In the 20th Century, the mass exoduses that displaced thousands of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans to the United States marked the beginning of ethnic diasporas that have redefined preconceived notions of national identity. This dissertation focuses on contemporary narrative representations of Dominican and Puerto Rican migrations to the United States beginning in the first half of the 20th Century. The project addresses the processes of negotiation that take place in multi-ethnic and multi-cultural sites that result in the development of diasporic identities. At the same time, the project proposes that the intersections between the geographical and identity boundaries of these groups allow for cultural and individual interactions that affect the ways in which they negotiate their national ties beyond a state of liminality. The interactions resulting from these spaces of contention facilitate varied relationships and affiliations between diaspora and homeland. At the root of this project is my belief that the texts selected present diverse positions that rearticulate national identification in order to develop diasporic identities. The study contributes to critical work on diasporic identity formation as it comments on the processes of acculturation of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in the United States. While many studies dedicated to this topic have read identities in the diaspora as being located in liminal dilemmas, this dissertation presents how diasporic subjects develop national identifications that are not perpetually in conflict. In the Introduction I discuss the critical approaches that see diasporic subjects as individuals that are located in an “in-between” space, and propose the study of Dominican and Puerto Rican narratives of migration as case studies in which we can assess the intricacies contained in the development of diasporic identity formation.In chapter 1, “Carving Identities in Writing: The Migrant Jíbara, Gastronomy, Class and Encounter with the United States in Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican (1993),” I explore the author’s narrative representation of her younger self as a Puerto Rican migrant, and the identity changes and national identification shifts brought upon dislocation. In chapter 2, “Etching Identities in Alien Turfs: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets (1967),” I examine the role multi-ethnic and multi-racial urban environments play in the development of diasporic subjectivities and their impact on the subject’s racial, ethnic, and national identity consciousness. In chapter 3, “(Re)Assembling Home in the Diaspora: Gendered Returns, Religion, and Patriarchy in Loida Maritza Pérez’s Geographies of Home (1999),” I analyze the domestic junctures in which the formulation of “home” reproduces national discourses and their reexaminations from members of different migrant generations. In the last chapter, “Fictionalizing History: Comic Books, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and the (Re) Articulation of the Past in Junot Díaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007),” I focus on the process of writing about the nation-as-ancestral land as a form in which discourses about nationness can be rewritten.
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