos tended to
pile up on the spacious balcony of the first building, sure to not miss the
moments of greatest interest.

Indeed, the Jacuzzi is yet another liminal space, doubly constructed as a part of

and apart from the hotel itself, partially hidden within the grounds yet accessible,

86

designed for both privacy and spectacle as it simultaneously shields occupants from the
gaze of others and exposes them to it. This will also soon become a stage for Gatto’s
presumed heroic protagonism and take on the qualities of a sacred space of initiation.

As Jennifer awaits Gatto’s reply to her invitation, she caresses the hair on his arm.
Displaying the look of an innocent child, she holds his eyes with her gaze as she slowly
introduces and removes a sucker several times from her mouth and then finally suffers a
swoon which may merely be a ruse or the product of all the cocaine and alcohol she has
ingested during the evening. At last she manages to overcome Gatto’s initial resistance
and stirs pity within him as he realizes “she is only a girl” (124). When he arrives at the
Jacuzzi, he finds her lying apparently lifeless within it. As he attempts to revive her, she
laughs and throws her arms around him and briefly kisses him before settling back down
to rest her head on the edge of the tub.

At this point, Gatto seems to be moved by some feeling of heroic nobility—
perhaps a chance at redemption after the reminder just a few moments earlier of his
having abandoned his own children. Perhaps he senses what the text describes of the life
of this eighteen-year-old:

Jennifer, pestafias largas, que no sabe contar, que no sabe ver la hora en un
reloj, que en vez de escribir, garabatea unas cuantas letras torcidas [. . .]
Jennifer que nunca fue nif'la, encarcelada, acostandose con el abogado para
salir de prision [. . .] Jennifer, borracha y endrogada para engafiar al dolor y
5610 sentir placer [. . .] Jennifer enferma de los rifiones, del alma, adicta,

astuta, mentirosa, incumplidora, princesa de los bares de mala muerte de

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Long Beach/ 9, en compafiia dc to’ lo cuero malo de Puerto Plata [. . .]
(125-6)
Jennifer, long eyelashes, who doesn’t know how to count, who can’t tell
the time on a clock, who, instead of writing, scrawls a few twisted letters
[. . .] Jennifer who never was a child, jailed, sleeping with the lawyer to get
out of prison [. . .] Jennifer, drunk and stoned to cheat the pain and only
feel pleasure [. . .] Jennifer sick with kidney problems, sick to her soul,
addicted, astute, a liar, an oath breaker, princess of the seedy bars of Long
Beach, in the company of all the bad-assed whores of Puerto Plata.
Whatever his full motives, with a mixture of heightened libido and aroused sense of
chivalry Gatto declares, before touching her breasts, “Jennifer, novia del Atlantico,
victima del subdesarrollo, quiero ser tu héroe, yo, James Gatto, ciudadano del Primer
Mundo, te salvaré” (“Jennifer, novia del Atldntico, victim of underdevelopment, I want to
be your heroe, 1, James Gatto, citizen of the First World, will save you”; 126). Aside
from this parodical and somewhat humorous portrayal, Gatto’s attitude is actually not
uncommon among male sex tourists, who, upon witnessing the socio-economic disparity
of their sex worker lovers are sometimes moved to exhibit this same type of concem—
what Chris Ryan calls a “‘white knight’ syndrome,”’ a product of “the self-delusion
exhibited by some males that they, and they alone, are the answers to the predicament
they imagine the [. . .] girls to be in” (“paradigms” 32).
After he makes his noble proclamation, Jennifer, smiling, grasps his sex as if a

“remote control,” maintaining her eyes fixed on his, holding him within her gaze as she

 

'9 An area within Puerto Plata where a good number of foreign ex-patriots, particularly North Americans,
established bars and rent-by-the-hour bungalows commonly frequented by sex tourists.

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immerses him in a hedonistic baptism with which to bury his former life and close
“Novia del Atlantico.”

From this point on Gatto, having symbolically taken another step of separation
from his past, enters liminality more fully. However, as seen in his dealings with
Jennifer, there is another factor beyond his own protagonism and desire that immediately
comes to the fore as he enters into contact with local actors—the presence of their own
desire and the power they wield within their domain—a power with which he must
negotiate. This dynamic will continue and intensify in the story “Bachata,” whose events
occur at some future point relative to “Novia del Atlantico.” In the end, these stories
taken together show how Gatto’s progressive surrender and move into liminality parallels
his progressive vulnerability to those who seek to take advantage of the very wealth and
mobility with which they identify him. At the same time, the texts portray the distinct
perceptions and uses of local social space on the part of Gatto and local actors.

Thus, while “Novia” details Gatto’s progression into what represents the opposite
of his home culture, severing the ties that bind him to it, “Bachata” details what life is
like after he has more fully entered a state of consciousness that has freed itself from
those ties and norms. This is seen from the beginning of “Bachata,” where the text
recounts his arrival to Manresa, a small coastal slum of Santo Domingo which the text
describes as “El tipico suburbio de casa construidas a lo loco [. . .] sin acera, orden, ni
planificacién, por alguien que [. . .] es solo un arquitecto a1 servicio del caos y la
estrechez” (“The typical suburb of randomly built houses [. . .] without sidewalks, order,

nor plan, by someone who [. . .] is only an architect at the service of chaos and poverty”;

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92-3). After Gatto passes through this “anti-structural” built environment, he suddenly
discovers another liminal space:
La arquitectura cadtica dio paso a la anchura irresistible de las aguas y el
cielo. Un cielo sin nubes que necesitaba un agrimensor para que lo
deslindara del mar, pues ya no habia frontera entre ellos, penso James. E1
cielo era el mar y viceversa, y una vez mas 16 cause sorpresa ese mar
carente de agrimensores y tierra firme. Siempre la misma sensacion pirata
que tantas veces 1e habia suscitado su andar por aquella isla mal
descubierta y mal criada [. . .]. (92)
The chaotic architecture gave way to the irresistible wideness of water and
sky. A cloudless sky that would have needed a surveyor to distinguish it
from the sea, James thought, since there was no border between them.
The sky was the sea, and vice versa, and he was once again surprised by
this sea, lacking in surveyors and firm land. Always the same pirate
feeling that his travels through that poorly-discovered and poorly cared-for
island had stirred in him so many times [. . .]

Before him is a space that contains no lines of separation, no borders. All things
here become one in the indistinguishable, free flow of sea and sky, a naturally occurring
perceptual space beyond the ordering logic of the gaze—that is, an anti-structural space
par excellence. Beyond measure and containment, it awakens within Gatto a feeling of
freedom beyond bounds—a libertine “pirate sensation.” This site will function like a
magnet, for moments later he will park his car, trembling with uncertainty before this

space of unbounded possibility. He then comes to occupy yet another liminal space as he

90

stands on the shore to observe the horizon once again, overcome with a diffuse sense of
nostalgia for “something,” or “someone” before being awoken by the power of the sea
that faces him and fills him with a desire to live: “Si, 10 importante es que todavia estaba
vivo. Y aquel mar violento lo excitaba, devolviéndole al'm mas las ganas de vivir" (“Yes,
the important thing was that he was still alive. And that violent sea aroused him, filling
him once again with the desire to live.”; 93)

Thus, while occupying an ultimate geographical interstice in the “betwixt and
between” of the littoral zone which is neither mainland nor sea (Ryan and Hall 20), he
observes the limitless horizon where sky and sea are one and enters into a fully liminal
experience as described by Turner: "[In the margin or limen] the past is momentarily
negated, suspended, or abrogated, and the filture has not yet begun, an instant of pure
potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles in the balance" (Turner "From Ritual";
44). With his “alma en vilo” ‘heart completely undecided/up in the air’ (93) between
nostalgia for an ambiguous past and the uncertainty of the liminal present, he affirms life
in the here and the now, opting for the vitality of the moment of which the sea’s violence
reminds him as it fills him with the desire to live.20

This does not mean, however, that Gatto has now decided to take a new course of
action and make plans for his life whether long term or short, for he presently takes off

his sandals and wanders along the shore, “sin mayor pretension que la de fumarse un

 

20 A part of Gatto’s search can also be described as illustrative of some of the key elements that Zygmunt
Bauman identifies with touristic behavior: “the tourist is a systematic seeker of experience, of a new and
different experience [. . .] The tourists want to immerse themselves in the strange and bizarre element (a
pleasant feeling, a tickling and rejuvenating feeling, one that blends vague danger with a sense of
salvation—like letting oneself be buffeted by sea waves). . (Fragments 96). Furthermore, as Bauman
points out, the more “life itself turns into an extended tourist escapade,” the more any tangible sense of
“home” disappears, the latter being “increasingly stripped of all material features” (97). As we have seen,
this is precisely Gatto’s goal and, as he moves ever farther into liminality, the concrete elements of his past
recede accordingly, leaving him with an increasingly vague sense of nostalgia with no definitively
ascertainable referent. See Bauman Fragments 95-8 for his complete discussion of the tourist.

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cigarillo y ver lo que Ie deparaba la existencia” (“with no greater intention than to smoke

a cigarette and see what existence would provide him with”; 93; MaGuire). Indeed, it is

in “Bachata” that we see Gatto’s fuller conversion into Cohen’s “drifter tourist”:
In the broadest sense, drifting is a striking manifestation of what Kavolis
has termed the mentality of ‘post-modem man,’ for whom ‘ . .. the self is
experienced in the expanding peripheries, or at the vanishing horizons...’
and who is characterized by a ‘decentralized personality’ for whom ‘. .. all
elements of behavior have the same rights...’ so that ‘ . .. personality must
become disorganized and assystemic.‘ This decentralization is well
expressed in the aimlessness of the typical drifter's traveling and his
indifference as to the next stop of his trip [. . .] (93).

As we see in the quotes above, as Gatto looks out onto the horizon, he is faced
with a place beyond the ability of his gaze to delimit, a space beyond grasping but which
holds him fascinated and resonates with his desire to be whatever he wishes. Caught in
the simultaneous balance between unrestricted promise and possible oblivion, Gatto
draws impetus to continue his existence from the violent energy of the sea. He is thus
driven on, though with no firm footing or course of action, for the gaze that cannot
delimit the vanishing horizon to which it aspires is unable to map a plan for its own
existence beyond the here and now. Indeed, though simultaneously lured by both the
existential spectacle of the sky/sea with its immeasurable horizon and local existence on
firm land which he can delimit as a field of action, Gatto soon hears the sound of a
bachata—a song form often associated with revelry and eroticism—waiting through the

air from the land side. Curious about the “beautifill flower” he had come across just

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moments before, his appetite for the primitive and instinctual opens up and, “de
inmediato, 1e apetecio una cerveza” ‘suddenly, he craved a beer’ (94). He then tracks
down the music to the nearby disco-terraza, a type of open-air bar that adjoins the beach
where he discovers that Yajaira works.

The bar will form the setting for Arias to introduce the reader to a more in-depth
representation of the local mixture of the formal and informal economics as constituted
within places such as Manresa, which do not form part of the tourist circuits. Indeed, the
bar and the beach which it borders are both spaces of marginal legality, populated by
delinquents and police officers who arrive to receive bribes. This is the context within
which Yajaira moves. Just as Jennifer at Barbanegra, she is positioned according to both
local and international hegemonic masculinist systems which ultimately are shown to be
dependent on her multi-tasking labor, which, in turn, grants her both agency and
authority. For example, since his arrival to the bar, Gatto tries to woo Yajaira, eventually
succeeding to convince her to dance with him. As the two of them dance, they fall under
the local gaze of some of the men at the bar who immediately position Yajaira within the
local economy and masculine hierarchy according to her function:

Antes, Yajaira miro por el rabillo del ojo al grupo de hombres que
continuaban bebiendo y tarareando canciones sin por ello dejar de prestar
atencion a la pareja hombre desconocido (a lo mejor un gringo) y la hija

de la gran puta de Yajaira, tan buena que ta tan depravada sabichosa,

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mundana, buscavida, duefia de la finquitaZ', gallinita de los huevos de oro

[. . .] (98)

Before, Yajaira glanced out of the corner of her eye at the group of men
who were still drinking and humming songs without failing to pay
attention to the couple: the unknown man (probably a gringo) and that
bitch Yajaira who’s so hot, so depraved, know-it-all, worldly, such a go—
getter, queen of the hill, hen-who-layed-the-golden-egg [. . .]

In this way, the above passage articulates the ambivalent male construction of a
female who plays a central role in their social and economic lives. While seeking to
maintain male hegemony, they recognize the power that resides in her eroticized body
even as they frame her in derogatory terms (“la hija de la gran puta,” “depravada,”) a
product, perhaps, of their resentment at the economic power she wields and upon which
they depend (“duefia de la finquita,” “la gallinita de los huevos de oro”). This latter point
is further developed in the list of different roles she has had to play. As the passage
continues, the narrative voice shifts to a more sympathetic description of the load that she
has born within the micro-economy of the extended family:

[. . .] masajista, bailarina, mesera, chica de compafiia. Pobre Yajaira,
muchacha que ha mal pasado esa, explotada desde jovencita por su
pseudo-familia chupa-sangre, mama, papa, hermanas, sobrinos, y esos tres
hermanos dedicados tempranamente a la delincuencia, uno de ellos
deportado desde los paises, que a cada rato caen presos, y ella los tiene

que ayudar. (98)

 

2' “Duefia de la finquita’” literally, “owner of the little farm.” “La finquita” is an expression used among
the popular classes to refer to the vagina, emphasizing the income generating capacity of a woman’s sexual
labor.

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[. . .] masseuse, dancer, waitress, escort girl. Poor Yajaira, what a bad time
she’s had of it, exploited since she was a kid by her blood-sucking pseudo-
family, mom, dad, sisters, nephews, and those three brothers fallen early
into a life of crime, one of them deported back, arrested again and again,
and she has to help them.

Participating in both the formal and informal economy of Manresa while working
at her father’s disco-terraza, and in her contact with both local men for whom she serves
as a sex worker and those from abroad like James Gatto, who effectively add an exotic
element in their erotic objectification of her, the “tall, dark-skinned” Yajaira exemplifies
the economic bricolage to which some women resort due to the demands of economic
hardship. Kamala Kempadoo has affirmed regarding black women in the Caribbean:
"Caribbean history indicates that sex work, particularly prostitution, has been profoundly
shaped by both racialized and gendered processes within the context of the wider global
economy, with the black woman at the nexus. The subordination of women is crucial in
the process, with prostitution often an extension of domestic and household work [. . .]”
(23). Even as Yajaira works for the family business as a waitress, she engages in
multiple roles dealing with sexualized labor, such as masseuse, dancer, and escort, thus
demonstrating, as did Jennifer from “Novia,” her own repertoire for survival. Yet, she is
not without agency, for throughout the story, she exercises power and authority over men
even as she finds herself placed within local and global masculine hierarchical systems.

This is shown in her dealings with James Gatto whom she effectively seduces and
who finds himself at her mercy at the end of the story. The text describes both her

confidence in the power that resides in her sexualized body and the underlying economic

95

interest that motivates her interest in Gatto. As she sits with him, she astutely reads his
behavior, noticing that, “ella le gusta muchisimo a él también. Esta como nervioso. A
Yajaira le encanta poner a los hombres asi. Y mas a un extranjero, porque con los
tigueres de por ahi, no hay vida” (“he really likes her too. He’s nervous. Yajaira loves to
make men feel that way. And even more so a foreigner, because with the toughs around
here, there’s no getting ahead”; 100, translation mine). Indeed, she had already taken an
interest in Gatto from the first moment she saw him when they crossed paths along the
beach earlier. Just as she was detected within Gatto’s field of vision and immediately
inscribed with his exoticizing desire, she immediately invests him with the desires that
spring from the economic conditions in which she lives. As the narration describes it:
“La muchacha se quedo parada observandolo mientras se alejaba. Ese hombre viene de
algr’rn pais lejano, probablemente desde donde ella se muere por ir” (“The girl stood there,
watching him as he moved away. That man came from some far away country, probably
from where she was dying to go”; 96 MaGuire). Once enacted, the power of the local
gaze is described thus: “[Ella ] lo dejo irse, sabiendo que no llegaria mas alla del l'lltimo
basurero” (“She let him go, knowing that he wouldn’t get any farther than the farthest
trash pile”; 96 MaGuire). Of particular significance is the manner in which the text
underscores her decision to “let him go,” another indicator of her knowledge of men and
the local terrain as well as her confidence in the exercise of her personal power.

In contrast to the strident cat calls that Jennifer employs when first spotting Gatto
in “Novia,” Yajaira’s seduction of Gatto is much more subtle, beginning with the smile
with which she greets him on the beach when they first cross paths. In addition, when he

asks her to join him at his table after having danced with him, she gently protests, calling

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him “my love” ‘mi amor’ (99), maintaining she has to work, but as the text points out:
“casi diciendo con los ojos que si” (“almost saying yes with her eyes”; 99). Again, when
he eventually asks her to leave with him after suddenly kissing her “a la vista de todos”
‘in the sight of everyone’ (101 ), she accedes "con una docilidad complice, como si se
conocieran de siempre” (“with a docile complicity, as if they had known each other
forever”; 101) and then directs him to meet her by a small house on the beach near a
stream of dirty water where he is eventually mugged. In this way, she performs
masculinist fantasies of female docility, affecting these postures to gain the advantage
and thus effectively reduces Gatto to an object of material interest, a product of a
consumer exchange.

This point is further reinforced by the behavior of the men in the bar who call
Yajaira over to them to inquire about the white, “gringo” foreigner who, they note,
probably uses dollars—a preferred currency—and who looks like “gente” ‘somebody’
(99). They then wish a blessing upon Yajaira, “A Yajaira que se la busque bien con él”
(“may Yajaira get something good out of him”; 99). Once again, Gatto falls under the
local gaze, reduced to a surface spectacle and invested with the economic desires of the
local people.

Once again, as occurred in “Novia”, there is a mutual objectification and
commodification between the characters, for after Yajaira agrees to meet him, Gatto
leaves a “good tip” (“ buena propina”) for her, perhaps in repayment for the pleasure of
the aftemoon and her company, perhaps in token of future rewards for her dalliance with
him. Furthermore, the place she instructs him to meet with her is a house that has a “for

sale” sign outside—marking it as a territory for the marketing and selling of property,

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associating their meeting and her assent as part of an economic transaction. In this way,
the text connects sexuality, labor, and desire—the commodification of relationships
within the contact zone.

Indeed, the reduction of the foreigner to his cash value has also been on the minds
of the local men, as was pointed out earlier. While Gatto waits with anticipation in the
dark of the moonless night, he suddenly feels the edge of a knife blade against his throat,
and discovers he is being mugged by the same men who moments earlier had said
goodbye to him “como si se tratara de un viejo amigo” (“as if to an old friend”; 101),
which he had taken as another instance of the Dominican “sociability” he had come to
love in his experience on the island (101). However, Gatto had fallen within their gaze as
they had immediately equated his “gringo” otherness with the money they crave and so
now he finds himself hanging by his collar while three men drag him toward the back of
the house at knife point.

Immediately prior to this, however, the text portrays Gatto’s last entrance into the
liminality of the beach, a quality now increased because of the engulfing darkness:
“Parecia bien entrada la noche. Una noche oscura. Pocas estrellas y nada de luna” (“The
night seemed well advanced. A dark night. Few stars and absolutely no moon”; 101). In
this dark space, Gatto notices the movement of the fishermen: “Los Pescadores llegaban
y se iban. James penso que le gustaria llegar con los que llegaban e irse con los que se
iban” (“The fishermen came and went. James thought that he would like to arrive with
those who were arriving and leave with those who were leaving”; 101). Just as earlier he
was drawn to the immeasurable expanse of sea and sky, held mesmerized by the

vanishing horizon which resonated with his desire for limitless possibility, so now he is

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simultaneously attracted to both types of contrary movement, seeking both arrival and
departure—a reflection of the restlessness of the drifter and an indication of his growing
inability to choose or commit to a single course of action.

However, even while being mugged, Gatto still explores the potentiality of the
liminal for his personal reinvention, casting himself within a story and as a character of
his own liking. Indeed, the initial feel of the knife blade against his throat within that
setting triggers a search for models of heroism that might serve him in just such a
predicament, the first being the discourse of comic books. But his memory soon reverts
back to the tale of his experience as night manager, trying to save the sinking ship of
Barbanegra that founders amidst sex tourists, prostitutes, thieves, corrupt police and its
owner/captain, a “pirata sin ley” ‘lawless pirate’ (102), even as he tries to forget his past
(102). But he is soon confronted with the memory that he is not the hero who sacrificed
himself for something that wasn’t even his, but rather an anti-hero who left that place
without saying goodbye thanks to the mobility he enjoys (102). Thus, amidst these
musings, even as he stands with knives to his throat, Gatto still manages to convert the
liminal space before him into a stage for his final moment of protagonism:

su vida de aventurero en una pintoresca isla del Caribe iba a terrninar. Y,
pensandolo bien, ya habia vivido tanto, habia sido protagonista de tanta
momentanea felicidad, que bien se merecia un descanso. iQue' bueno que
por lo menos sucederia alli, frente a ese mar! Tal vez se tomarian la
molestia de tirarlo al agua para que se lo traguen rapidamente las furiosas
olas y lo devoren los tiburones. Que' final tan interesante, penso [. . .].

(103)

99

his life as an adventurer on a picturesque Caribbean island was going to
come to an end. And thinking hard about it, he had lived so much, had
been the protagonist of so much momentary happiness, that he well
deserved a rest. How nice that at least it was going to happen here, facing
that sea! Maybe afterwards they would go to the trouble of throwing him
into the water so the furious waves could suck him down and the sharks
could eat him. What an interesting end, he thought [. . .].

In this way, Gatto experiences yet another ritualistic characteristic of liminality,
for, according to Turner and Turner: “The liminal state has frequently been likened to
death; to being in the womb; to invisibility, darkness, bisexuality, and the wilderness
[There is a] resurgence of nature when structural power is removed [. . .] Much of what
has been bound by social structure is liberated " (249-50). Thus, the sea, which had
earlier provided him with the revivifying energy to continue living in accord with
whatever “existence would provide him with,” comes to the fore once again, cast as a
romanticized setting for the end of his existence while he stands in the dark between
death and life on the beach.

In the end, however, Yahaira comes to the rescue of this would be “First World”
savior, asserting her command and dominion over men. After authoritatively calling off
the attackers, who turn out to be her brothers and obey her without question, Yahaira then
confronts Gatto, addressing him formally, thus imposing a distance between them which
had been breached in their earlier interaction: “—Y usted, mejor vayase y déjeme trabajar
tranquila—dijo ella, como enojada, dejando de tutearlo” (“‘And you, sir, had better go

and leave me to my work in peace,’ she said, as if angry, no longer addressing him

100

informally”; 103). But even as she drives him away she entices him by “coquettishly
walking into the semi-darkeness with a sensual “meneo de nalgas” ‘sway of her
buttocks,’ further exhibiting her command over men (103). As the narrative gaze lingers
on this scene, it incorporates a song lyric as its intertext, reinforcing the link between her
eroticized body and her personal power. The song, a bachata that has been interwoven
throughout the text, offers its audience the option to either “forget me, or come back if
you wish, I will wait until you understand that without my love, you’re nothing” (“Y si tzi
quieres me olvidas, si quieres vol'ver también, yo esperaré hasta que entiendas, que sin
mi amor tri no eres nada...”; 106). Through this textual juxtaposition, the narrative
highlights the role of Yajaira’s sexual labor in securing her own agency and authority
within both local and global systems of hierarchical power, effectively contesting and
upsetting, in a manner similar to what Stephen Gregory has observed, the
“heterononnative structures of power and meaning” upon which these systems are
predicated (157).

Thus, Arias offers no simple binary depiction of exploiter and exploited but rather
the dynamics involved as local and foreign subjects engage each other, negotiating their
desire, endowing spaces with meaning as they use them. Indeed, even as Gatto reduces
Caribbean places to a personal setting for the rehearsal of Western scenarios of
heterosexual male protagonism within the periphery, the local subjects he encounters use
those same places for personal material benefit and gain, configuring his “wide-open
frontier” as a predatory field of action.

To further analyze the type of negotiations that factor into the configuration of the

contact zones, I adapt Michel de Certeau’s conceptualization of “strategies and tactics” as

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articulated in The Practice of Everyday Life. According to Certeau, at the heart of the
power differentials operative within a social field is the ability of a subject to both delimit
and control an autonomous place of their own. Thus, he defines a strategy as a
calculation made by a “subject with will and power” who occupies a “place which can be
delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority
composed of targets or threats [. . .] can be managed” (36). A tactic, on the other hand, is
“a calculated action” on the part of a subject who is not able to delimit an autonomous
place of their own. Because of this, “[t]he space of a tactic is the space of the other.
Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it by the law of a foreign power”
(Certeau 36-7). Although applying his theory to the possibility for action on the part of
individuals (who are limited to tactics) within a social field constructed and controlled by
institutional power (the “subject of will and power,” able to deploy strategies), what one
finds at play within the contact zones as portrayed by Arias, are shifting positionalities
and levels of power possessed by individual actors at any given moment in the course of
encounter, even while overarching levels of inequality and power are in force.22 Let us
then briefly consider this contestatory model of the contact zone as applied to the
encounters portrayed within the texts.

Perhaps this is most easily illustrated by considering first the position of Jennifer
and the other sex workers from “Novia del Atlantico,” who, in the end, exemplify the use

of tactics due not only to their economic but also their literal geographical positioning.

 

22 My adaptation here of Certeau’s theoretical construct is in keeping, at least in part, with his own
reconfiguration of it both later in The Practice ovaeQIdayLife (131-53) and in “Montaigne’s,” where his
“subject of will and power” is no longer identified with institutions, but rather with the individual. To be
sure, even though in these latter two cases the individuals in question are Western subjects and thus equated
with the possession of a privileged level of power within the fields in which they move, as my argument
shows, no matter how “overdeterrnined” their socio-economic positionality, the local actors represented in
the stories still possess a sufficient level of power to exercise agency and not only contest hierarchical
systems but, indeed, to actually enjoy “victory”—however ephemeral—over their foreign Others.

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Indeed, their economic condition and early formation have steered them toward
prostitution, and in as much as they, as the text puts it, are “allowed,” to work at foreigner
John F inch’s hotel, they, in fact, work within a terrain configured and ruled “by the law
of a foreign power” and must utilize the bar, the lobby, the dance floor and the Jacuzzi as
places to “maneuver ‘within the enemy’s field of vision’ [. . .] and within enemy territory”
(Certeau 37). Here they perform male desire, employing tactics of seduction and
manipulation to their own advantage. This is a direct result of their relative immobility
compared with their foreign Other. Indeed, the mobility they do possess is one “that
must accept the chance offerings of the moment, and seize on the wing the possibilities
that offer themselves at any given moment” (Certeau 37).23 However, although these
women move in the space of their Other, at the same time they possess an autonomous
space from which to “delimit an exteriority”—-i.e. their own bodies, from which they
exercise the power of their own gaze, and the knowledge they possess cultivated within
local territories. And so, it is through her astuteness, skill and, importantly, the strategic
power of her gaze that Jennifer exercises mastery over James’s will, gradually seducing
him. At least for a brief time and sufficient for her immediate desires, Jennifer, who
“conoce al dedillo todas las mafias y peligros aprendidas durante su temprano aprendizaje
callejero” (knows by heart all the craftiness and dangers learned during her early
apprenticeship in the streets”; Arias “Novia”125), ends up controlling the would-be
controller.

This illustrates what Certeau identifies as a crucial “effect” of possessing a place

of one’s own—the “mastery of places through sight [. . .] proceeding from a place whence

 

23 This, it will be remembered, was also seen in “Hotel Radiante” in which the female protagonist’s failure
was portrayed as her failure to effectively seize the opportunity for flight from the island that the Italian
Lucas represented to her. See above, p. 12.

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the eye can transform foreign forces into objects that can be observed and measured, and
thus control and “include” them in its scope of vision” (36). As has been seen throughout
these texts, central to the exercise of power is the possession of precisely this type of
sight through which both Gatto and the local actors with whom he comes into contact
execute a series of operations as they, upon detecting each other, reduce one another to a
surface spectacle, invest one another with their desire, and thus effectively objectify each
other. Thus, just as Gatto dissects space, delimiting the field of action for his heroic
protagonism to then mystify it with his desire, so too do the women with whom he comes
into contact.

All of the above elements come into play in Yajaira as well, the “duefia de la
finquita,” whose laboring body serves an exploitative family while simultaneously
granting her agency and a degree of authority within patriarchal systems. She, of all the
women with whom Gatto interacts, possesses the greatest level of agency, being free to
move within her own territory, which serves as a “base” from which she can manage
relationships with Others. Like Jennifer and the other women, Yajaira must seize
quickly on opportunities as they present themselves and, while also relatively immobile,
she exhibits the ability to exercise a bit more of strategy within her territory. Thus, when
she first sees Gatto on the beach, she calculates his movements based on her knowledge
of the local terrain, “letting him go,” knowing that he has only one way to come back—
by the disco-terraza where she works. It is unclear if she is complicit with her brothers in
setting Gatto up for a mugging, or if they, also residents of the architecture of “poverty

and chaos,” seize on the opportunity with which they have been presented.

104

In the stories under consideration, Gatto, of course, would be most readily
identified as the “subject with will and power” owing to his origin, his privileged racial
and cultural capital and his greater wealth and mobility. However, even though he
delimits, dissects and mystifies Caribbean space as if it were his possession and the
colonial “playground” that historic practice and the Euromale imaginary have construed
it to be, he does not, in fact, own it and actually ends up misreading it to be
outrnaneuvered and manipulated by local actors. Thus, his gradual progression into
liminality during his “existential tour” through the island entails a corresponding
decentering such that he misreads local design and desire, and is thus trumped by local
knowledges, tactics, and strategies.

Such is the experience of the privileged traveler James Gatto as he confronts local
power. The narration describes him as a “giramundo” (91)—a word commonly
translated as “globetrotter.” However, interpreted within the context of the global flows
of money and bodies which trace their origin to the colonial relations established at the
outset of modernity and whose logic they continue to perpetuate, the term “giramundo”
could very well be taken in a more literal fashion as “one who spins the world” or
“causes the world to spin.” Indeed, it is precisely out of the socio-economic and
relational dynamics set in motion by travelers like Gatto in their encounters with the
local, that Arias weaves her portraits of present day sex tourism in the Dominican
Republic, showing how that ‘tropical paradise’ is a site of negotiation and struggle where
bodies are shaped and reshaped as they spin in a dialectic of mutual desire, power and

agency.

105

'9,

This chapter began by referencing Arias’ story “30h, Bavaria drawing attention
to the fact that, even as it identifies its place of enunciation as a periphery of the West
(“the end of the world”), it enters into a dialogic relationship with the metonymic
representative of the Western traveler to the island, Bavaria, who serves as the text’s
interlocutor before whom and to whom the narrative voice seeks to tell its tale. These
same devices have been employed in the works studied in this chapter as Arias continues
to construct a dialogical discourse generated by the contact and relationships between
foreign males and local females within the context of commodified [hetero]sexual
encounter. In “Hotel Radiante” the narrative voice addresses itself directly to the mobile
and ephemeral Lucas and his friends as it seeks to come to terms with their volatile
presence and its impact on the lives of the women whom they encounter. In the case of
“Novia del Atlantico” and “Bachata,” the emphasis is on a deeper, more thorough
exploration of the individual Euromale as represented by the metonymic James Gatto.
Taken together, these stories discursively portray the impact sex tourism has on the
production of social experience and space within the Dominican Republic as both foreign
and local subjects negotiate their desires.

I also pointed to the fact that Arias correlates travel to the island to the logic of
invasion, suggesting that the trope of the phantasmagoric Viking ship serves as a
contextualizing device to interpret current experience, placing travel to the island and its
local impact within an historical continuum, correlating it to dynamics set in motion some

500 years ago by Columbus and those that came after him. Indeed, the effect of early

travelers to the region are further described by Fernando Ortiz, whose depiction, even

106

though specifically pertaining to Cuba, could easily apply to the present day male

travelers described in these stories:
There was no more important human factor in the evolution of Cuba than
these continuous, radical, contrasting geographic transmigrations,
economic and social, of the first settlers, this perennial transitory nature
of their objectives, and their unstable life in the land in which they were
living, in perpetual disharmony with the society from which they drew
their living. Men, economies, cultures, ambitions were all foreigners here,
provisional, changing, “birds of passage” over the country, at its cost,
against its wishes, and without its approval. (101)

In a similar fashion, the men depicted in these texts engage their periphery
according to the residue of colonial practice inscribed within Euromale consciousness,
treating island space as possession and a “wide-open frontier” for their own indulgence
and recreation, utilizing it either as a paradise of “cueros baratos” and “came caliente” or
an existential theater for personal reinvention. Yet, in the face of those who mystify
island space with exoticizing discourses, finding in it a quintessential anti-structural
location for the projection of the conquering E uromale ego unleashed—an almost-perfect
liminality to correlate with the vanishing horizons that draw them onward as they drift
from island to island in search of “la vida verdadera”—these narratives read as a dialogic
continuation of the contestatory discourse begun in “;Oh, Bavarial”, whose narrative
voice affirms its own truth, pointing to the contrasting difference between two cultures in
contact: “Te juro, Bavaria, que es cierto todo cuanto acontece, que ésta es la verdadera

verdad, y la verdad menos verdadera, aunque si menos real, esta en cualquier otra parte”

107

(“I swear to you, Bavaria, that everything that is happening is true, that this is the true
truth, and the less true truth, although, indeed, less real, is anywhere else”; Puerto Rico
132). Thus, the text argues not only its veracity, but also that the spaces it describes and
what transpires there constitute “true truth” in contradistinction to the lesser truth which
lies elsewhere—including the very lands from which the Other originates. Furthermore,
as it raises itself one last time to address those that have made of the island a stage for
their transient protagonism, the narrative voice signals to its Other the true nature of “real
life” within island space: “Y, una vez hayas pisado los escenarios de esta isla, de estos
huesos blandiendo como bandera un corazon marino abierto de par en par, la logica sera
un animal danino e inatrapable, y no te quedara mas remedio que borrar todo lo hecho y
dicho mas alla de tu ayer” (“And, once you have trod the stages of this island, of these
bones which brandish, like a flag, a marine heart that has been split wide open, the logic
will be a harmful animal that can’t be trapped, and you’ll have no choice but to erase all
that has been said and done beyond your yesterday”; 132).

The logic or “true truth,” of course, are the phenomena portrayed in Arias’ texts—
that is, the mixture of current global processes and the legacies of colonial practices that
set the dialectical groundwork for present-day relationships and negotiations that occur
between local and outside actors, configuring Dominican space simultaneously into a
mystified paradise and a predatory field of survival. It is a logic and a practice that would
maintain local women locked into subjugation at the leisure, service, and pleasure of the
“uncatchable” foreign male—much like the Taino woman whose body and joyful
submission are fixed in space as the necessary counterpart to the glory of the conqueror

in the statue at Parque Colon. Indeed, given this, if you will, “harmful animal” logic at

108

the core of their relationship, the interlocutory Other is called on to consider not only the
“yesterday” constituted by that original moment of colonial encounter he or she shares
with local actors, but the empty space, the oblivion which lies “beyond” it in the
irretrievable local past24 that was erased at the point where the Taino woman was given
the instruments with which to inscribe the [hi]story of the forward-pointing Western
imperial project embodied in the “heroic” conquering male.

For her part, Arias, from within the crucible of contact that configures current
Dominican social space and experience, also takes up the pen to inscribe the name of the
Other as part of her own discursive project. Demonstrating a deep awareness of the
trajectory of relations marked by coloniality operative within current processes of
globalization, Arias raises a local voice to confront the interlocutory outsider. Thus, just
as the local subjects depicted in her stories seize the opportunities that appear in fleeting
moments of encounter, so too these narratives form part of a discursive body that
captures and apprehends these travelers in the midst of their passage through the island,
fixing them within the space of the page, there to interrogate and demystify them and the

practices they embody.

 

2" This observation is based on Peter Hulme’s position that the moment of encounter between Columbus
and indigenous peoples is the insuperable epistemological barrier to the indigenous past (56-7; 66-7). Also,
see Certeau’s discussion of the “Scriptural Economy,” (Practice 131-54) in which he argues that writing in
the West, at least since the 15lh (133) or 16th (135) centuries, has “gradually reorganiz[ed] all the domains
into which the Occidental ambition to compose its history, and thus to compose history itself, has been
extended” (133). It is also both “capitalist and conquering” because of its dedication to “accumulating the
past and [. . .] making the alterity of the universe conform to its models” (135).

109

 

Chapter 2. Cuba Part 1: Performing Subjectivities of the Special Period.

In chapter one, the texts of Aurora Arias offered us a panoramic view of
contemporary Dominican social experience within the global convergence point of the
tourist contact zone—a dialectical space of commodified sexual encounter and
negotiation which foreign and local social actors configure according to their own desires
as a potential-filled liminal zone for personal [re]creation, either for recreational
consumption and inner refashioning, or for the extraction of material gain and
advancement. In addition, we also saw how much of the phenomena portrayed within the
stories is an articulation of globalized social processes and forces reiterative of colonial
practices and discourses from which Arias weaves her own dialogic contestatory
discourse.

In this chapter, we consider some of the same and similar phenomena as
articulated in Cuba during one of its moments of greatest crisis—the special period—
through the analysis of three texts: “De un pajaro las dos alas” (2009)—a literary
autoethnography by Puerto Rican writer Larry La F ountain-Stokes; “La causa que
refresca,” (1998) by Cuban author José Miguel Sénchez (Yoss)—a short story that takes
the form of a dialogic monologue; and lastly, the short story “Los aretes que le faltan a la
luna” (2000) by Cuban author Angel Santiesteban. These texts, like those of Arias, are
concerned with the interplay of discursive structures, social processes and conditions and
the way these shape local experience, yet placing a greater emphasis on the constitution
of subjects in the places where such forces converge. Specifically, I argue that these
texts, responding to a fundamental tension increasingly felt at both the social and the

discursive levels within Cuba, take as their central concern, each in their own way, the

110

constitution of particular types of Cuban subjectivities indicative of the special period.
These, in turn, reflect the tension between competing socialist and capitalist social
systems and their accompanying discourses—a tension that can be detected first of all at
the level of official discourse.
To illustrate in a preliminary fashion the central questions this chapter seeks to
answer, I briefly analyze a speech made by Fidel Castro on July 26, 1991, roughly a year
and a half after declaring the “special period in times of peace.” The occasion was the
anniversary commemoration of the inaugural moment of the Cuban Revolution—the I
failed attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953 which gave name to the revolutionary 26
of July Movement. Speaking from that very site and with Nelson Mandela (released I
from prison the previous year at roughly the same time as the special period was
declared) in attendance, the Cuban leader announces the nation’s partnership with a
Spanish firm as the country opens up to and seeks to develop a tourism industry in the
face of the economic crisis that beset it: “Curiously, as evidence that we are not
dogmatic, today an unusual event has occurred. We have given one certificate, of the 15
we gave out, to a work center, the Sol Palmeras Hotel, [. . .] which we own in partnership
with a Spanish company. Well, we do not have enough capital to develop tourism at the

”I

pace we want to . The disclaimer with which this quote opens is a transitional rhetorical
device that occurs toward the end of a speech that has firmly condemned capitalism and
its contemporary neoliberal incarnation on more than one occasion, as in the following

example in which it criticizes the application of free market policies to

address the problems of poverty, underdevelopment, and inequality. Castro says:

 

lCastro “Castro Opens.”<http:/llanic.utexasedufproiect’castro db5199 1 £199 1 0726-2.html>. Unless
otherwise noted, all quotes excerpted from this speech come from the source indicated here.

111

Trying to solve those problems through capitalism in a world divided
between immensely rich capitalist countries and a great majority of
immensely poor countries—precisely as a result of capitalism,
colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism—believing that neo-liberal
formulas will promote a miracle for our countries' development, is an
incredible illusion. It is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.
Throughout, the text attacks capitalism in a similar fashion, creating the image of a
beleaguered and valiant Cuba, alone in a drastically reconfigured geopolitical landscape,
last bastion and defender of “the most just ideas in the history of mankind, the ideas of
socialism, and the ideas of Marxism-Leninism.” As it sets itself up in a contestatory
dialogic position, it references a rather vaguely-defined antagonist associated with
triumphalist capitalism: “About what are they going to speak to us? About the past?
About capitalism? [. . .] About private property, large land holdings, corporations,
imperialism, neocolonialism? [. . .] about the days of beggars, of prostitution, of the
systematic looting of the national treasury, of cheap politicking, or of the merciless
exploitation of workers and landless peasants [. . .]?” In this way, the speech points back
to the social ills which beset the country prior to the Revolution of 26 July as a
consequence of the capitalist system, a point reinforced in the following quote: “Let them
not tell us stories about capitalism, the market economy, and such crazy things, which we

are already familiar with and can remember.”2 Indeed, the speech pitches its rhetorical

 

2 Indeed, the speech further condemns capitalism as the ultimate core of social suffering: “I asked myself:
Where did injustice come from? Where did inequality, poverty, underdevelopment, and all the different
calamities come from, if not from capitalism? Where did colonialism come from, if not from capitalism,
neocolonialism, and imperialism?”

112

 

battle precisely in terms of the historical dialectic of the different stages of capitalism and
their contestation as experienced on the island. Thus, as it points to the conditions of
inequality dominant prior to the Revolution, it highlights the types of subjectivities
produced under capitalism—beggars, landless peasants, maids, prostitutes, etc—and
ultimately cites one of the oldest subjects and, perhaps, the one that symbolically
subsumes all the others: the slave.3

Early in the speech Castro, having acknowledged the presence of Nelson
Mandela, links both apartheid and slavery as expressions of “the essence of capitalism
[and] of colonialism,” and then further links the Cuban people and slavery, asserting that
at one point in the nineteenth century over 300,000 were enslaved on the island. This
connection is one that the text then exploits throughout the speech, adducing not only the
current, collective performance by all members of revolutionary society of work once
done by slaves, but also the multiple achievements of the Revolution—cg. the
manufacture of productive machinery, the great success of the Cuban educational system,
the increase of women’s participation in the formal economy—after each of which it
adamantly affirms such things as “How far we slaves have gone!”, “See how high we
slaves have climbedl”, We slaves have climbed high!” The speech thus employs this

defiant equivalency of the nation’s citizens and the slave to underscore how the

 

3 However, one year later, Castro acknowledged the rise of prostitution that accompanied the growth of the
tourism industry, although he attempts to assert its coincidental nature by pointing to its illegality and it’s
“voluntary” nature: “We had to accept tourism as an economic need, but we said that it will be tourism free
of drugs, free of brothels, free of prostitution, free of gambling. There is no cleaner, purer tourism than
Cuba's tourism, because there is really no drug trafficking, no gambling houses. There are hookers, but
prostitution is not allowed in our country. There are no women forced to sell themselves to a man, to a
foreigner, to a tourist. Those who do so do it on their own, voluntarily, and without any need for it. We can
say that they are highly educated hookers and quite healthy, because we are the country with the lowest
number of AIDS cases. There are nearby countries which have tens of thousands of AIDS cases. Therefore,
there is truly no tourism healthier than Cuba's.” Castro “Castro Speaks.”
<http:l/Ianic.utexasedu/prolect/castro/db/1992/19920712.htm|>

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revolutionary Cuban subject, formerly “enslaved” under capitalism, has overcome the
former limitations imposed on him/her.

Yet, even in its repeated and insistent invocation of this modernized, transformed
Cuban “slave,” one senses that this ostensibly overcome subjectivity may once again
constitute a threatening possibility. Witness the following quote: “Who wants to return to
the time of the slaves' barracks? With what will they force us to return? Perhaps with a
threat to starve us, an increased blockade, the imperialist arrogance [. . .] after the
disasters in Eastern Europe?” Thus, even as Castro signals the collapse of some of
Cuba’s primary trading partners, he also points to the very real threat and pressure
exerted on Cuba by some capitalist nations, primarily the US.4 He then continues his
defiant and determined rhetoric: “We will manage. Somehow, we will manage [. . .] But
we will not return to the slaves’ barracks.”

Is slavery perceived as a real threat? Or, is its utterance a hyperbolic rhetorical
gesture designed to underscore how far the people have come in their historical
experience and, thus, garner support for the regime and its ideological and political
commitments? What exactly are those commitments? Is it coincidental that the slave is
invoked so frequently at the precise moment the nation is opening itself up to capitalism,
and, that, through the development of tourism—with the very nations which occupy that
geopolitical and economic grouping that the speech itself has gone to great pains to

identify as the source of colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism and historical and

 

4 The traditional hostility of the US. government toward Cuba, as evidenced by the trade embargo, took an
even harsher turn in the fall of 1992 with the passage of the Torricelli Act and in 1996 with the Helms-
Burton Act, both of which imposed severe sanctions and restrictions designed to isolate Cuba and “visit
upon the Cuban population unrelieved punishment, to make daily life in Cuba as difficult and grim as
possible, to increase human suffering in measured but sustained increments, at every turn, at every
opportunity, at a time when Cubans were already reeling from scarcities in goods and the disruptions of
services in the wake of the Soviet collapse" (Perez, 314). For more detailed information on the contents
and impact of each of these acts, see Perez, 299-301 and Gott 301-06.

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potentially current enslavement? Is the fact that the text pitches its relational positioning
in terms of the slave—in solidarity with the world’s “oppressed and exploited”—over and
against “the exploiters, conquerors, colonizers, and looters” identified with the capitalist
“West,” a case of duplicitous and obfuscatory political speech or an admission and
indication of an underlying anxiety about a vital slippage: not only of revolutionary
discourse’s binding address, but also of the revolutionary subjectivity that that discourse
has sought to produce? What exactly does making accommodations to allow for free
market-like reforms, however “cautiously,” imply for the island’s subjects? Amalia L.

Cabezas points out the nature of the reforms that the Cuban government made:

 

the state-party apparatus implemented wide-reaching reform measures
such as decentralization, the opening of all sectors of the economy (except
education and health) to external influences through foreign investments
and joint ventures, and other market-oriented policies, which contradicted
or reversed some of the government's most egalitarian socialist-based
principles. The Cuban reforms appeared to be based on principles very
close to those of neoliberal economic strategies and had all the features of
structural adjustment programs, except that they were internally generated
and not prescribed by the IMF. (60-1)

15 Cuban society of the special period thus faced, unlike its post-Soviet European

counterparts, not with the “spectres of Marx,” but rather the revenant of capitalism—in

particular, the resurgence of a type of colonial discourse, power differential, and

attendant relational positioning between the island and the wealthier capitalist nations of

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the world which may be reduced to the Master/Slave dialectic retooled for the late
twentieth-century tourism industry?

The texts analyzed in this chapter grapple with precisely these questions as they
deal with the issues and processes attendant upon the constitution of subjects within the
particular social spaces that I have designated, borrowing from Pratt, as tourist contact
zones—spaces marked by their own specific local, material, and social contingencies as
well as serving as loci for temporally bound dialogic social practices which respond to
and articulate multiple discourses and processes that converge there both from within and
without national boundaries. That is, this chapter sets out to answer in a particularized
and specifically contextualized way, the following set of questions asked by Michel
Foucault regarding the social constitution of subjects through discourse in his essay
“What is an author?”: “[U]nder what conditions and through what forms can an entity
like the subject appear in the order of discourse; what position does it occupy; what
firnctions does it exhibit; and what rules does it follow in each type of discourse?” (1635-
6). This chapter is concerned precisely with the conditions and forms by which subjects
appear, disappear, and transmute in an order of particular competing discourses as these
converge in specific, materially embedded social spaces. Moreover, it argues that part of
the discursive work being carried out in the texts herein studied consists of registering the
[dis]articulation of subjectivities as it takes place within the specific socio-temporal order
of the Cuban special period.

As will be seen in what follows, these texts have a certain theatrical quality about
them, which will be underscored by bringing to the fore Diana Taylor’s terms related to

the performance of contemporary social dramas enacted within the contact zone—e. g.

116

 

“enactment,” and “(re)staging” of various “scenarios of encounter” and the “repertoires”
of repeated “embodied/bodily acts” by which social actors constitute themselves and
activate the particular scenario variant in which they engage.

Complementing Taylor’s theoretical apparatus, the analysis which follows will
also employ Judith Butler’s conceptions of “perforrnativity” and the constitution of
subjects through discourse and social performance. Similar to Taylor’s description of the
“scenario,” Butler, speaking of the way in which gender as a subject category is
constructed, points to the restaged quality of a social act that has already been scripted
prior to the actor/subject assuming its role/subject position: “Actors are always already on
the stage, within the terms of the performance. Just as a script may be enacted in various
ways, and just as the play requires both text and interpretation, so the gendered body acts
its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space and enacts interpretations within the
confines of already existing directives” (“Performative Acts” 526). In a similar fashion,
both local and foreign social actors, or subjects, enact the scenario of sexualized
encounter within the Cuban contact zone according to a seemingly pre-existing set of
possibilities. Indeed, I take Butler’s “stylized repetition of acts,” by which subjects are
constituted in discourse and which serve as the occasion for “meaning” and, therefore,
agency (Butler “Performative Acts” 519-21), as the functional equivalent of Taylor’s
repertoire of embodied acts—those performative acts of bodily memory and knowledge
learned through repetition, specific to the scenario at hand, and called upon for its
successful execution (Taylor Archivmrd Repertoire 19-20). These texts chronicle,
through their textual representations, the experience of Cubans and visitors to the island

as they interact according to various subject positions available to them as embedded in

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competing discursive structures. 5 Indeed, each text seems to point to a script—a set of
normative roles—of “stylized bodily acts,” if you will—that have been produced within
the contact zone based on the relation and contact between particular stylized bodies. In
other words, within the Cuban contact zone of the special period, discourses, practices,
and processes converge; within this context certain “stylized bodily acts” are performed
repeatedly such that they form a repertoire with which to enact the general script of the
scenario of sexualized encounter.

The texts by La F ountain-Stokes, Sénchez, and Santiesteban further suggest that
these bodies in encounter can be understood, according to Butler’s summary of the
phenomenological perspective on the topic of Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, “to be an active process of embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities”
(521). That is, as the bodies that encounter one another in the contact zone come to take
their places as subjects, they do so “by taking up and rendering specific [. . .] a set of
historical possibilities” (521 )—possibilities which will become apparent in the analysis
which follows.

In 1998 Larry La F ountain-Stokes participated in a Latin American theater
conference hosted by La Casa de las Américas. Arriving with an open mind and a desire

to experience directly a country whose ideals he had admired, the disappointing

 

5 One crucial difference between Butler’s theorization and my adaptation of it is that whereas she is very
much concerned with destabilizing the apparently “abiding” essentialist identitarian category of gender by
showing how it is a temporally bound enactment of pre-existing discursive norms, I am dealing with a
relationship and the assumption of relational positions generated through a mutually recognized temporary
encounter inherent in tourism’s mobility. Therefore, although there seem to be a type of pre-existing norms
for sexualized encounter, I am not arguing that these authors propose the jinetero/a as a fixed, essentialist
category such as the “gender” which Butler seeks to decenter. Indeed, part of special period subjectivity,
and of jineterismo itself, is that it is more of a bricolage-type fashioning with sexual commodification being
only one avenue among many others through which one looks to hustle and “make a buck”. Amalia L.
Cabezas maintains that one of the difficulties she faced from a theoretical standpoint was the fact that,
based on what she observed in her field work, the role of the jinetero/a did not seem to coalesce into a
stable subject category—sex work was rather just one option among the many tasks undertaken by women
as they sought to earn money (Economies of Desire 8-9).

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experience he had while there would trigger the writing of the piece “De un pajaro las dos
alas,” which evokes the nineteenth-century poem “A Cuba” by Dolores (Lola) Rodriguez
de Tio, the poet who also penned the Puerto Rican national anthem, “La Borinquena.”
The text is a generically indeterminate work that La Fountain-Stokes’s classifies as “a
fictionalized, experimental narrative or autoethnography based on my travel experiences

as a gay Puerto Rican theater critic and former graduate student” (La F ountain-Stokes,

E).

“De un pajaro las dos alas,” 2008 [2002] 211).6 Indeed, the element of self-construction

denoted in the term “autoethnography” becomes a major discursive component as the

 

author produces a piece of writing that simultaneously constructs a personal vision of the

contemporary state of the Cuban nation at the same time that it represents his negotiation

r

of the multiple subject positions he both assumes and into which he is cast by the local
population—e.g. “as a white, foreign, well-off, gay tourist” (“Postdata” 228, n 19).
While restaging, in its most rudimentary sense, the scenario of encounter between
the outside traveler and the local population, the roles played by the narrator/protagonist
represented within the text are more complex than those performed by, for example, a
“straightforward” Euromale character such as James Gatto. Here, what is foregrounded
is the protagonist’s multivalent subjectivity as an economic, ideological, and desiring
subject who is also gendered, sexualized, and racialized and who must navigate the

waters of a population in the throes of material desperation, the latter condition ultimately

 

6 Throughout this chapter, I draw on two versions of this text. From the first, published in Glave, Thomas,
ed. Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the A nti/les, 1 limit myself to citing
selections from the appropriately entitled last section “Posdata: Metatextual Wings of a Dove,” which
continues the author’s reflections on his experience in Cuba in 1998 and offers an explanation of the
genesis and content of “de un pajaro” and his aims in writing it. From this point on, I will refer to any
material cited from this text simply as “Postdata.” The second version of the text, published in the author’s
bilingual collection Unas pintadas de azul/Blue F ingernails (Tempe: Bilingual P/Editorial Bilingi'le, 2009
150-175) will serve as the main source text for my analysis. All citations in English and Spanish will come
from these texts, unless otherwise noted.

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reducing human relationships to the laws of economic exchange—the ideals and goals of
the Revolution left behind in the search for daily survival. What is produced, then, is an
ambivalent text that reflects a subject who is simultaneously pulled by a liberatory
historical discourse of pan-Caribbean solidarity and the experience of becoming reduced
to a victim in a field of economic predation.

Thus, while offering itself up to a multiplicity of meanings, “De un pajaro las dos
alas” serves extremely well , on the one hand, to show the reader the conditions of the
Cuban “special period” from the perspective of a restless multiply-identified subject.
Thus, the first half of my analysis will focus on the way in which the text reconstructs,
from a bird’s eye view, if you will, the social space of Havana and the local
circumstances and experiences of subjects there, while highlighting the narrator’s own
experience that brought him to question both his preconceived ideas and idealism
regarding the Cuban revolution.

On the other hand, La F ountain-Stokes’s “nightmare” experience in the Cuban
contact zone, which he is glad to leave behind, produces a discursive crisis involving the
articulation, or, as Judith Butler would term it, the “resignification” of subjectivity.
Indeed, inscribed by a multiplicity of discourses, the text, like the subject(s) that write(s)
it, illustrates the difficult attempt to perform or “bring into being that which it names,”—
in this case, a fully constituted pan-Caribbean identity, understood as attached to united,
yet free and independent, geographically situated entities. In the second part of my
analysis, therefore, I focus on the discursive work being carried out by La F ountain-
Stokes’s text, arguing that it can be read as a palimpsest of the poem from which it

derives its name, rewriting the latter’s representation of the ideals inscribed in the Cuban

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nation as well as its liberatory dream and aspiration for solidarity between Puerto Rico
and Cuba.

Narrated in the second person singular, early on the text sets the tone for its
representation of the decaying Havana of the special period, foreshadowing both the
quality of the physical and social space through which the narrator will move as well as
his ambivalent experiences there. Describing the oldest part of the city, he states: “Old
Havana, of walls consumed by termites that no poison will kill” (151). Placed in the
opening paragraph, this multifaceted metaphor sets up the narrative, pointing forward to
multiple manifestations of physical and social corruption even as it chronicles their
processual causes. At the most direct level, the passage refers to the decaying state of the
urban built environment such as noted in a street “pockmarked with holes that looks [. . .]
like Beirut,” and the “filthy bay contaminated by the petroleum waste and debris from a
thousand ships” that the narrator encounters in a municipality of Havana (163). The
material decline he witnesses also extends to the dwellings of the families with whom he
treats as is portrayed in the description of the living space and conditions of one of his
contacts during his stay there: “Abraham shows you the way, and when you arrive you
have to go up hundreds of steps without light, wander through the darkness of a wolf‘s
mouth to reach the small apartment where the black-and—white television proclaims the
wonders of the revolution [...] You greet his family and burst into sweat while they bring
you a glass of water that might not have been boiled" (153). As it ironically juxtaposes
the state’s triumphal official discourse with metaphors of a threatening darkness and
labyrinthine space—while hinting at possible contamination from unclean water—the

narrative sets the stage for his movements and his experiences within Havana, pointing to

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the heightened level of risk with which not only he, but also the Cuban citizenry of the
special period have to contend daily.

Indeed, the personal risk he feels is heightened by several other factors that
contribute to his feeling of insecurity, which, in turn, correlates to his sense of fear and
limitation before phenomena beyond his control. Indeed, this is reinforced by another
multivalent metaphor—the central one of the text—which is also introduced early on and
which signals the inception of the narrative’s autoethnographic function. Here, the
narrator begins to construct himself as the protagonist referred to in the title: “You are the
two wings of a dove—dc un pajaro las dos alas—but you cannot fly; the celestial
clockwork does not allow it” (“De un pajaro”153).

Coming immediately before the aforementioned limiting factors attached to the
decayed state of Havana, this metaphor announces his impeded ability for liberty and
freedom of movement. Instead, he is besieged from the outset by a series of limitations
which contribute to his “ordeal” (153): The travail of travel—the risk of illegal
movement which he has undertaken to avoid the US-imposed embargo (151); the
surveillance of the airports and the technological fruit of “la modemidad”—X-rays and
dogs—deployed by state apparatuses, “lest you were bringing along a mortal plague”
(151); the harassment upon leaving the airport by two youthful-looking officers carrying
“state-issued guns” (153); and finally the warning of one of his acquaintances of the
possibility of crime (153). Indeed, these factors, together with those already enumerated
above, are but the first in a series of events and experiences which will leave him
extremely ambivalent about his stay there and will produce a growing state of malaise in

which, from his earliest moments in Havana he comments, “fear and paranoia assail you”

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(153). At this point the narrator also indicates the early onset of his doubts and
disillusionment before the incongruence between experienced reality and the ideals he
has invested in the Cuban nation. Indeed, to him, this reality does not conform to
“Nuestra America; my America of Jose’ Marti’s dreams slides down a path you didn’t
realize existed in these tropics” (153), once again, referring to what he has just described
as well as pointing ahead to the rest of the experiences that await him on this voyage.
Most of these are mediated through his interaction with two homosexual men—
Josue' and Abraham7 — each of which comes from a different social class and to whom
he refers respectively as the “horizontal” and “vertical” “wings” of his “flight” through
Havana. Both of these men and their local families serve as vehicles for the illustration
and exploration of the social inequities that deeply marked special period Cuba as a result
of the dual economy that became ever more entrenched once the US dollar was allowed
into circulation and adopted as the primary currency for commercial exchange. As Esther
Whitfield explains:
[T]he dollar's superiority over the Cuban peso set a pattern for social
inequalities that the revolutionary project had sought to eliminate.
Salaries continued to be paid in pesos while material goods were sold in
dollars, so that labor hierarchies were distorted and service work that
could earn dollars (waiting tables, guiding tours, driving taxis,
prostitution) was valued over specialist professions. Society’s deeply
ingrained work ethic became increasingly obsolete as the depenalization

of the dollar propelled Cuba's primarily agricultural-industrial economy,

 

7 In the “Postdata” of the 2009 editon, the author also relates these nicknames to the vertical and horizontal
wings of the bird referred to in the title, itself taken from the poem “A Cuba” and which stand as metaphors
for Cuba and Puerto Rico (211). We will pick up this metaphor at more length below.

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once artificially sustained by the Eastern bloc, to a more service-oriented
economy geared toward non-Cuban consumers" (Cuban Currency 5).
Illustrative of these dynamics, Josué and Abraham and their families allow the

narrative to focus on the ironic inequities of a social system that has broken down and the
effect of the dual economy. Thus, a family like Abraham’s, whose parents are chemistry
and biology professors, barely earn enough to maintain a family of four adults who live in
a one-bedroom apartment, with Abraham’s grandmother forced to sleep in the kitchen.
(15 7-9). As the father states, “‘No one can take it anymore, but if you say anything you

lose your job, and at our ages, where are we going to go?”’ (157). After speaking of the

 

possibilities to escape by rafts or balsas, the narrative continues to contrast the dollar
economy with what a citizen can obtain on the government allotted rations: “a two-liter
bottle of Najita orange soda to quench your thirst costs a dollar seventy; mayonnaise --
forget about it” (159). With the libreta, the govemment-issued rationing book, they
receive “seven eggs, powdered milk only up to six years of age, 5 pounds of rice and
beans a month, no meat, and the toothbrush and toothpaste of a foreign friend who came
for a visit were stolen by a neighborhood boy who crawled in through the window”
(159)8. Thus, Abraham earns roughly 300 pesos a month as a professor of electronics—
roughly worth fifteen dollars, as calculated by the text—an amount, as Louis Pe’rez has
noted, that was “the black market price of four bars of soap, or a two-pound chicken, or

four liters of milk" (310).

 

8As Louis Pérez Jr. observes: “The pursuit of dollars led to a rise of petty theft and pilferage, both for
personal use and for use as a medium of exchange for dollars, which in turn served to exacerbate scarcities
of state supplies [...] Gasoline reserves, foodstuff, and consumer goods were only some of the many items
that found their way into the underground market” (31 l).

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Juxtaposed with Abraham and his family of well-educated and highly trained
professionals, one finds Josue/lateral’s family whom the author identifies as belonging to
a less educated working-class, yet who enjoy a better standard of living, owing to their
being plugged into the dollar economy. Through their contact with foreigners “in
countless businesses,” they are able to enjoy “a color television and eat congri (rice and
beans) with picadillo (seasoned shredded meat) and spaghetti with hot dogs from the
government dollar store.” Indeed, as Richard Gott affirms, “Those with dollars—obtained
chiefly through the tourist trade, the black market, and remittances from Miami—became
significantly wealthier than those who had none” (292).

Even though Abraham and his family members chose to remain in their
professions in spite of suffering economic hardship,9 many did not, and Cuban society
suffered from a flight from the professions to service-sector jobs, as noted in the above
quote by Esther Whitfield. Giving an even more detailed depiction of exactly what labor
conditions were like, Pe'rez affirms:

The dollarization of the economy had other anomalous consequences. The
demand for dollars resulted in something of an internal "brain drain,"
where professionals employed in various state enterprises and paid in
pesos "migrated" to dollar zones, most typically to those sectors connected
to tourism. It was not uncommon for a hotel bellhop to earn 10 times

more than a brain surgeon, or a taxi driver to earn 20 times the salary of a

 

9 As the La Fountain-Stokes notes, he assigned Abraham and his family the nick name of “vertical” to
connote his and his family’s more “straight-laced” approach of following the system’s rules by not
participating in the black market, in contrast to the “horizontal” Josué and his family who “were more
openly defiant of the regime and participated fully in the informal sectors of the economy” (“Postdata 217)

125

state engineer, or for a hotel waiter to earn more in two weeks then a
physician earned in one year (310).

Even as the text documents the disparity between income levels and the consequent level
of access to consumer goods and necessities, so, too, the flight of professionals to the
informal and service economy is treated in several places. This is seen in the former
chemical engineer-tumed-taxi-driver mentioned at the beginning of the narrative “who
had abandoned his profession, who told stories about the virtue of American dollars to
anyone who had the patience to listen” (151); and, again, in Abraham’s now pregnant
“old schoolmate who abandoned their profession and now works as a tour guide.
Engineering is worthless when the only dollar around stays in a hotel, she who doesn't
hustle with her body, if she wishes to survive, she hustles with her soul" (163).10

It is in this context of frantic economic struggle and survival that the narrator
comes to learn the dynamics of a society and economy marked by the jineteo—where he
will come to know firsthand the meanings of the words vividor and joseador, to both of
whose connotations he reduces some of his primary experiences and his interactions with
local social actors.” Indeed, it will be they who implacably convert this special period
setting into a predatory field of action, driving the exasperated narrator to exclaim at the
end: “you couldn't stand the thievery any longer, the constant grubbing for money" (169).

Indeed, just as we saw in chapter one of the present study in the interactions of
James Gatto and the local subjects with whom he comes into contact, the narrator in “De

un pajaro las dos alas” is quickly reduced, through an inversion of the “tourist gaze” to a

 

’0 The word here translated into English as “hustles” is the Spanish “jinetea,” thus, underscoring the dual
sense in which the word can be used, leaving the sexual exchange aspect up to the reader.

“ Vividor denotes one who parasitically lives off another—Le. “moocher” would be a close translation in
English. Joseador(alsojoceador), would be roughly the equivalent, of the Dominican word buscavidas

that we saw in chapter one of the present study (see chapter 1 note 13).

126

surface spectacle, and invested with local economic desires as Cubans associate him as an
opportunity upon which they wish to seize, thus interpellating him, as the author himself
points out, as “a white, foreign, well-off, gay tourist” (228 n. 19)”. This is clearly seen
in his description of the persistent experience of beggars who assail him in different
locations throughout the capital. For example, when considering the efficacy of his
prayer offering to the Virgen of Regla after having visited the cathedral there, the narrator
questions ' 3 :
Was it she who protected you when the swarms of children grabbed you
on the Malecon, or later in Old Havana? Wherever you go, you attract
multitudes as if you were the Pied Piper of Hamelin, but you don't let go
of a penny. You send them off, leaving nothing in their wake but the
memory of a brief scare [...] Blessed be he who wanders aimlessly
through Central Havana possessing the face of a gringo like yours, even if
you are from the oh-so-esteemed other wing (161).
Bearing the racialized marker of whiteness, he is identified as a source of desperately
needed cash. Indeed, this is seen once again, as he relates what he has heard regarding
public transport and wonders if he dare risk it: “transportation around here is so bad
because of the ‘Special Period,’ you know, that if you don't live near your job you never

get there. The motorized camellos or buses the people travel in seem more like trains for

 

'2 As the author explains in his “Postdata”: “In this type of environment [i.e. the particular sector of the gay
community that he personally witnessed], all tourists are seen as potential customers, and interpersonal
relationships that are not based on economic exchange are rare” (222).

'3 Regla is a municipality of Havana and a potent space of symbolic capital, from the tradition of early
colonial indigenous resistance, to the anti-colonia1/pro-independence speeches of Jose Marti in the 19th
century, to the current Santeria festivals surrounding the figure of the Virgin located there.

127

livestock, and you don't dare ride for fear of having your pockets emptied, looking like
the foreigner you are—or at least that's what everyone says" (165).

The narrator is subject to the basic dynamic of “grubbing for money” that drives
jineterismo not only through his contact with the general population of Havana, but also
through his more personal relationships with those with whom he associates during his
stay. This is especially evident in his relationship with Josué, the working class “lateral”
wing who attempts several methods of extracting as much benefit as possible from their
time together. For example, at several points throughout the narrative, he will attempt to
seduce the narrator, serving as a go-between to procure the latter as a client for one of his
neighbors, at first merely informing the narrator of “a stud near his house with a prick a
foot long” (155). Later, J osué’s intentions become more overt as he “tries to get you to
pay his neighbor, the one with the ungodly dick, but you resist” (163). Finally, after
having been asked point blank “Did you come to fuck?”( 163), the narrator states in
exasperation, "You explain to lateral a thousand times that you don't want to bed anyone,
that that is not why you came, and finally the concept bores a hole in his Celestina-like
head, although he will never cease to repeat ‘ [Que' buena es la came cubana! "' (165), a
further attempt to close the sale on such fine human merchandise. Thus, the author, the
white traveler, is once again interpellated as a sex tourist, but as he states “[W]hen they
told you about sexual tourism, you felt sick, not because of the jineteros but because of
the power of dollars, and perhaps because you envy them and it bothers you that you are
too shy or scared to try it” (163).

Indeed, the reduction of relationships to economic exchanges converts the capital

of the nation into a predatory field ruled by a survivalist logic which pervades decisions,

128

physical movement, and social interaction and which the narrator underscores as he
comments on his lack of desire to engage in sexual liaisons, which, upon reflection, may
merely be caused by “inconveniences, like the fact that vigilante hotel doormen keep all
Cubans strictly out of guest’s rooms. Like a penniless child in an ice cream shop, and the
treats are sharks on the prowl” (167). Even as he points out the exclusionary inequities
brought about by the dual economy and the strict separation enforced between tourists
and Cubans who weren’t directly employed in tourist-oriented establishments, the
narrator quite clearly demonstrates the predatory nature of the place within which he
travels and moves, marking this space as one of thwarted desire.

Indeed the jineteo——“grubbing for money”——seems to be an inescapable logic that
will also pervade the male homosexual circles to which the narrator is introduced through
his acquaintance with Josué, who, even as he continues to seek to extract benefits from
the narrator throughout the latter’s stay in Havana, describes the very same special period
praxis in which he himself engages: “Josue’ starts to tell you of the guys who have made
him a woman and complains in a sad tone how expensive they've become. ‘I met him
when he was nobody; he didn't have those clothes or gold chains, and he slept with me
for ten dollars that I had gotten from a Spaniard. Now they all ask you for something: a

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shirt, a pair of trousers (167). The reader will note that Josué’s complaint is not so
much about the fact that relationships and intimacy are based on some sort of material
exchange, but that the cost has increased from the time when he was able to exchange the
dollar value of his own sexual labor in an even trade. Moreover, the very practice of

which he complains is part of his own survivalist repertoire as we see when, in light of

the narrator’s rapidly approaching departure, he asks him for the shirt that he had seen

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him wear the previous day, having the added cheek to actually ask him if it was a
designer brand. On the night in question, he also had sought to convince the narrator to
try to pass as a Cuban, and thus, save money—a calculation at whose motive the narrator
guesses: "he well knows that the more you save, the more you can spend on him; or
perhaps it is yet another ruse. You even start to suspect that there is a certain tenderness,
even while everything is so marked by the commercial exchange" (170-1). After having
thus identified the ruling logic of his social interactions, the narrator offers one filrther
example:
You meet another friend, Chino, who asks you to buy him a drink, and
you offer him a beer, but he wants a bottle of rum—it’ll last longer and it's
only two dollars more—but you say no out of principle, although you
actually don't have that much money left anyway. ‘Why did you go out
with so little money?’ Chino asks, and you tell him your trip’s over and
you'll be leaving tomorrow, and you have to give twenty to Fidel if you
want to get out. So he halflreartedly dances with you in a sexy but distant
way. It's pretty late, and the chances of netting bigger fish are slim. (171)
And so it is that the narrator finds himself, through his relationship with Josué, in close
contact with the world of homosexual sex tourism, where: “affective and sexual
relationships with other men were predominantly based on economic exchange”
(“Postdata” 218)—-—an extension of the general hustling through contact with their foreign
others in which his family members engaged much to their material benefit, as discussed
above (“Postdata” 218). Indeed, the general mooching which characterizes their

relationship will continue beyond the time the narrator spent there, for a few weeks later,

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Josué will write him and the narrator will end up sending him “vitamins and film
magazines and new socks and T-shirts with a traveling acquaintance” (171)—similar to
the types of remittances about which the Barba Negro girls boasted as we see in Alias’
short stories.

And so it is within this predatory context in which he felt taken advantage of that
the narrator feels “profoundly ambivalent” about his experience (“Postdata” 223).
Compounding his personal discomfort is the fact that, he, as an ideological “leftist,” had
held such high hopes and expectations, but found instead, through his experiences,
evidence of the failure of the Cuban revolution. As he explains: “‘De un pajaro las dos
alas’ reflects my disillusionment with a revolution that I had held up as a model of social
development, in spite of its notorious persecution of homosexuals” (“Postdata” 214-5).
And so the author chronicles his experience of a world upside down, ravaged by a base
material desperation in which inequities proliferate as the ideals and goals of the
revolution are gutted and hollowed out in daily practice.

It is in response to the reality of the special period that the Cuban-bom writer and
intellectual to whom “De un pajaro las dos alas” is dedicated, José Quioroga, also
composes his book-length essay Cuban Palimpsests. He too notes a type of “money
grubbing” that characterized the Cuba of the special period in which identifiably Cuban
items were sold off by those in need. Some of these objects came to his attention as he
saw them collected in a Cuban restaurant in Madrid, where they were regathered to

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promote the establishment’s authenticity.” Thus, he describes his fascination with the
disassembling and reconstruction of Cuba as a consequence of the needs that beset Cuban

society across the board in the 19905 in the midst of the national crisis:

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