Junot’s Prize: A Pulitzer First for Afro-Latino Literature
Posted on April 29, 2008

What does Junot Diaz’s well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for his novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (Riverhead Books, $24.95), mean for the future of Afro-Latino literature? Earlier this month, when news that Diaz had won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction began to spread, I thought immediately of the positive impact it is likely to have.

First, it will call even more attention to the novel itself, which received rave reviews from various critics (including my own, posted on this website) and readers at large. The prize might thus expose many editors and publishers to the wondrous possibilities embedded in challenging limiting categories of race and ethnicity, a feat that Diaz’s novel achieves with great aplomb.

A novel about Dominicans and Dominican Americans of African descent living in United States, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” navigates a rich terrain. It locates its protagonists’ sense of home in both the U.S. and the Dominican Republic and their identities between the all-too-familiar American racial binary—Black and White.

Simultaneously, it exposes the impact of accumulated and often interrelated histories, that of the African Diaspora, the Dominican emigrant exodus produced by the Trujillo dictatorship and its own complicated relationship to U.S. imperialism. At the same time, the novel sings with the languages of American urban landscapes, mixing Spanglish with African-American slang in a wickedly street-smart wit.

Diaz is not the first Latino or writer of color to win the prize. N. Scott Momaday, a Native American of the Kiowa tribe, won it in 1969 for “The Way to Rainy Mountain.” Oscar Hijuelos was the first Latino to win in 1990 for his novel, “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.” Hijuelos was born in New York of Cuban parents in 1953.

But Diaz is the first to win for a novel that makes great art out of the experience of being Afro-Latino in America; a novel that also embraces the American immigrant experience while refusing romantic notions of a paradise left behind for the drudgery of America or, conversely, of America as the great land of opportunity.

Diaz’s sensibility is a lot like that of Groucho Marx, who was fond of playing with the old saying that American streets are paved with gold. When immigrants get here, Marx said, they learn that “one, the streets are not paved with gold; second, that the streets are not paved at all; and third, that they are expected to pave them.”

Diaz is also keen to the African heritage that Dominicans and other Latinos bring to America and their interaction with African Americans in the contemporary U.S. cultural landscape.

Hijuelos’s “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” is a fine novel, but it flows with nostalgia for a motherland, Cuba, and barely nods to the African aspect of the music played by the eponymous kings.

Mambo, among Haitians who practice Voodoo, means priestess. The word comes from the languages of the African slaves that were imported into the Caribbean. As a style of music and dance, the mambo combines European movements with rhythms derived from African folk music.

In Hijuelos’s novel, the African aspects of the music and dance that is mambo, surface only superficially. Hijuelos lovingly recreates clubs and scenes of 1950s New York where mambo music and dance attracted the attention of African-American greats such as Dizzy Gillespie, who was instrumental in founding Afro-Cuban jazz because he loved the sound of mambo. But Hijuelos pointedly marks his protagonists as White Cuban men and focuses almost myopically on what one reviewer calls an “eternal homesickness” for Cuba. Situated as the novel is in the mid-20th century, it also presents the immigrant experience at a “safe” distance.

“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” by contrast, places Afro-Latino immigrants squarely in a contemporary setting and refuses to make the African aspect of Latino culture merely decorative or performative, in the general sense of the word. The novel deals primarily with the life of a young Dominican American who, despite his social handicaps—his hopelessly nerdy ways and his weight problem—longs for true love. But it also reveals how his life, that of his family and that of other Latinos around him, is shaped by racial histories that transcend national boundaries—mainly the U.S. and the Dominican Republic. This is not to say that race determines everything in the novel or that race means the same in both countries. Far from it.

Love, if anything, is at the center of the novel. But Diaz is also, as scholar Carolina Gonzalez has noted, the first Dominican “tiguere” (homeboy) to win the Pulitzer. He is the first to make the Brown and immigrant, the smart but poor, the multilingual but disenfranchised, and the multinational but homeless, the center of a great novel.

Joseph Pultizer was himself an immigrant, from Hungary, who became a passionate newspaper publisher. It is thus fitting that this year’s prize should go to a novel that deals with immigration in such illuminating ways.

It is also promising that the prize should go to a writer of African descent who does not fit entirely in the now well respected field of African-American letters.

When the Pulitzer Prize committee began awarding prizes to African-American writers—Gwendolyn Brooks was the first in 1950—it started a trend whereby African-American writers began to be recognized for their achievement.

In the late 1980s, Alice Walker, Rita Dove and Toni Morrison all won the award. The fact that many African American writers were and continue to be recognized, such as August Wilson in 1990, Suzan-Lori Parks in 2002 and Edward P. Jones in 2004, has helped build and solidify the field of African-American literature.

Let us hope that Diaz’s prize means the beginning of a similar trend in Afro-Latino literature.

Glenda Carpio is an associate professor in the departments of African and African American Studies and English at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. Glenda can be reached at carpio@fas.harvard.edu.