BMNAN12700A – Introduction to Postcolonial Theory

Hybrid Experience in the Dominican Diaspora: Junot Díaz’s “Fiesta, 1980”

Zsuzsanna Balázs

Dr János Barcsák, Dr Michael McAteer

In this paper, I am going to address the complicated plight of diaspora people and the
formation of their hybrid identities as a result of this diaspora existence. More precisely, I will
focus on the situation of the Caribbean diaspora in multicultural America and the formation of
their hybridity through the examination of a contemporary Dominican writer Junot Díaz’s
short story “Fiesta, 1980” and discuss literary criticism through the close reading of this text. I
chose to present this topic through a literary work, because—as Homi K. Bhabha points out—
literature can play a central role in the representation of the uncanny in-between position of
diaspora individuals (qtd. in John McLeod 220). In what follows, I wish to rely on the idea
that despite the difficulties and frequent disadvantages experienced by hybrid individuals
along with their sense of constant displacement and rootlessness, all in all this hybridity can
be regarded as something constructive and enabling for them on the long run. As Salman
Rushdie argues, this “displaced position is an entirely valuable one. […] In learning to reflect
reality in ‘broken mirrors’, he or she comes to treasure a partial, plural view of the world
because it reveals all representations of the world are incomplete” (qtd. in McLeod 214). I
propose that in this story, the father figure functions as such a broken mirror for his son
Yunior from which the child will gradually establish his own complicated but enabling hybrid
identity. Yunior’s coming of age is reached through a disappointment in the father, which
reinforces his confusion and cultural rootlessness but finally leads him to a better
understanding of his hybrid position.
I chose Díaz’s work, because in this story we learn about the situation of Spanish
speaking (Hispanic), more precisely, Dominican families in the Dominican diaspora, and it
nicely illustrates what it means when one has to split one’s identity, trying to adapt to two
different cultures yet not belonging truly to either of them. This short story is part of a
collection of short stories entitled Drown (1996) in which Yunior is the protagonist. The story
tells about one day of Yunior’s family: this is a special day, because his aunt and uncle have
just moved to the US from Santo Domingo, and to celebrate the occasion, they organise a
party. However, Yunior comments that no one is happy about this party, except for his half-
Americanised oppressive father. The plot revolves around Yunior’s reflections to his father’s
repugnant behaviour (aggression and infidelity to the mother) and its effects on his own
identity. The Dominican communities living in the United States are characterised by cultural
hybridity, and this hybrid state has various impacts on the old and the young generation as
well. This hybridity is caused by the fact that Dominican people in the United States have to
belong to two different cultures, but none of these two spheres accepts them entirely, and
therefore, they appear to have two identities and no identity at the same time. As Bhabha puts

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it, “hybridity is a new cultural and privileged third place” which is “neither the one nor the
other” (qtd. in. Fernando Valerio-Holguín 2).
Diaspora people experience a sense of constant duality which appears as the basic
component of the formation of their hybrid identities. This duality derives mainly from the
fact that diaspora existence seems both a “perilous intermediate position” (McLeod 214) in
which the individual is “unable to indulge in sentiments of belonging to either place” (214)
and at the same time it provides new promising perspectives for them. This persistent duality
will be manifested in various aspects of the story: in the son’s attitude to his father, in the way
he approaches the American culture and his country of origin, and in the use of language.
There is a permanent oscillation in the quality of the father-son relationship, and also in the
question whether the child protagonist appertains to the Dominican or the American culture.
The story’s father-son relationship nicely reflects the young-generation immigrant
Yunior’s mixed feelings about his hybrid situation. The father symbolises the displaced and
disturbed home-concept which is so crucial to hybrid diaspora communities. Yunior searches
for a fix point of reference in a strong father figure to construct a stable identity. Instead, the
bad example set by his father reinforces the formation of his troubled hybrid existence. For
him, the father with his Latin-American masculinity would represent the home country, yet
what he sees is a confusing and exaggerated Americanisation and a distorted Latin-American
masculinity in the father’s conduct.
Yunior has a strong connection to his father, but this connection is accompanied by fear
and confusion. Valerio-Holguín believes “that there persists within the hybrid a heartbreaking
ambivalence, often expressed as love/hate and manifested in the binary oppositions here/now
and there/then” (3). Yunior’s father appears to be very decisive, violent and aggressive.
Yunior’s father image seems to be strong but only physically—his father image in terms of
morality is destroyed forever when Yunior first meets the Puerto Rican woman (his father’s
lover) and senses the father’s infidelity. Due to his unfaithfulness to Yunior’s mother, his
father image becomes unstable. Yunior condemns his father for his unfaithfulness to his
mother, but if we examine more thoroughly Yunior’s thoughts, we can easily notice his
longing for his father’s affection. When he refers to those occasions when his father was
trying to make him get accustomed to travelling in their new van, he adds that “[those] were
the only times [he] and Papi did anything together. When [they] were alone he treated [him]
much better, like maybe [he] was his son or something” (Díaz n. p.). Yunior also adds that
“[their] fights didn’t bother [him] too much. [He] still wanted [his father] to love [him]” (n.
p.).

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 Yunior’s fear of his father and his confusion are represented by a metaphor: Yunior’s car
sickness. This metaphor serves to express three things: the uncanny, hidden presence of
hybridity; the consequences of the defects of the Latino diaspora (violence, oppression, and
Latin American masculine privilege) represented by the old-generation immigrant father
figure; and it can also be the symbol of the resistance to the mainstream culture’s endeavour
to colonise (assimilate) the diaspora communities. Victor says that “[he] met the Puerto Rican
woman right after Papi had gotten the van. He was taking [him] on short trips, trying to cure
[him] of [his] vomiting” (n. p.). This passage makes it clear that Yunior had had car sickness
even before he got to know the Puerto Rican woman. It follows that he probably sensed in the
behaviour of his father that he was not faithful to his mother, and therefore, he had started
vomiting in the car before his father got him to the woman’s house in his new van. Yunior
knows of his father’s sexual intercourses with the Puerto Rican woman already at the
beginning of the story, when he claims that “we [Yunior and his brother Rafa] both knew Papi
had been with that Puerto Rican woman he was seeing and wanted to wash off the evidence
quick” (n. p.). It means that he despises his father, though, at the same time, he fears him very
much and secretly, he even wishes to be loved by him. This also evokes Julia Kristeva’s
concept of abjection, which can also be a central theme to the diaspora people’s perception of
home: “There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed
against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the
scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be
assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let
itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects” (1).
Yunior’s ambiguous father-image is similar to the diaspora people’s home-image in four
aspects. First, Yunior’s ideal father-son image is as imaginary and elusive as the diaspora
people’s concept of home in their memories, that is, something that seems realisable but in
fact is false and unachievable. Second, the reality of the father’s true, frightening side is close
to the diaspora people’s assumption of their new homes, which always remains frighteningly
alien from them despite any attempt of assimilation to that new culture. Third, Yunior tries to
conform to his aggressive father yet he can never fully achieve that and this can recall the
diaspora people’s semi-assimilation attempts in the new country, which always inevitably
results in mimicry, that is, it will never be a full assimilation. Fourth, the father represents the
uncanny in-between position for Yunior. He is witnessing two opposing types of conduct on a
regular basis: his father’s longing for the Puerto Rican woman, and at the same time, his
humiliating and rough behaviour towards his beloved mother. For Yunior, “[t]he affair was

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like a hole in a living room floor, one we’d gotten used to circumnavigating that we
sometimes forgot it was there” (n. p.). Despite the permanent sense of the existence of this
extramarital affair in his family, Yunior witnesses his mother and father dancing almost
happily at the party. The gesture which induces the greatest confusion in Yunior is a touch:
“In the darkness, I saw that Papi had a hand on Mami’s knee and that the two of them were
quiet and still” (n. p.). As a result, Yunior feels a constant ambiguity towards his father: he
both fears his father and is longing for his love; he both hates him hardly bearing his presence
and, at the same time, cannot imagine his family without him; moreover, he wants to
humiliate his father expecting the moment when his mother would shout at her husband
“[y]ou’re a cheater!” (n. p.). It is these ambiguities that intensify Yunior’s mixed feelings,
confusion and the formation of his hybrid identity. This is a very different father image than
the one he imagined. In this respect, this is a disappointing experience similar to the one
Rushdie tells about in his “Imaginary Homelands” following his visit to his home village in
India (qtd. in McLeod 214).
This disturbed and imaginary concept of home in the case of diaspora people conjures up
Michel Foucault’s idea of heterotopia explained in his essay “Of Other Spaces”. Home is a
heterotopic space for these hybrid individuals. Heterotopias are “real places—places that do
exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-
sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites that can be found within the
culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault 3). Thus a
heterotopia is like a place that both exists and does not exist. It is real and imaginary at the
same time, but it can never be only an imaginary symbol, as it always has to bear some kind
of concrete social function. For diaspora individuals, both their new home and their home of
origin function this way, and this is the basis of the formation of their hybridity: this constant
sense of belonging to two places and an inevitable disappointment resulting from their
realisation that they cannot feel themselves as complete, stable, homogenous individuals in
either of these cultures.
For Yunior, not only his ideal father-son image works in this way, but his memories of
Santo Domingo are also heterotopic. He has only vague memories of his home country, which
means that he does not have much knowledge of it. For instance, when they have dinner at the
party, he comments: “It must be some Dominican tradition or something” (n. p.) Also, he
imagines Santo Domingo as a place of joy and peace when he looks at a photo of his mother
taken before she had married Yunior’s father: “In the photo, she’s surrounded by laughing
cousins I will never meet, who are all shiny from dancing, whose clothes are rumpled and

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loose. You can tell it’s night and hot and that the mosquitos have been biting. She sits straight
and even in a crowd she stands out, smiling quietly like maybe she’s the one everybody’s
celebrating” (n. p.). It seems that he imagines his homeland as a country where there is no
oppression and aggression represented by his Americanised father and his humiliating
treatment of the mother. Thus through these memories, Díaz also addresses the doubly
oppressed position of Dominican women in America: oppressed by the white American
culture as members of the Dominican diaspora and silenced and threatened by their own
community’s patriarchy. In fact, Yunior’s image of his joyful homeland is an illusion. For
instance, when the ten-year old Yunior is asked by his uncle whether he wants to drink beer or
rum, and the mother says he is too young, Yunior’s uncle immediately replies that “[b]ack in
Santo Domingo, he’d be getting laid by now” (n. p.)
Latin-American masculinity is connected to Dominican male identity, but because of the
father’s repugnant behaviour—who even takes his sons to his lover’s house—Yunior to some
extent starts to distance himself from and feel disgust for this home country formerly
represented by the father. As John Riofrio explains it in his article on Latin American
masculinity and Junot Díaz’s Drown, “[m]asculinity, like race, disability or sexuality, is [...] a
component of identity” (24). Here, however, respect for and reliability of Yunior’s father have
vanished. Seeing the two sides of his father’s personality, his aggression, and how
inconsistently he treats women, Yunior is shown a confusing example about what it means to
be a man, and therefore it is this disappointment in the head of the family that leads him to
feel a sense of rootlessness. Yunior’s relationship to his father, to some extent, reflects that of
Díaz to his own father. As Díaz articulates the negative side of his father’s Latin American
masculinity: “I had that military father who made us aggressive” (qtd. in Diógenes Céspedes
894).
In Díaz’s work, language too plays a central role. His use of language is a means of
resistance to the mainstream American culture and the representation of hybrid experience.
This is part of what the Kenyan writer Ngugi called the decolonisation of the mind (qtd. in
McLeod 22): “Colonialism is destroyed only once this way of thinking about identity
[superiority-inferiority discourse] is successfully challenged” (qtd. in McLeod 20). First,
Yunior is telling the story in English to an English speaking or half-English speaking
audience, yet there are allusions in the text that his family speaks in Spanish to each other—
for example, when he remarks that “Rafa [his brother] said to me in English” (n. p.).
Moreover, he refers to his family members with their Spanish name (Papi, Mami, Tío, Tía)
and inserts Spanish phrases into the text thus disturbing the flow of English language.

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Céspedes addresses Díaz by stating that he “create[s] linguistic violence that makes readers
read that which they may not want to read” (904). Díaz reacted to this statement and
explained that “[b]y keeping the Spanish as normative in a predominantly English text, [he]
wanted to remind readers of the fluidity of languages, the mutability of languages. And to
mark how steadily English is transforming Spanish and Spanish is transforming English” (qtd.
in Céspedes 904). This passage suggests that Díaz’s intention is to strengthen Latino identity
by using Spanish words as if those were parts of the English vocabulary. Therefore language
functions as a means of resistance and the decolonisation of the mind for the Dominican
diaspora as well. Language cannot only function as a creator of discourse but also as a
resistance to the existing discourse (Cf. McLeod 18). This also leads us to Foucault’s
heterotopia, as according to Robert J. Topinka, “heterotopias are sites of resistance to and
reordering of the established orders and received knowledge, and by doing so, they create a
kind of clash of ideas which results in an intensification of knowledge that leads to the
production of new knowledge” (qtd. in Ghahremani 125). In this respect, what Díaz does in
his short stories including “Fiesta, 1980” can be seen as an attempt to produce a new
knowledge of diaspora existence in America, showing that it is not only the English language
that can affect the ‘other’ culture but it works the other way round as well. Also, Díaz stresses
the enabling dualities and privileged position of these people. Even though Yunior has to live
in a bicultural fragmentation in this story, attempting to adapt to two cultures at the same
time, and he seems to be rootless, eventually he turns out to be an exceptionally sensitive and
able child, making the best out of the bad example he has to witness in his father’s conduct.
Still bound up with the role of language as an expression of Yunior’s heterotopic home-
concept, Yunior’s name is also telling. In other stories of the same collection, Yunior is
sometimes called Junior, meaning that there exist two different spellings of his name: the
Spanish (Yunior) and the American one (Junior). It indicates that he has two identities: the
Americans call him Junior, while to his family and friends he is Yunior. It follows that there
is a Junior who is attracted to American culture and its products, and who has to deal with the
American world. And at the same time, there is the Yunior who should remember his
Dominican origins. In an interview, Díaz stresses that “you come to the United States and the
United States begins immediately, systematically, to erase you in every way, to suppress those
things which it considers not digestible. You spend a lot of time being colonized. Then, if
you’ve got the opportunity and the breathing space, [...] you immediately [...] begin to
decolonize yourself” (Díaz qtd. in Céspedes 896).

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 This story can be seen as Junot Díaz’s attempt to restore the world of his childhood home,
to return home through writing, just as Salman Rushdie attempted in his novel Midnight’s
Children. However, in the case of diaspora individuals (both for Díaz the writer and his
character Yunior), a complete return to the original culture is impossible. In Ian Chambers’s
words, a “‘discontinuity’ persists, a discontinuity installed in them upon leaving the country
[Dominican Republic] for the first time” (qtd. in Valerio-Holguín 9-10). Rushdie confessed
after writing his novel that in fact it was impossible to return home either through writing or
physically travelling back to the homeland, as it would never be the same as the idealised,
aestheticised home-image which had existed in their imagination (McLeod 210). Their
constant experience is that the country in which they have to live will always be both familiar
and alien, and this is true for their country of origin as well. As McLeod puts it, “[m]igrants
may well live in new places, but they can be deemed not to belong there and disqualified from
thinking of the new land as their home. Instead, their home is seen to exist elsewhere, back
across the border” (212). This is what Bhabha in his book The Location of Culture calls
“being in the ‘beyond,’” (10) that is, a feeling which “renews the past, refiguring it as a
contingent ‘in-between’ space the past that innovates and interrupts the performance of the
present” (10).
This story suggests that the young generation of immigrants can react to the bicultural
fragmentation and its confusing effects more flexibly than the representatives of the old
generation (Papi and Tío the uncle). Even though the father and the uncle seem to digest their
shift from the home country to the United States, in fact they both fell into exaggerations (the
father’s obsession with his American car, and Tío’s over-decorated house). The young
(Yunior and his brother Rafa) can take it more easily despite the initial confusion resulting
from the father’s conduct, and they are able to negotiate and consider serious matters even at a
young age. Yunior is presented as an attentive observer; his observations and behaviour
appear to be much more grown up then his father’s conduct. Furthermore, this child proves to
be the most reliable, prudent, and the wisest character of the story. For example, he is the only
one who pays attention to and appreciates the mother utterly silenced by the father: “Mami
looked really nice that day” (n. p.). Also, Yunior senses his father’s infidelity right at the
beginning of the relationship with the Puerto Rican woman, and he endeavours to understand
this situation, trying to protect his mother from the effects of his father’s behaviour. Therefore
Yunior understood or at least tried to understand the situation brought about by his father with
his emigration to the United States. However, this broken mirror reflecting the father’s
distorted image seems to help him drift away from his father’s example, and possibly improve

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his community’s situation in the future or at least their perception/assumption of themselves
and their qualities in America. The broken mirror turned towards him by the father creates in
him a fear of the possibility of inheriting his father’s defects. Yunior is taken aback by his
father’s way of life, and this repugnance towards the father figure’s conduct pushes him into
another direction.
Therefore, through the analysis of Yunior’s plight in this story, it appears that for the
young generation of Latino immigrants, their hybridity brought about by the cultural
fragmentation of their communities in the United States proves to be a possibility rather than
a tragedy. As de la Campa articulates, “a split state implies a permanently severed entity, a
loss in many respects; but perhaps it could also suggest a postnational symptom that has many
possibilities” (376). In this story, Díaz calls attention to the reality of the Dominican diaspora
through male violence and masculine privilege over women and children. By emphasising
these defects of the old generation, the author seems to shift the responsibility to the young
generation. It is only by facing the defects of his own culture of origin that Yunior (and
through Yunor, Junot Díaz as well) can have the possibility for remodelling and healing their
predicament (Cf. Evans 51).
In conclusion, we have seen how in a diaspora community coming of age entails the
formation of hybrid identities. We have also seen how in Díaz’s story the distorted mirror
turned towards Yunior by his father helped him to adapt to his bicultural fragmentation
instead of drowning in his seemingly helpless situation. Therefore being part of the American
multicultural sphere and hybridity is both destructive (if we consider the confusion) and
constructive in the sense that the individual’s split identity makes him/her more sensible and
responsive to the difficulties of hybrid existence. Despite the fact that their cultural
rootlessness remains part of their lives, we can conclude that, all in all, this hybrid state can be
a privileged state, for it helps them see the problems more clearly, and accordingly, prevents
the new young bicultural generation from descending into self-destruction in the future. As
Álvarez articulates the effects of hybridity, it “creates confusion, and conflicts that get worked
into the writing, but my eyes see certain things because I am that mixture” (qtd. in Valerio-
Holguín 14-15).

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