“Papá says even one drop of water could fill a bucket if you wait around long enough.” - from Dominicana
With the recent news surrounding the lifting of Title 42, it seems especially timely that this week’s review focuses on an immigration story, albeit a historical one. I recently read Angie Cruz’s 2019 novel Dominicana because I knew she’d written it based on her mother’s immigration experiences, and I am working on a historical novel inspired by my great-grandmother’s immigration story (she came from a rural village in what is now Slovenia) and hoped to learn from it. I was actually first introduced to and impressed by Cruz’s work when I participated in a hiring committee search for two new fiction faculty as an MFA student at the University of Pittsburgh. I was delighted she joined the Pitt faculty, though disappointed not to get the chance to work with her myself, as she started after I graduated. From what I’ve heard, she’s been a great addition to the program.
Dominicana tells the story of a teenage girl named Ana who immigrates to New York City’s Washington Heights in 1965. She becomes trapped in what is effectively an arranged marriage to Juan, a much older man, in the hopes of improving her family’s financial situation during a time of political turmoil in the Dominican Republic. Ana struggles especially to find community and connection in this new culture and learns only by trial and error who she can trust. I found the book a pleasurable, immersive read, with plenty of historical and cultural context deftly laced throughout its tight, punchy chapters.
The book takes its title from a ceramic Dominican girl in which she keeps the money she tries to save to escape her confining life with Juan and return to her mother and sisters. It also shares some thematic concerns with Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, which tells the New York immigration stories of a Haitian mother and daughter from a similar time period, but Cruz’s style is much lighter tonally, interspersing many playful and even comic moments with the more poignant and painful aspects of Ana’s story.
Ana is especially compelling and richly drawn; my favorite moments were when she is most assertive and feisty, taking risks—one particularly memorable one involving revenge via pigeon. Sometimes I forgot just how young she is, considering how abruptly she is thrust into marriage and motherhood in a strange country.
While some aspects of the plot felt a bit convenient, with an occasional dropped thread and several jarring leaps in point of view, the book reads well overall, with some satisfying twists and turns, including subplots involving secret love and a friend’s betrayal. If you enjoy a lighter, historical novel with a strong woman protagonist, you’ll find this a great summer read.
One of the aspects of this book I enjoyed was that the main character (Narrator? I forget the POV because I read it a few years ago.) was pregnant for part of the book. Before then, I had gone through a difficult pregnancy and later thought that I had never read anything from this POV before. To this day Dominicana is the only novel I have read that's done it.