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Junot Diaz through his work  gives us the experience of coming for the opportunity to an American dream, as he was a migrant from the Dominican Republic. With this he shows us the struggle and hardships it took in the process of achieving a bigger goal.

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Junot Diaz’s life story tells of how he grew up coming especially after his transition from the Dominican Republic to the U.S and how that changed his life into becoming an author. In his rise to fame, his book “Drown” brought the perspectives of immigrants settling into urban American life with a cycle of  American struggles such as drugs, theft, and grueling jobs. With this, they are trying to make a way in American Society with the use of Hispanic and African American culture and slang. Based on his transition from the Dominican Republic to the United States he developed an interest in writing literature that related to him in the struggles and triumphs of an immigrant in American Society.

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Born in 1968 in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic, Junot Diaz immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of seven in 1975 and spent the rest of his childhood in a tough neighborhood in Parlin, New Jersey. He started writing in his early teens and after high school entered Kean College in New Jersey. He went on to earn a B.A. from Rutgers University. With the publication of his acclaimed first fiction collection, Drown, he was named one of the "new faces of 1996" by Newsweek magazine and nominated for the Quality Paperback Book Club's "New Voices" award. More honors followed, including a 1997 Pushcart Prize, a 1998 McDermott Award, and a 1999 Guggenheim Fellowship. The New Yorker named him one of the "20 Writers for the 21st Century."

Many of the stories in Drown focus on characters either in the Dominican Republic or recently settled in rough urban environments in the United States in the 1990s. Life in the city as depicted by Diaz is a cycle of drug deals, theft, and relentlessly grueling jobs, and he writes in a slangy, first-person style, incorporating Hispanic, African American, and other city street talk. Drown has been published in Spanish under the title Negocios and translation rights have been sold in 15 countries. Diaz's stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, African Voices, and other literary magazines, as well as Best American Fiction of 1996, 1997, 1999, and 2000. He edited The Beacon Best of 2001: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures. In 2002, Diaz continued to teach creative writing at Syracuse University and participated frequently in writers' festivals and other symposia. His forthcoming first novel is entitled A Cheater's Guide to Love.

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Born in 1968 in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic, Junot Diaz immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of seven in 1975 and spent the rest of his childhood in a tough neighborhood in Parlin, New Jersey. He started writing in his early teens and after high school entered Kean College in New Jersey.

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Junot Diaz Reflects On 'This American Moment'

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Junot Diaz Reflects On 'This American Moment'

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Junot Diaz talks about childhood and what it was like growing up as an immigrant in American Society, which was much different from what he was used to and how that led to him discovering his passion for literature using his experiences. He stated that at times growing up a migrant, especially at a young age was challenging but literature helped him find a way out by which he was really fascinated. Helped him to talk about what it is to be an American based on how reading  American literature changed him by which he said, “ And an America where, simultaneously and in opposition, where many things are possible. Where a kid like me can come from a non-bookish culture and miraculously be transformed.”.The experience of having literature in his life, Junot Diaz was able to find something by which he could relate the culture of being Dominican in becoming a part of the American society which changed his life.

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To listen to this broadcast, click here:

Now, this American moment. Everyday during the Democratic and Republican Conventions we spoke with a different guest, politicians, yes, including a former president, but journalists, writers and thinkers, too. We asked each to take a step back to put this election and the campaign season in context. What's at stake? What does this election mean? We've decided to continue that series. In just a minute, Junot Diaz, the author of "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction will join us. His book focuses on the lives of first and second generation immigrants from the Dominican Republic. We want to know what this American moment means to you. Our phone number 800-989-8255, email talk@npr.org. You can join the conversation on our blog, too. That's at npr.org/blogofthenation. Junot Diaz, a professor in the program in writing and humanistic studies at MIT joins us now to talk about what this American moment means to him, and it's good to have you with us today.

Professor JUNOT DIAZ (Pulitzer Prize Author): Well, thank you for having me.

CONAN: And a lot of people see - they see more history than usual in this particular election. Election where neither a president or an incumbent vice president is running for re-election, women, an African-American, old candidates, young candidates, what do you see in this American moment?

Prof. DIAZ: Well, I mean, certainly those things are present. But it's extraordinary how a sort of - the real candidates in some way, it's like erasure and kind of make believe are sort of running like really strong campaigns, too. You know, it's just one of those extraordinary things. I'm watching this campaign with my students and it - sometimes you feel like you're on crack or something, you know?

CONAN: On another planet. When you taking about make believe, give us some examples of what you mean.

Prof. DIAZ: Well, I mean, you would really think that it's not a nation that's in two wars and whose economy hasn't bottomed out, that you know, our economic, our educational system hasn't been utterly gutted and that, you know, the kind of number of bodies that are coming back and just a sort of demoralization at a civic and sort of at a social level, you wouldn't think these things are present if you're listening to some of the discourse of the candidates. And also the sort of - the issues that are being focused on, I mean, it's kind of like both parties are sharing a similar script which is let's pretend that the situation is nowhere near as dire as it is, and certainly not dire enough that you could accuse us for having caused the problem.

CONAN: Yet, you see tremendous political activity in both political parties, the turnouts in the primaries was extraordinary.

Prof. DIAZ: Well, certainly. I mean, one of the wonderful things is that no matter how moronic and bankrupt our leaders are, there's still an enormous part of a civic life and voting and of the electrical process that many people have faith in. And I think that even though we're sort of like voting one dope before the next, I do think that the process of elections, the process of taking part in a civic life are really fundamental and I think always should be celebrated.

CONAN: When you look at the situation of the country and clearly you have a bleaker view than either of the major party presidential candidates.

Prof. DIAZ: Well, I don't think they - when is the last time that they spent four days in a row with people who have to make their - four days consecutive, from morning to night - have spent four days in a row with people who make their own meals, don't use credit cards and bank cards to buy meals, out to buy lunches, to buy dinners to break have food brought to them. I think that it's got nothing to do with I'm more bleak. It's like these people, I highly doubt that they're spending time with the sort of people that I'm spending time with. Who, you know, when the economy collapses, it's certainly not collapsing on the heads of the people who have three or four homes. It's collapsing on the heads of the people I know, who I'm sitting around and they're like how am I paying my medicals bills? How am I paying my rent? How am I going to pay the little money I have to send my kids?

CONAN: "Life of Oscar Wao" is now available in paperback. And he's talking to us about this American moment. If you'd like to join the conversation, give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. And many people, for many reasons, know your name and know a little bit about your book. They may not know so much about you. Tell us a little bit about your history.

Prof. DIAZ: Oh God, I'm probably the most boring person to have sat up here. Just some- I'm from the Dominican Republic. I'm an immigrant, immigrated to that great, exotic place, New Jersey. I'm a state school boy. I'm from Rutgers. I spent my entire childhood and adolescence and college I worked my way through school. I had jobs - always doing industrial work and I became a writer because I was absolutely terrible at all the traditional things like making money and sports and sort of being cruel. So, I figured that part was my approach to life.

CONAN: A Dominican who doesn't play shortstop?

Prof. DIAZ: Yeah, no. A Dominican who doesn't play shortstop or isn't in an Ivy League school, studying at the business program. Yeah, those are the alternatives, some of the cadre that I grew up.

CONAN: And yet you also came under tremendous pressure. You published a book of very well-received short stories. And then suddenly there was a lot of expectation put upon you.

Prof. DIAZ: Well, I mean, it's literature. I have a friend who employs 400 people. He's under pressure.

Prof. DIAZ: You know, he's under pressure to keep his employees at work every year. I mean, to keep them working, keep the business rolling. I'm just a writer, you know. I mean, books are never late. That's like the best part. There's always room on a shelf and there's always other things for people to be reading. So, a person - you come late to a party that's for you, people get heated. You know, a book coming 12, 14, 15 years late, readers have got all these stuff to worry about and they're just happy to see it when it comes.

CONAN: And let's see, let's got some callers in on the conversation. Let's see if we can go to Gonzales. Gonzales with us from Salt Lake City in Utah.

GONZALES (Caller) Hi. Thank you for taking my call.

CONAN: And what does this American moment mean to you, Gonzales?

GONZALES: Well, I just became a U.S. citizen two hours ago, as a matter of fact.

GONZALES: Thank you. Thank you. Well, I immigrated (unintelligible) and I was really to see so many common places that, you know, immigrants in his life, you know. But unlike him I see that this is a - and I'm not trying to make any political propaganda to anyone in specific. But I see this as a moment of hope. As an American, we can make a change, especially the way the United States is perceived before the world. And it's a matter of daring to participate and to help society and to try to make a difference in everyone's life. And we just need to dare to do so, not only by voting, but actually by serving our fellow men.

CONAN: And it's- Gonzales, if I could ask, where is it that you came from?

GONZALES: I'm from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

CONAN: The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

CONAN: That's interesting. I was going to ask you, Junot Diaz, we hear so much about immigration and the issue was almost always portrayed as an issue about the Mexican border. This gentlemen from Venezuela, yourself from the Dominican Republic. Your family, you came here, I guess when you were six years old. Do you see the immigration issue differently? How does it frame, and we're not hearing an awful lot about it from either side in this presidential campaign.

Prof. DIAZ: Well, no. I mean, that's one of the great comedies of it is that you know, the silences of the campaign speak louder than anything else. But you know, Gonzalo, I'm in agreement with almost everything you said. I think that all of us need to be involved and some sort of community work and sort of social work. I mean civic life is fundamental. It's not just something that you do when you're young and idealistic. You know, it's the price we pay, as has been said famously, for living in this world.

And you know, immigration is the absolute engine that drives the society. It's the absolute engine which regenerates the society. This country has been predicated on the sacrifice and on the contribution of its immigrants since its inception. And I think that figuring out a way to deal with this process, to deal with our kind of clearly broken immigration system is really a primary importance, not just for those of us who are immigrants who are directly- you know, directly suffer from this kind of broken system for the entire society. I mean, as a whole, we need to understand and we need to relate and create a better way for this to work.

CONAN: Gonzales, again, congratulations.

GONZALES: Thank you. Thank you very much.

CONAN: So long. Let's see if we can get another caller on the line. Let's go to Chris. And Chris is with us from Elizabethtown in Kentucky.

CHRIS (Caller): Hi, Neal.

CONAN: Hi, Chris. Go ahead. I'm a huge leader of the local Republican Party here in Hardin County. That's where Elizabethtown is, and I just wanted to say, you know, growing up in a party that's been traditional values and conservative values, having a woman as the vice president, what that means to me is our party is, you know, moving forward. You know, we're becoming more progressive. And it's just wonderful for a young person like me who - this will be my first presidential election I'll be voting in. And it's just been wonderful for me to know that I'm going up in a party that's secure and is actually starting to embrace feminism and embrace a female and say, you know, we're ready for a female to be vice president. And hopefully, you know, in the next election, maybe we'll see a female running. You know, have a real chance that a female running, too.

CONAN: You mean, for the presidential, to the top of the ticket.

CHRIS: Yes, for the presidency. Yes, for the office in this country. I really would like to see that. And it's given me so much faith in my party to see a female be able to run as a vice president. You know, that I'm hoping that we'll - and even Hillary Clinton, even women today that are running in the Democratic Party, you know, it just shows that America is really moving forward and it's becoming more progressive.

CONAN: Thanks very much for the call, Chris. I appreciate it.

CHRIS: Thank you, sir.

Prof. DIAZ: What an interesting claim. Just what an interesting claim. The lives of women both with health levels, employment levels, rates of abuse have deteriorated over the last 10 years. So I think it's a fascinating thing that we can have leadership that, you know, that are women. But if the overall lives of the women in your country are deteriorating and every indicator, I don't think it matters if you elected 99 senators who are women. In the end, what really matters to me is not that we sort of pin the tail on a donkey that looks like us or is of a different gender, but that our society as a whole is dealing with the gender that we're celebrating simply because they're running for our party. In other words, having a female president and having the lives of women be worse than it was in 1983 does not sound to me like any form of progress.

CONAN: We're talking with Junot Diaz, the writer, about this American moment. You're listening to Talk of the Nation from NPR News. Let's get Bill on the line. And Bill is calling us from San Francisco.

BILL (Caller): Yeah, hi. I guess, you know, the Bush elections were - we won't to go back into that. But this one, it seemed obvious to me that people would vote their own interest. And it seems like with the arrival of Sarah Palin, that suddenly we have working class voters in all the swing states saying, yay, suddenly the Republicans are going to do something for us. And it seems like an incredible disconnect, and I'd like to know what Junot thinks about that.

CONAN: Well, go ahead. But let's try to keep it short. We're tying to step back just a little bit from the day to day issues of the campaign. But go ahead, Junot Diaz.

Prof. DIAZ: Well again, I mean, was it Mencken who said that you'll never go broke underestimating the - what of the American people?

CONAN: Intelligence, I think.

Prof. DIAZ: Yeah, and I mean, you don't want to be like a jerk because I'm one of them. So, damn, I'm a dumbass, you know. But in the end, these things are very difficult and they're hard. We're dealing with campaigns from just a civilian point of view that if you subtracted the spin from these campaigns and you subtracted people's deep desires to have their mythologies, the kind of, you know, assuaged, I don't know if there would be any campaigns. Because the issues are almost nonexistent. I mean, really, when they say that that's issue, if one of my freshmens came in talking or one of my first year student came in talking that these were their issues, we would throw them out of class. We'd be like go read a book.

CONAN: Bill, thanks for the call. Here's an email we have from Dan. If New York is one of the biggest Dominican cities in the world does that mean that this is the moment when the culture of our island finally takes root in the States? Is this a moment for Gabachos(ph) and Gueros(ph) to learn to play dominoes?

Prof. DIAZ: Oh, that's a wonderful question. Would you know - I mean, New York has been a Caribbean city for a very long time. You know, they always say that like New York - Brooklyn has an enormous part of New York's history they're like, you know, huge amount of people lived in Brooklyn when it was independent. Well, the Caribbean to New York is what Brooklyn is used to be to the whole city where it's like a deeply Caribbeanized culture. Part of the energy of New York comes from the passing of the baton of those wonderful white ethnic groups that, you know, dominated New York, gave all it's energy to this Caribbean collective. And, you know, you see a lot of them in the neighborhood I lived in, Washington Heights, which was an old Irish, old Jewish, old Greek community that's become Puerto Rican, Dominican and African-American and also African-Caribbean. I just think that this is like a wonderful - that to me cheers me up more than any politics as watching the way people live their lives in really complicated, positive and often like dynamic ways.

CONAN: That's gone from a Orango(ph) to El Presidente from Chock Full 'o Nuts to Cafe Bustelo.

Prof. DIAZ: Well, also - and having both of them in the refrigerator. I mean, that's for me the dreams that none one replaces the other. You know, it's like you got enough room in the fridge for all your vices.

CONAN: Let's go quickly, if we can, Jerry is with us. Jerry calling us from Sacramento. I don't mean to ask you to keep it short, Jerry, but we're running out of time.

JERRY (Caller): Not a problem. You know, I look at this as a real opportunity, you know, in the depression we're in, comparing it to the Depression earlier in the century where the - we came out and voted in a very progressive president that actually focusing on the needs of the American worker and reigning in the - the unfettered capitalism of the liaises faire area - era. You know, I see this as another opportunity for us to change the course to the ship of state to start thinking of people as important rather than just cheap labor. And I'm hoping that the right person, you know, gets in power that can, you know, at least affect some incremental change in that direction.

CONAN: Junot Diaz, do you see it in those terms or do you see both parties as representing the same old way?

Prof. DIAZ: Well, no. I mean, look, I think that it's sometimes when you're dealing with a lead interests it's very difficult to decide, you know, who's really running the ship. But I think that caller has a wonderful point. I mean, I also dream of a time when we would elect someone more progressive, who can make our society better.

CONAN: Jerry, thanks very much for the call. Appreciate it. Sorry, I had to squeeze you for time. Junot Diaz, thank you for your time today.

Prof. DIAZ: Thank you.

CONAN: Junot Diaz, the author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" which has just been released in paperback. He joined us here in the Knight Studio at the Newseum as part of our series on this American moment. This is Talk of the Nation from NPR News, I'm Neal Conan in Washington.

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Junot Diaz Reflects On 'This American Moment'

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To listen to this broadcast, click here: Now, this American moment. Everyday during the Democratic and Republican Conventions we spoke with a different guest, politicians, yes, including a former president, but journalists, writers and thinkers, too. We asked each to take a step back to put this election and the campaign season in context.

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Junot Diaz acknowledges the hardship of leaving his home country and going to the U.S for a chance of new opportunity which he did not fully understand and appreciate until encountering literature. Coming from the Dominican Republic Junot Diaz describes his transition at first as a hard experience but with that, he came to see the importance of his new opportunity. Describing his story he lets it be known that, "I was not a huge fan of the American experience for my first few years. It wasn't until I discovered books that I began to feel any fondness toward this adventure that I was on, this adventure called immigration.".Though immigrating from a place you once knew through exploring what is in the world around us we can be able to see the opportunity that the world holds with this exploration.

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El sueno americano. The American dream. Terrifying, promising and elusive, it pulls us from our native lands. We leave behind families and careers; many of us leave to survive, escaping countries shrouded in violence and death. This dream tells us that no matter our circumstances elsewhere, in America we can make it. In America, the land of opportunity and democracy, anything is possible. El suefio americano. It is this dream that is at the center of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

It is a cold Monday afternoon in early January, and I am in Cambridge, Mass., to discuss the novel, which turns 10 this September, with its author, Junot Diaz. As immigrant children, I begin, we learn at a very young age to view America as a kind of utopia, a place to be lauded. Diaz nods in agreement, settling into the chair across from where I am seated. "From the moment I could remember, it was made very clear to me that I was going to the United States," he says. "There was already the shadow of the United States over all of our lives. There was a sense that the world that we were inhabiting, the people that we were connected to, the neighborhood that was more or less my entire universe, that all of these things would soon vanish."

Born in 1968, Diaz spent the first six years of his life in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. "La Capital" is one of the oldest cities in the Caribbean and home to over three million people. The country shares its home-and complicated history--on Hispaniola with Haiti. Christopher Columbus landed in Santo Domingo in 1492, making it the first city to come under Spanish rule. During this time, the country was populated by Taino Indians. Under Spanish rule, men were used as cheap labor, women were raped, and lands and resources were pillaged. The effects of Spanish colonization were so severe that by 1548 the Taino population had dropped from over 1 million to just 500.

As a result, the Spanish began importing African slaves to the Dominican Republic. The introduction of a new culture directly affected the country, especially its religious practices. Over 90 percent of the country identifies as Christian, half as Roman Catholic. It is not, however, the Roman Catholicism found in the United States or Europe. "In the Dominican Republic, it was very hard to escape the sort of syncretic, Africanized Catholic faiths, plural, that are to be found across the island," Diaz tells me.

Describing this faith in Oscar Wao, the author writes, "We postmodern platanos tend to dismiss the Catholic devotion of our viejas as atavistic, an embarrassing throwback to the olden days, but it's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, when the end draws near, that prayer has dominion." The Christian faith of our viejas, our mothers and grandmothers, is one shrouded in folklore. "I think that a lot of what I was raised to think of as Dominican was inflected by both religious and supernatural complexes," Diaz tells me.

For the young Diaz, leaving this culture was not easy. "I grew up in this barrio where there's a ton of kids, where all we did was play all damn day. My experience in the Dominican Republic in those years was living in this wonderland," he says. Six years later, he and his family left for the United States, joining his father in Paterson, N.J. The transition was difficult. "I immigrated to central New Jersey. I immigrated to an area where there weren't a lot of Dominicans," he tells me. "I was not a huge fan of the American experience for my first few years. It wasn't until I discovered books that I began to feel any fondness toward this adventure that I was on, this adventure called immigration."

His readers see Diaz's love of books in what he describes to me as "Oscar's nerdology" in Oscar Wao. In the author's home in Cambridge, this fondness is more than apparent. There are books everywhere: stacked by the door, on coffee tables, on window sills, on mantels and in various piles throughout the apartment he shares with his partner Marjorie Liu, the New York Times best-selling author and comic book writer.

Reading Diaz's books was the first time I saw myself reflected in literature. Like Diaz, I was born in Santo Domingo, where I would remain for three years before my parents would fly me out to New York City in the winter of 1992. He speaks a dialect I know, one born in the streets of Paterson, the Bronx, Washington Heights, a language born out of our diaspora. It is the language we learn, fluently, in the various American pockets we fill when we leave the Island--a mix of English and Spanish, that eclectic mix of"dimelo!" and "what's good." It is the bridge between our motherland and this land, a blending of two countries.

It is this language Diaz perfects in his literature.

Junot Diaz's first book was Drown. Published in 1996, it is a collection of 10 short stories that first introduced his readers to Yunior de Las Casas. The stories are narrated through the perspective of an adult Yunior, touching on themes related to patriarchal abandonment, homosexuality, immigrant poverty and migration from the Dominican Republic for the United States. The idea for the collection began when Diaz was studying for his M.F.A. at Cornell University. "I was really interested in this idea of telling a story that's a linked group of stories about, basically, how a certain kind of Dominican male subjectivity is formed," Diaz tells me. "I conceived of this family, this narrator, who was simultaneously brilliant and profoundly stupid around women and around intimacy. And once I had Yunior as a concept, as a strategy, the book began to come together." I tell him that Drown was the first time I read his work and saw Dominican characters reflected in American literature. "It is a typical coming of age story, from the point of view of our community's craziness," he tells me.

Writing for The New York Times the year of Drown's publication, David Gates compared Diaz to Raymond Carver, one of America's finest short story writers. Like Carver, Diaz "transfigures disorder and disorientation with a rigorous sense of form," Gates wrote. In "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie," Diaz presents a story written like a how-to manual. The protagonist, listing a variety of ways to "date a browngirl, blackgirl, whitegirl, or halfie," says, "Clear the government cheese from the refrigerator"; "Shower, comb, dress"; "Get up from the couch and check the parking lot." Diaz's prose is methodical, efficient and beautiful. In one of the most poignant lines in this story--and arguably all of Drown-Diaz commands, "Run a hand through your hair like the whiteboys do even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa."

Writing was not the author's first career choice. He attended Rutgers University in New Jersey in the early 1990s, and, unlike many of his peers, he had no career path. "I didn't know what in the world I wanted to be. I loved books to death, I loved history to death. What was I gonna do with that?" At Rutgers, he found himself immersed in the works of Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, Gloria Anzaldua and Toni Morrison. "I came of age surrounded in college by these brilliant women of color and their radical epistemologies." Diaz would later name several of these writers as influences. By his junior year, his focus on writing grew, and every night Diaz spent at least two hours writing. "I was able to do that for a couple of years," he tells me. "It proved to me that there was more to this dream than just kind of a desire. There was something beneath it." Ten years after the publication of Drown, Diaz would introduce readers to what some have called the greatest novel of the 21st century.

"How long did it take you to write Oscar Wao?" I ask. Diaz groans and laughs. "I'm a terribly slow writer. It took about 11 years from those early beginnings to finally getting the last chapter written."

The first inklings for the book began in 1996. Growing up, Diaz, like most Dominicans, knew of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. Known as "El Jefe" or The Boss, Trujillo ruled over the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. Thirty-one years of the Trujillato, the Trujillo Era, left over 50,000 people killed, including over 10,000 Haitians in the Parsley Massacre. "I had a father who was in the post-Trujillo military apparatus, a father who grew up inside of the Trujillato, and was very supportive of it," Diaz says. "My father had a very romantic vision of who Trujillo was. I did not."

Diaz's obsession with the dictator was one of the themes he wanted to include in the novel, along with the "nerdology" of the protagonist, Oscar De Leon. "As I wrote the book, I began to shape both of these projects. They did not emerge fully formed in my head. I didn't have the idea of what was joining these two narrative strands."

In Oscar Wao we are presented with Oscar, an overweight Dominican boy living in Paterson. He is obsessed with science fiction, falling in love and "getting laid" and the fuku, the curse that has plagued the De Leon family for generations. The story is told through a seemingly ambiguous narrator we eventually realize is Drown's Yunior. Touching on depression, womanhood, death and violence among other issues, Diaz presents three stories of the De Leon family. We encounter characters who must deal with what it means to be Dominican in a new country, struggling to live out el sueno americano.

Diaz captures the tension felt by many immigrants. It is difficult to form one's identity between two countries, two cultures. This tension is present in Oscar. He does not show the qualities he has been told are those of the archetypal Dominican man. He is a virgin who doesn't want to be one, a voracious reader immersed in the worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien and Oscar Wilde. He wants to fit in, whether with the students at his college or with the people he meets when he visits the Dominican Republic. In one of Oscar's most distressing moments, Diaz writes, "The kids of color, upon hearing him speak and seeing him move his body, shook their heads. You're not Dominican. And he said, over and over again, But I am. Soy dominicano. Dominicano soy."

Then there is Beli, Oscar's mother, who grew up in the Dominican Republic while Trujillo was in power. Her father is sent to prison by the government, and her mother commits suicide. She is then shuffled from one distant relative to another, until she is finally sold as a child slave. One day, while she attempts to go to school, Beli's "father" drops hot oil onto her back.

Beli is scarred, emotionally and physically. She is eventually found by her aunt, known as La Inca, who dedicates her life to helping Beli make the most of her post-trauma life. But Beli's struggles do not end there. As a teenager, she falls in love with and has an affair with a married man, whose wife is Trujillo's sister. As a result, she is kidnapped and tortured, "beat...like she was a slave. Like she was a dog." It is in this character that we see the grisly legacy of the Trujillato. While the story of this family is fictional, the effects of Trujillo's dictatorship are not. "I wanted to understand and capture this phenomena, the political, social, cultural phenomena that was Trujillo," Diaz says.

Oscar Wao also features the juxtaposition of two seemingly different cultures: the Caribbean and science fiction. Reviewing the novel for The New York Times, A. 0. Scott wrote that Oscar Wao is immersed in "magic realism, punk-rock feminism, hip-hop machismo, post-modern pyrotechnics." I tell Diaz I am surprised at how well he connected these two worlds. He tells me that the connection is more discernible than it may seem at first. "To read science fiction and fantasy is to encounter within it resonances and echoes of the history of the New World, of Dominicans specifically," Diaz says. "Science fiction and fantasy stories are obsessed with these questions of power. They're obsessed with racism. They're saturated with the political unconscious, with the dark energy of colonialism. And it was only when I was writing the book that I became aware of their affinities."

In 2008 Oscar Wao was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Diaz humbly shrugs when I bring up this honor and instead emphasizes that he is grateful for the spaces it has created for communities of color, particularly Dominicans. "I'm glad it's opened spaces for the Dominican community at a literary level. I am constantly humbled and gratified that this book continues to speak to anyone."

My parents arrived from the Dominican Republic in New York City in the winter of 1991. For that first journey here, they left me behind for a year while they settled in America; the island, however, they left behind, essentially, forever. They left a world that made them happy and comfortable, por el sueno americano, they have told me repeatedly throughout my life. Like immigrants before and after them, they struggled. It wasn't until years later that I would learn how difficult it truly was. They arrived with just $90 in their pockets; the uncle on my mother's side who promised to pick them up at John F. Kennedy International Airport was nowhere to be found for almost two weeks; and they had no steady jobs or home for months. It wasn't until years later that I would see these experiences represented in literature, in Diaz's work. And at a time when our political leaders employ harsh anti-immigrant language, reading experiences like the ones described in Oscar Wao takes on even more importance.

During a Senate floor debate on immigration reform in 2006, Republican Senator Jeff Sessions said, "Fundamentally, almost no one coming from the Dominican Republic to the United States is coming here because they have a provable skill that would benefit us and that would indicate their likely success in our society." Eleven years later, Sessions is now the U.S. attorney general, and this attitude, fueled by the blistering rhetoric of President Trump, has made immigrants something like the national bogeyman.

I bring this up in my conversation with Diaz. I mention the fear among immigrant communities, people of color, women. "This election has revealed this country in ways that little has," he says. "And for me, Trump is not even the worst of it--the worst of it is the culture that could make Trump possible. We just live in a society that is so addicted to xenophobia, to blind bias."

So, does this change the role of the writer, I ask. Diaz tells me that the role of the writer is the same it has always been, to continue pushing boundaries. "As artists, we're not here to comfort anyone. If you want to have your back rubbed, you don't come to the arts for that," he says. "We're as artists here to point out the things that we don't like to point out. We're the anti-politicans," he proclaims, "We're actually trying to make the country better."

Olga Segura is an associate editor of America.

Caption: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao turns 10 this year. "I am constantly humbled and gratified that this book continues to speak to anyone," Junot Diaz says.

Caption: "It was very hard to escape the sort of syncretic, Africanized Catholic faiths that are to be found across" the Dominican Republic, Diaz says.

Caption: Oscar Wao grapple with the grisly legacy of Rafael Trujillo, the former president of the Dominican Republic.

Source Citation

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El sueno americano. The American dream. Terrifying, promising and elusive, it pulls us from our native lands. We leave behind families and careers; many of us leave to survive, escaping countries shrouded in violence and death. This dream tells us that no matter our circumstances elsewhere, in America we can make it.

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